Transcription
Through practice we can glimpse a sense of the nature of awareness as something ever present and awesomely vast, and this sense can be cultivated as a profound resource for freedom and peace in our lives. But eventually we must see even beyond this to know the ultimate nature of the mind - empty, completely groundless, and dependently-arisen - a seeing which brings an even deeper freedom. This talk explores some of the ways this realization might be encouraged and developed in meditation.
I'm aware that in the weeks that I've been here, in the talks weekly, there have been a few threads that sort of run through the talks, so I want to take one of those threads and fill it out a bit, quite a bit actually, explore it and expand on it quite a bit. And that is the nature of mind, or the nature of awareness. So what does it mean to realize the true nature of mind, to realize the true nature of awareness? I'm also aware that everyone here obviously has different practice backgrounds. You've been doing different practices in the time that you've been here, you've had exposure to different teachings in your life, etc. So to some, what we're talking about tonight will seem very, very relevant, very apropos. To others, it will seem less pertinent right now, less relevant. If that's the case, if it doesn't seem like this is really relevant to my practice right now, I hope that you can just listen. I hope it's still interesting, and I hope one can listen with a sense of possibility. So just listening to something -- "Okay, not right now," but there's a sense of the possibility of practice, the possibility of an avenue to explore in practice. One can just listen and file it for later, just stick it somewhere, and "I'll come back to this later." That's a totally valid and wonderful way to listen to a Dharma talk.
Now, actually, I should really -- and in another situation, I would have devoted three or four or five Dharma talks just to this subject. There's much more to this than meets the eye. There's much more to this than meets the eye in terms of depth and richness. Yet I'm steaming ahead and doing what's foolish and trying to put it all in one. I hope it's not too full. Again, I hope it's full enough for the people that have been here and followed those threads, that it raises some questions. But more I'm interested in offering something, a possibility. How might one practise to discover the nature of mind? How might one navigate through practice as it deepens, as it evolves, to actually come to that realization and then consolidate that realization, strengthen it?
So, some words: 'mind,' 'awareness,' 'that which knows,' and 'consciousness.' In this talk tonight, I'm using them all as synonyms. I'll use them interchangeably. I'm meaning the same thing by all of them. Sometimes when we talk about mind, and "my mind is making such a fuss," "my mind is so difficult," we actually mean all the realm of thoughts. But you also get in the Dharma talking about 'mind' meaning just 'awareness' or 'consciousness.' Sometimes people leave out the word 'consciousness,' people in Buddhist circles leave out the word 'consciousness' from that group, and there's a reason that they do that -- partly because the Buddha was a little bit dismissive of consciousness in the sense it's just something impermanent, not-self, etc. But actually to leave it out obscures something. It obscures something, which I hope will come clear in the talk, and I hope it makes sense.
So different streams of Dharma tradition kind of make a promise. It's if we understand the nature of mind deeply, the nature of awareness, consciousness, etc., deeply, if we really understand that deeply, there is freedom. That's the promise. That runs through a lot of different Dharma traditions, a lot of different Buddhist traditions. What I want to explore, and what I'm asking right at the beginning is: understand what about the nature of mind? What is it about the nature of awareness that I need to understand? And with that, how, as I said, how can I understand that? I'm gearing this talk not so much to questions of abstraction or philosophy. That can be very interesting, and I think has its place in human sort of inquiry, but really talking on a very practice level -- we as meditation practitioners.
So oftentimes we don't really think about the nature of mind; it's not something we give that much reflection to, maybe until we start meditating, and then maybe we do because meditation is a lot about awareness, a lot about consciousness. At first, perhaps in the beginning years even of practice, the notion of the mind or awareness as the metaphor of a mirror might feel very apt. Now, obviously we don't think there's a mirror somewhere in us, that if we cut open our brain we get to this mirror. But that sense of "Awareness is somehow reflecting the world" -- we have that. Even if it's not a conscious notion, that notion is somehow embedded in us: "Awareness is something that reflects the world."
In a way, we can see practice and the devotion to mindfulness and being present and bare attention as a kind of polishing of that mirror to see "things as they really are, things as they truly are," to quote the Buddha. And so the constant practice to let go of the entanglement in the story, the entanglement in papañca and complication, the opinions that we layer onto experience, the preconceptions, the views, the images, the likes, the dislikes -- all that whole baggage of veil that covers over the actuality, the experience. We have a sense of practice just patiently polishing that mirror so that the awareness can reflect things as they really are. So sometimes people use this phrase or words 'pure awareness.' Now, that actually means very different things used in different contexts, but that might be a meaning: awareness is 'pure' in the sense of it's free of all that papañcizing, complication, story, etc.
Having that kind of model or metaphor, whether it's conscious or unconscious, can bring with it a lot of clarity, a lot of vividness into the experience. I'm sure many of you have felt on retreat, or as practice time goes by, the actual imprint of perception becomes brighter, more vivid. The actual grass seems greener, the light seems more colourful, everything stands out in a beautiful aliveness because we're metaphorically polishing that mirror. There's also something else that's very helpful about the metaphor of the mirror -- and it's just a metaphor -- in that, if you think about a mirror, a mirror remains unaffected by what passes in front of it and is reflected by it. So I could be absolutely beautiful, I could be monstrously ugly, I could be scary, I could be this or that, or radiant, whatever, and the mirror -- just still and reflecting. In a way, incorporating that kind of aspect of the metaphor into the practice lends itself towards equanimity. Can you see? Because there's an aspect of the being that's unaffected. This aspect of mindfulness is just unaffected by what passes in front. It's very, very useful.
[9:13] Now, there are problems with this. I'm going to come back to this. I'm going to lay out a few possible ways of conceiving of the nature of awareness, and then later come back to what potential problems there are with each of them. So that one with the mirror might be very understandable and useful, certainly in the beginning years -- really, years of practice for most people, years. But after much practice or some degree of practice, a different sense of awareness can begin to kind of be discovered or opened to. Now, one comes about, one possibility, is through developing the attentiveness, developing the mindfulness in a very sharp way, very focused awareness, very bright attentiveness, microscopic kind of fine awareness, and really refining the mindfulness like that. What happens is that the reality that's revealed to us through that lens is of a very quickly, rapidly changing impermanent reality. Everything, like pixels on a screen changing, like sand falling on the surface of a lake or something. Just change, change, change, arising, passing, arising, passing. Included in that: consciousness. So the sense then of consciousness is of rapidly arising moments: a moment of consciousness, a moment of consciousness arises in relationship to something. And you find this very commonly in the commentaries to the Pali Canon. It's also a little bit in what the Buddha said, but mostly in the commentaries.
Again, it can be very useful if one can develop that way, just from the consistency of mindfulness, in that what it brings -- seeing all this impermanence, there's nothing to hold onto. Everything is just slipping through the fingers, like sand through the fingers, including consciousness. Can't be clung to. So a letting go happens with that -- I'll say theoretically, because sometimes that mode of working doesn't actually bring a letting go, but theoretically it brings a letting go and certainly has that potential. So that's another possibility, again with its fruits.
A third one we've touched more on in the course of the talks here. It's more practising in a kind of opened out sense. So awareness kind of opens out to the whole field, the whole totality of experience and phenomena. And this opening out of the practice lends itself to having a sense of awareness as something very spacious. So we talked about this, especially when we talked about silence a little bit. Awareness begins to seem incredibly spacious, vast, unimaginably vast. Now, this can be arrived at actually through letting go, so the more we let go in practice, the more likelihood there is of the sense of awareness opening up in this very beautiful way, very vast awareness dependent on letting go. How do we let go? We could either just focus on letting go, we could focus on the impermanence and then we let go because of that, or we could focus on the anattā: 'not me, not mine.' Those are three classic ways of letting go.
That sense of vast awareness might also be discovered, arrived at, just by kind of practising in a way that relaxes the attention. So usually we attend to this object, and that object, and another object, and another object, but actually relaxing that propensity and being more interested in the space that opens up rather than the objects, the things in the space. We say you can rest then in awareness. Instead of going out and doing things with objects, one just rests in that space of awareness that begins to open up. This is something one can do with the eyes open or the eyes closed -- it's actually completely irrelevant. Practise it with the eyes open, practise it with the eyes closed.
One can also arrive at something quite similar in a more focused way, a less sort of restful way, and that's actually focusing in a very alive way, in the moment, on the sense of awareness itself. All this is practice. Everything that I've said so far comes out of practice and kind of tuning the practice a certain way, a little bit directing it a certain way, and then these senses are discovered. One can actually do it in a more focused way, actually focusing on awareness. It will bring about a slightly different state.
We can use analogies to kind of help ourselves open to that sense. So the night sky, just vast, black night sky, and then suddenly a firework, a burst of colour: a phenomenon, something is happening in experience. And of course we say, "Wow! Look at that! Amazing!" Dramatic event, phenomenon. In getting drawn into the object, we lose the sense of the context. We lose the sense of the space, the sky around that thing. Similarly, you could say a shooting star -- a phenomenon arises out of this space and does its thing and then disappears back into it. A cloud moving across the sky -- same thing, a sense of a context, a space which is awareness, and the object in it, and giving more attention to the space, the sense of awareness, than the object.
So phenomena begin to seem as if they're arising, passing, and living in awareness, which is different than how we usually think of the world -- my awareness is somehow in here, the world is out there, phenomena are out there, and there's some kind of interaction going on. We begin to get a whole other sense: that the world of phenomena is being born, living, and dying in awareness. Now, I'm going through this very quickly. In other talks we spent more time on this. But this is something incredibly beautiful. If I had more time I would really emphasize that more. Something very, very beautiful to open up to. There's an incredible peace in this, just the sky, the space, everything belonging to that. Real equanimity comes with it, and a real sense of very deep freedom comes with it.
It's something we practise over and over. We develop that sense of awareness. Now, someone doing this might get the sense, "Oh, that sky, that awareness in the sense of a big space, that's actually pure in the sense that it's untainted, unaffected by what arises and disappears and lives in it." So similar to the sky, a shooting star goes through the sky, fireworks go in the sky, the sky remains the same -- unaffected, still, tranquil, imperturbable, vast. One might be practising in this way, and if one does, one is usually really struck by this; there's an incredible sense of depth and beauty here, incredibly striking and attractive place to discover. And one has heard, if one is practising, one has heard of the Unconditioned, the Buddha talking about the Unconditioned or the Deathless. And very common for a practitioner to think, "Is this it?" Because it seems unchanging. It doesn't seem to change. It's there. Everything else is arising, living in it for a while, and then dying back into it. It seems unchanging and kind of eternal in the sense of lasting forever in some unperturbed way. So one really wonders, or decides it is the Unconditioned.
Again, practice is to be developed. I'm moving in a lot of territory tonight very quickly, laying out possible ways of navigating through this. If one learns to cultivate that space, and discover that space, and hang out in it, and sustain in it, and be familiar with it, it's possible that it deepens. It's possible that the whole sense of it begins then to deepen, and objects, the phenomena that occur, begin to feel as if they're made of the same 'substance' as the space of awareness. They're made of the same substance as awareness. So you might have heard analogies like "waves in the ocean" -- whatever happens, you, me, this, that, a sound, an event, whatever, it's all just waves in the ocean of being or the ocean of awareness. It's all just the same substance taking different shapes. Incredibly freeing and useful perspective to open to: everything is just an impression in awareness. And in that sense, from that perspective, we could say things, the things of the world, all things, all phenomena, all observable phenomena, are empty in the sense that they're not different than awareness. They're empty of being something different than this vast, insubstantial substance of awareness.
So things seem empty in that sense, they seem insubstantial, and they seem not real in the sense of not existing really outside of awareness in the way that we [knocks on something] usually think things do, usually perceive things. We have a whole different perception. With that, too, as it deepens, there's a sense of incredible oneness. All is one. And one has heard that in the teachings, different teachings, different traditions: all is one. Sometimes when people use the phrase 'non-duality,' they use it in that sense: everything is one. So it seems to tie in very strongly. One has a real sense, as this deepens, of there being only really one mind. So my mind, your mind, his mind, the dog's mind, whatever, is one mind, one vast mind that encompasses everything. And we hear about that in different teachings, some Buddhist teachings, some non-Buddhist teachings: one mind or cosmic consciousness, awareness knowing itself; everything is the play of consciousness, but that consciousness kind of is the base, it's somehow self-existent, that's the ultimate reality. So very easy to kind of have that view. And it's very liberating at a deep level, very liberating. Very useful.
And these views are not intellectual standpoints. I really want to stress this. They're not intellectual standpoints. They're views that people come to through practice. So it's not like someone was figuring out da-da-da-da-da. It's actually through deep and sincere practice, and care in practice, this is the perspective that can easily -- well, not so easily, but eventually be come to. And in that, as I said, there's an incredible beauty, an incredible sense of mystery that the being opens to. A person who practises in that way a lot, who practises at that level a lot, who cultivates that, and looks to cultivate that, and learns, develops the skill, the art, of really hanging out there a lot -- if you meet a person like that, they are going to be very radiant, very shiny, very big aura, very free. And they will feel very free at quite a deep level quite a lot of the time. They will also probably be quite compassionate, a lot of love there.
[22:11] The Buddha makes a very marked point on one occasion -- I think it was to Ānanda -- which is never judge someone's awakening or non-awakening, enlightenment or not enlightenment, by how radiant they seem, by how shiny they seem, by how glowing. Absolutely not the way you discern where someone's really at in the practice.[1] But to practise at that level will bring that, and to learn -- people do, they develop it as kind of what they're going for. I'm talking about Buddhists and non-Buddhists. They learn to hang out there. Incredibly beautiful, incredibly powerful.
So before I kind of go into this in a deeper way, I really want to make the point before I sort of say what's the problem with these views, I really want to make the point that all of these are to be cultivated, to be cultivated. It's not that we're dismissing them out of hand immediately at all. They're to be cultivated. We want to actually practise developing these in our practice.
But there are problems with them. I want to look into this. So let's just take the mirror one for example. The notion of a mirror, the metaphor of a mirror as something that gives a real, true reflection of a real world -- there's a problem with that. I can't find a stance in consciousness, I can't find a place from which to look, a moment of looking, where there's not something in the mind, in awareness, shaping, fabricating what is perceived in that moment, in that present moment. So the conditioning factors are not just in the past; they're in the present, as well. What I see is always being shaped. It's always being shaped. I cannot find a sort of zero point in the mind. Sometimes we think that's what mindfulness is or that's what equanimity is. If one really goes into practice, one sees one cannot find that place. This is one of the most fundamental insights of the Buddha. It's easy to practise a long time without kind of going into this. I know we've touched on it before over the weeks, but it's so important. If we don't see this, that what we perceive is being conditioned in the present by how I'm seeing it and relating to it, we're missing one of the most fundamental and important insights of the Buddha.
We might say, what's the problem with that vast awareness, that sense of vast awareness? Well, one thing is it might seem that all phenomena arise in it and die back into it -- but what about my actual death, the actual time when I actually keel over? I have to have a bit of faith that that will just be another event in this awareness, and there's no way of knowing that. It's a leap of faith. Is it possible to have such a deep insight that it's actually not dependent on faith any more, so there's no sense of needing faith there?
There's so much to this, as I said at the beginning of the talk, and to beware -- I think all of us as practitioners, to beware of answers to what is the ultimate nature of awareness, etc., that are too easy and too facile. Or also answers to what liberation might be: "It's just kind of hanging out in that place and realizing that it's vast." Beware of answers that are too glib, too facile, too easy.
I feel, and there can be for a practitioner at that point, many times for a practitioner, there's a sense of uneasiness at that point. Despite all the beauty, despite all the loveliness and the mystery and the depth and the freedom that come from it, at some deep level in the being there's a sense of, "Hmm, not quite sure about this," and real uneasiness. I think that needs to be cultivated, that uneasiness. One doesn't stop probing and asking and questioning. I actually remember years ago in my practice being on retreats, and quite a long period of time where any time I met a teacher, I would ask them about this and get all these different takes and try and understand, and in my own practice try and understand. One time, feeling like I just couldn't understand it, and I wasn't happy with any of the answers I got, and being so upset with that. Actually I remember being on retreat at Gaia House and just sitting outside and crying. I think it's really okay in the quest for truth and in the quest for liberation that there's agitation at times. I think it's a sign of how much we care.
With that big space awareness, the vast awareness, it's the place where most people will tend to stop their inquiry. It's the most common place nowadays to stop the inquiry. But there are a lot of assumptions there. One is that awareness is something simple and passive, in the sense of, "It's just there, and it just receives experience." I think this came up in a question and answer or something. Just hear, and I hear the bird tweeting, and it just comes. Awareness is simple and passive and has a kind of naturalness to it and natural openness to it, versus what -- sometimes we use the word 'mind' as very complicated and enmeshed in thought, etc. But is there an assumption that 'simple' means 'true'? We're very attracted to simplicity, oftentimes because our lives are very complex and our thinking minds seem very complex. So simplicity has a real, "Ah, that's nice. Simple." It feels soothing. Does it mean that it's true?
[28:58] These are the kind of things one really needs to watch out for, one's preconceptions, likes, assumptions. I think it's really important to bring into practice, as much as possible, the quality of integrity, that there's a real sense of caring about the truth and not stopping short, keeping the heart alive in its penetrating questioning, not settling too easily. Really caring and really being very careful in one's inquiry. Part of integrity is a heart movement. Another part of integrity is actually intelligence. It's actually using one's 'nous' -- that's what we say in England, I don't know if you say that here. Using one's intelligence is part of the integrity. It's part of the care in practice. So not almost like leaving the intelligence outside of practice, outside of our meditation practice. To me, this is actually really important. Because we often have a very difficult relationship with thought and with discursive thought and the thinking mind, oftentimes we jettison the whole of our intelligence as well, and we regard it as something we need to get rid of in practice. That may be a huge mistake at times.
Does there need to be a divorcing of head and heart? So just because my head is getting involved and thinking through stuff, does that mean my heart has to close down? For a lot of people it does, but that's just a habit, and it doesn't need to be so. So it might feel better if things are simple, but that's just a feeling of it feeling better, and as such, it doesn't mean anything about the truth. Again, we might have an intuition that the truth is this way or that awareness is this way, etc., but in a way, lovely and good and helpful as that can be at times, it's still just an intuition. It needs to be probed, needs to be questioned, needs to be checked out.
Sometimes when we go to the texts of different Buddhist traditions, it seems as if -- especially the vast awareness -- it seems that we find something in the texts that really corresponds to that. We can find plenty of references. I don't have time to go into it tonight, but this is actually not as simple as it seems. Words can sound very, very similar when you get to a certain level in practice. We say *'*empty' or 'nothingness' or 'vastness' or this or that, and it's very -- it can all begin to sound very similar after some point. It behoves us, I think, to really be careful not to be sloppy with language in our practice, be as precise as we can -- which isn't easy. And not to, though, throw out words or concepts. As I said in one of the talks,[2] if I throw out conceptuality too early, what happens is I just land, I'm just left with my default, unexamined concepts. I've done nothing to actually really dig them out; I'm just saying concepts are not helpful.
What we also find, if you do kind of check out a lot of texts on this, is the same words are used in very different ways. We use words like "awareness is luminous." It turns out if you really probe that that 'luminous' actually means 'empty' or 'pure,' meaning 'empty of inherent existence.' It doesn't mean 'bright' in that sense. You wonder why they're using that word. Or 'clarity' -- it doesn't mean clarity in the sense that we would usually mean clarity. Or even the word 'space,' funnily enough, doesn't even mean space in the way we'd usually mean space. So it's not easy.
One time the Buddha went to a group of monks and he basically told them not to see awareness as the source of all things. So this sense of there being a vast awareness and everything kind of just appears out of that and disappears back into it, beautiful as that is, he told them that's actually not a skilful way of viewing reality. That's a very interesting sutta because it's one of the only suttas where at the end it doesn't say, "The monks rejoiced in his words." [laughter] This group of monks, they didn't want to hear that. They were quite happy with that level of insight, lovely as it was. It says the monks did not rejoice in the Buddha's words.[3] [laughter] Similarly, one runs into this as a teacher, I have to say. This level is so attractive, it has so much the flavour of something ultimate, that oftentimes people are unbudgeable there.
In the Dzogchen tradition, there's a very beautiful saying -- very simple but very beautiful. And it says:
Trust your experience, but keep refining your view.
There's a lot of wisdom in that, a lot of wisdom. One of my teachers, years ago when I was describing some of these states to him and questioning, "Is this right? Is this real?" He said to me, "Get attached, Rob. Get attached there. Slow down. Hang out." Of course that was very surprising to hear. I was like, "Really?" We need to actually hang out in these states because through time they work their way into the cells and into the view, and they begin transforming the heart and transforming the view long-term, in terms of freedom, in terms of opening, in terms of love. They really have that power. So it's interesting. You get different personalities -- people who want to park the bus there and build a house and arrive and finish there, not with the kind of agitated impetus to keep questioning, and other people who want to move through too quick. There are just different personalities. So in a way, one needs to get attached, but not stop there. So again, please see all this as in the context of how practice might navigate through all of this. Sometimes I really feel that people need to fall in love with those kind of spaces. Something really feels touched so beautifully inside.
[36:22] So how might a practitioner move on from there? How might one come to a deeper understanding, one might reveal that that's not quite it? Well, one clue is in the fact that, if one really develops one's practice, it's actually possible to experience both this sort of rapid arising and disappearing of consciousness that I was talking about in the very fine awareness, it's actually possible to experience that, and it's possible to experience a very wide, vast, spacious, still awareness. If you really practise this kind of stuff a lot, it's actually possible to have both those experiences in the same sitting. See it one way, see it another way, and actually to choose which one to have. What does that imply? There's something right there that's at the core of all this.
Now, sometimes I've come across people -- I won't say who, but people -- who actually then come up with a kind of theory: consciousness is what's called the rapid arising and passing, and you've got something else called 'awareness' which is the vast thing in which consciousness takes place. The awareness knows the consciousness which knows the object. It's kind of this, you know, quite complex theory. But it's actually just a theory. Might be a perception. But there's something here to question. Could it be that awareness, or consciousness, mind, whatever name we give it -- awareness and perception are inseparable? In other words, when I focus my mind in a certain way, when I focus it in a very narrow, microscopic way, I have certain perceptions, and I will have a certain perception or sense of awareness. When I focus my mind, when I use my mind in a different way, I'll have different kinds of perceptions of things and with that a different perception or sense of awareness. So the sense of awareness takes on the aspect of perception. We could say awareness, consciousness, whatever you want to call it, is bound up with perception. This is at the core. This is something we want to understand. It doesn't sound very glamorous at first at all, but this is what we need to understand.
[39:17] So how might I work with this? Well, one way, it's a very -- I was going to say "cheap and easy" way, but ... [laughter] One way of doing it is to practise in this vast way. You get this sense of vastness and a sense of awareness as vast. And you get a kind of global sense of awareness, but then kind of introduce the thought subtly, the insight subtly, that that sense of awareness is also, so to speak, happening in awareness. In other words, that's just a perception, too. You introduce that and see what happens, see where it goes. That can be very powerful for some people and very useful. But I don't think it will give a really full -- probably not, probably not -- a really full understanding of the whole picture of what's going on.
So there are many possibilities to navigate through this. But one possibility -- we've touched on this in here before -- is using the practice of not-self, not me, not mine; regarding whatever comes up, regarding whatever phenomena, as 'not me, not mine, not-self,' and -- we've touched on this -- developing that as a practice. I'm not going to go too much into it again. But including in that seeing the awareness, as I said I think in the last talk, seeing awareness or consciousness also as 'not me, not mine, I am not that.' This is a practice, as I said in other talks, that we can develop and we want to develop. We really go on a journey with it and we deepen it and develop it.
What happens potentially when we develop it, and in the moments when we manage to -- it might be just for an instant or two -- unhook the identification from objects or awareness? In those moments, what happens? Well, a number of things can happen. One of them is the whole experience opens up to a whole other level of freedom, a whole deeper sense of freedom, because at that point there is no identification with either object or subject. There's no identification with any of the five aggregates. So of course there's going to be a lot of freedom, feel very free. But the second thing that will happen if one learns to hang out there, and learns to really sustain that as a way of looking -- and we've touched on this as well, so just to repeat -- is that objects and perceptions begin to fade because I'm not supporting them by identifying. Objects and perceptions begin to fade -- this is so, so crucial an observation in Dharma insight unfolding -- including the perception of space. It all fades.
Now, if I have a notion of awareness as 'vast,' and space itself begins to kind of fade or lose its reality, well, I can't really call awareness 'vast' because space isn't something really real. Maybe my notion of awareness as something vast is actually reinforcing or reifying a sense of space. If objects fade completely, completely, completely gone as it really deepens, is what's left 'awareness' in the usual sense that we use that word 'awareness'? Let's take a whole big step backwards and ask actually the most basic question of all, which often as meditators we don't really ask: what on earth do we mean by 'awareness'? We use that word all the time. But just hold on a minute. What do we mean by 'awareness'? What do you mean by 'consciousness'?
In English, we have a noun: 'awareness,' 'consciousness.' It's a noun, and nouns have a way of giving something a sense of independent reality: it's a clock, it's a whatever the hell this is -- lectern, thingy. It's a thingy, okay? And because awareness or consciousness is a noun, it seems to be a thing, a thingy. Pali apparently is more of a verb-based language. So awareness is really, when we think about what does it mean, it's awareness of something. Rather than some thing, some substance, it's awareness of something. Putting it in verb terms, we could say it's knowing, knowing. 'Consciousness' or 'awareness' means 'knowing.' Now, knowing needs a known. For there to be knowing, there has to be something that's known. And if there's a known, it needs knowing. So vice versa -- knowing needs a known, and a known needs knowing. If I followed that not-self practice, or a number of other practices too (it's not just that at all), if I follow that and I've seen that the known -- in other words, the perceptions or the objects -- are empty because they don't kind of exist by themselves; they depend on me identifying and clinging, and I don't know how they really are, how much clinging reveals the real object, then in a way the knowing, we could say, is leaning -- it needs a known, and it's leaning on something that's empty. It's leaning on a vacuum. Do you see this? Knowing needs a known, the known needs knowing. If the known is empty, this is leaning on nothing. It's leaning on something that's empty. We say then it's groundless or unsupported. Awareness is unsupported, it's groundless.
All this, it's sort of tracing stages. We want to deliberately consolidate the insights. So objects depend on the mind, so they are empty. And the mind, or consciousness or awareness, depends on objects, so that is empty, too, because it's depending on something that's empty. Any time two things are mutually dependent, they have to both be empty. We could go into that, but we don't have time. This groundlessness, this emptiness, this lack of independent existence of awareness, rather than being a kind of conundrum or a complication, is actually the insight that brings the deepest level of freedom. It's not anywhere, and it's not supported by anything. It's not anything that supports anything. It's empty.
[46:16] Most people are going to need to develop that practice in -- take this word very lightly -- stages, in the sense of gaining conviction first that the object is empty, or learning actually how to disidentify and then seeing that because of that, things are dependent on that, which means they are empty, gaining conviction in that, and moving on, resting on secure footings in practice. But with that, the conviction comes, and eventually the conviction that awareness is empty, too, comes, and with that, the deepest freedom.
I was going to drop a little bit more in about doing versus not doing in practice, because I know it's come up and it came up in a question and answer period, but I'm actually going to leave that as an aside for now.
So taking this one strand that we've talked about -- it's just one possibility, one way of going about it. Disidentifying, learning to disidentify, practising this disidentification. We said in those moments what can happen is a much deeper level of freedom opens up. Second thing that can happen is the objects, the objects of perception, begin to fade -- very important. A third thing can happen sometimes. And that is that time or the sense of time begins kind of fading or stopping or losing its meaning. Some of you may have had a glimpse of this. The whole notion of past, present, and future, and a flow of time or moments of time, it's seen through. Time can stop. There are a number of different experiences that are possible. One can sometimes just get a glimpse of that, or it could be more an extended thing. One can feel as if one has a glimpse of eternity, but it's not eternity in the sense of something lasting forever. It's a sense of time not being really the reality of things; one goes beyond that. That's something we could give a whole talk to, and obviously I'm not going to, but. That's also something one can develop conviction in, and one should develop conviction in.
[48:49] I'm going to take a little time, because there's another way of approaching this, and it's probably going to be new to most people, I imagine. So one way of looking into this time thing is through the practice letting go, letting go, letting go. It could just be through letting go, letting go, letting go, the actual sense of time is seen through. But there's another way, and it's actually using reasoning. This is very popular in some Mahāyāna schools -- the Dalai Lama's school, the Gelug school, other schools. So we again have to ask, what's the relationship with the thinking, logical mind? What's the relationship with the reasoning mind? Do we reject that as an avenue of truth?
So check this out. This moment of consciousness, this moment of awareness. Is it inherently one moment, or is it actually many moments? If I say this moment of time is one moment, if I say it's one, in its essence it's one, then either it's divisible into a beginning, a middle, and an end, or it's not. Okay? Either it has a beginning, a middle, and an end, or it doesn't. If it is divisible into beginning, middle, end, that actually means that that one moment is three moments. Because when, so to speak, it's at the beginning, it's not at the end. When it's at the end, it's not at the beginning. Time is here, and then it's here. It's actually become three moments. It's not one moment. The beginning must come before the end, so at the time it's the beginning, it's not at the end.
If we say the moment cannot be divided into beginning, middle, end, that means it has no beginning and end, which means that actually it's non-existent. It's infinitely small. No beginning, no end also means that it's impossible to make a continuum of moments in which anything could happen, because I have to connect the end of this first moment with the beginning of the next one. Do you see that? Like a chain? It's actually impossible. You can't arrange moments in order in time, in happening.
If I then say, okay, I'll say the present moment is actually many moments somehow, many is an accumulation of ones. It's an accumulation of one, one, one, one together. But we've already said one moment can't exist, so it can't be many either. It must be either one or many if it's something real. It must, in its essence, be either one or many. But it can't be either. I'm aware of going through that very quickly, and I know for most insight meditators that's going to sound very alien, that whole approach. I think it's extremely powerful. What one can do in practice is actually hold the sense of the moment in awareness, focus on it, and get used to this reasoning in a way that you can bring it in in a very light way, that you're actually contemplating the moment. It can be extremely powerful for some people, extremely powerful.
But either way, whether it's through letting go or disidentifying, whether it's through using this reasoning, we see that time is actually empty. Time is also a kind of fabrication. So what happens, what does that imply in terms of awareness and the reality of awareness? Awareness, it's said in the different traditions, is unfindable. We can't find awareness. You can't find the mind. You can't find consciousness, no matter how much you look for it, in its essence. Now, one meaning of that is I can't see it because it has no form, no shape, no colour. It's formless. And sometimes people, again, attempted to stop there as a kind of seeing the complete unfindability of consciousness, but there's more to it than that. That's what the Dalai Lama would call the conventional truth about awareness, that it doesn't have a form and so you can't see it.
But relating to what we've said, if there's nothing real to know because the objects are empty, because I've seen the objects are empty, how can I really talk about a real knowing? There's nothing real to know. And if there's no time for the mind or awareness to exist in, how's it going to really exist? So we say awareness is without essence, but seeing all those reasons why it's without essence -- because of the time, because of the emptiness and the fabrication of objects, all of that's involved there.
So what's happening in all this? We're seeing that awareness, completely counterintuitively, is actually something built, and because it's built, it's empty. We build awareness, and it's empty. The Buddha, in a lovely quote, said, "Consciousness, when examined, is empty, void, without substance."[4] Now, if we just stop the quote there, that could sound like the vast, spacious, insubstantial awareness. But he doesn't finish there. He goes on to say, "Like a magician's trick, like an illusion." In other words, there's some hocus-pocus going on in the mind, and bada-bing, bada-boom, there's awareness, and it's a trick. It doesn't actually exist as something real. Consciousness, the Buddha says, is like a magician's trick, like an illusion. In formal Dharma language, we say it lacks inherent existence.
If one goes into this unfabricating, unbuilding, letting go of the building, then what's left? Is there a language for what's left? Some people use the words, "It's awareness unbound. It's awareness not being bound to objects and space and time. It's unwrapped itself from all of that." But that awareness is different than what we ordinarily mean when we use the word 'awareness,' because ordinarily, as I said before, we mean 'awareness of.' In everyday language, whether we're conscious of it or not, that's what we mean by awareness. It's awareness of. It's different, what's left after we unbuild everything, than ordinary awareness.
In some Zen traditions, they have the phrase, "No mind." It doesn't mean learning not to think. It actually means this. It's like a mind, in its essence, that doesn't know anything, that's not aware of the things that we usually are aware of. There's a beautiful Zen teacher that I really love called Huang Po. He doesn't seem to be that popular at the moment in the West, partly because I think his teaching is almost exclusively at an uncompromisingly deep level. I don't know if he started it, but he's very fond of this language of "no mind." He also sometimes uses that interchangeably with "pure mind" or "real mind," but they mean the same thing. Listen to this, a beautiful quote from him:
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].[5]
Later on he says,
Realize that, though real Mind is expressed in these perceptions [our normal perceptions], it neither forms part of them nor is separate from them.
Incredibly beautiful and profound.
Last thing I want to say: I'm aware, talking about this stuff, that it lands in very different places for very different reasons with people. It could seem -- I hope it didn't seem, but it could seem -- that all this is just an hour's worth of quibbling, an hour's worth of sort of petty wrangling about some kind of intellectual something-or-other. It may seem that way. But one of the things I want to say is it's very easy in the Dharma, after a long time of practice, to sort of hear this kind of talk and say, "Well, I don't want to quibble. Does it really matter? It's all good. You say this, you say that, he says that. It's all good. Let's all be friends and we can all be happy together." [laughter] That kind of attitude, again, is very popular. I think it's quite popular in the West. Contrary to the self-image we have, we actually don't like debating with each other and wrangling out these points. We actually don't like it. We prefer this kind of "it's all good," you know?
But there's something that happens if I don't grapple with these questions. From the outside, especially if I'm -- I don't know what to say -- when people in the Dharma look at me from the outside, and if my attitude is, "All this is just the mind getting into complications and arguing," if that's what I say, and it's like, "I'm not going to get into that," what it's going to look like, what it can look like from the outside is, "There's someone really peaceful and wise and not engaging in the da-da-da." But if I'm not grappling with these questions, although it might look like there's some peace and freedom here, I don't think that the deeper level of freedom will be arrived at. Like I said, I think it's almost inevitable that at points in the unfolding of insight there's going to be agitation. There's going to be difficulty. There's going to be frustration. There's going to be confusion. There's going to be a wrestling with these things.
That deep freedom won't be discovered unless we grapple with this stuff at some point in our practice, whenever that is. And I hope, I hope it didn't sound intellectual tonight. It might have. I hope it didn't. That's really not the point. What I really wanted to unfold is something we can see in practice, through developing practice in the right ways. There's not one way of going about it, but there are ways that will unfold this. And what one sees is that different levels of freedom, unmistakably different levels of freedom open up in one's experience -- different levels of freedom and release. And going through that, one sees, one understands this building process: "Oh, goodness me. This whole structure of reality, what seemed to be a self and a world and things and time and awareness and space, everything I took for granted, is actually built." And I've understood that because I've gone through it and kind of learnt to unbuild it and unbind it.
Then one realizes, almost in hindsight, that one was either consciously or unconsciously giving things, the things of this world, subtle things and gross things, giving them an inherent existence, seeing them as possessing inherent existence, ascribing to them an inherent existence. Usually we unwittingly do that. So a good rule of thumb is -- you know, we talk about the emptiness of this, and the emptiness of that, and the emptiness of all things, and blah blah blah -- to actually safely assume that you are giving something an inherent existence. In other words, not seeing it's empty, unless you're really deliberately seeing it's empty. In other words, in its default mode, the mind gives inherent existence to things all the time. That's what the Buddha called 'delusion,' at the fundamental level, 'delusion.'
The thing I really want to emphasize is the possibility of practice to actually discover this in a real way, in a way that can be brought into the life and have an enormous impact on our sense of freedom in life. That's possible and developable for us in this room as practitioners. It's just a matter of finding the way for that unbuilding, that unpacking, that seeing of the emptiness to happen. That is possible, and there's no reason why it cannot be or shouldn't be -- if we care deeply. As I said, if we don't really want to grapple with it, it's not like it's going to suddenly make itself known to us at a heart level. So it's something really possible for us as practitioners.
Okay. Let's have a bit of quiet together.
