Transcription
I think in some ways tonight's talk is a kind of continuation from where I left off last night. And you may remember -- it was just quite briefly, something I said towards the end of the talk -- it's helpful at times to see that there are kind of levels of self-identification. And it's possible to move between these levels and notice them.
So we talked about the personality level, and in fact, much of last night's talk was about the personality level of identification, being identified with the personal self, the psychological self. And then I mentioned there's also the possibility of, "Okay, that goes quiet, but I still feel like the self is somehow here. Even if my personality is quiet, I'm still somehow identified with the body or the mind or the kind of body/mind complex." It's, you could say, a more subtle, a more quiet degree of identification. It's a less built-up degree of identification. There is a degree of identification there.
But even that, too, can kind of be seen through and go quiet, and sometimes, there is an even more subtle, or even more subtle levels of identification -- for instance, an identification with awareness, or awareness in a cosmic sense, or the space of awareness, or an identification somehow with the oneness of things. That's much more subtle. In a way, I want to, in a roundabout way, kind of address all of that.
So this talk ends up also being a kind of inquiry into reality and the nature of things, the true nature of things. And for me, that's what deep practice has to become. The Buddha talks about "end of suffering," etc. It cannot be gotten anywhere near without this deep inquiry into the true nature of things, into reality.
So the Buddha said -- and I've already mentioned it -- the fundamental problem, sometimes there's "the fundamental problem is clinging." But then, most of the time, he says the fundamental problem is actually deeper than clinging. Clinging comes from something, and it comes from avijjā, which means delusion. The fundamental problem is delusion. And as I said in one of the talks, we see mistakenly. Our very seeing is wrong seeing. Our very perception is wrong seeing. This avijjā, this delusion, is woven into perception. And so we need to understand that, and it means that we need to understand something in life, if we want the kind of freedom that the Buddha's pointing to.
And I remember, I was teaching in America for a month earlier this year, and I said something like, "we need to understand" in a talk. The next day someone came for an interview, and they were quite upset at hearing that, that there's something we need to understand. They had said they'd never heard that before in a Dharma talk, and they took offence to it. And they thought it was just about being mindful, moment to moment. But to me, that's not the Buddha's message. There's something we need to understand. I wonder also if it, for her, meant a kind of intellectual understanding, and just that, and excluded the heart. When I use the word 'understanding,' I mean head and heart -- total; not excluding one or the other.
So in this talk tonight, I'm going to try and explore all that. One thing is I'm going to cover an enormous amount of ground quite quickly -- partly because I want to point something out about where the path is leading and fill something out, because it's easy for retreats to go by and retreats to go by and retreats to go by and it actually doesn't get filled out, because people feel, "Oh, there's no time." So I actually want to do that. So realizing, part of the talk, talking about very much the deeper aspects of the path, very much the kind of deep end. [4:28] And first of all, that this is not abstract. I'm not talking about philosophical speculation, or metaphysical speculation or abstraction. I'm talking about reality, in a very real way, I hope, that becomes, for a practitioner who dedicates themselves, it becomes at times a matter of life and death. It really is something crucial. So I hope it doesn't sound abstract.
Now, I also know that some of the talk, a good portion of the talk, will be actually -- how do I say it? -- beyond everyone in the room. A portion of the talk will be beyond everyone in the room. And I hope that's okay. Sometimes, and I'm aware in a retreat like this and some of the practices we've been doing and the groups and some of the talks, that the structure of the inner critic that I talked about early on in the retreat can arise in relationship to what's being said or what other people say. And as I said in that talk, can that just be there? It's okay if it's there. It doesn't need to take the whole space. It can just be there and it's okay. It does its thing.
And sometimes we hear something that we don't quite understand, and yet, if there's an openness, sometimes it's like we get a sense of something. We absorb something. I don't maybe understand it fully intellectually, but I'm absorbing something. I'm getting a sense of it, or just the perfume of something comes through. If the inner critic is taking up too much of the stage, it blocks that. It blocks that kind of absorbing. But if we can kind of open, give everything space, just listen, then there's a possibility that, in time, fuller understanding comes. You know, time -- all this takes time. A talk can be just planting seeds, and that's great. That's absolutely great if that's all it is. So in a way, for some of this, there's no pressure here. You can just sit back and kind of listen to a picture of the path, or a picture of aspects of the path.
But as we undertake the practice, as we dedicate ourselves to practice, and we come on retreat, etc., and practising in our life, there are a number of possibilities that begin to open up. One is -- and I think we touched on this yesterday -- as I am more mindful, and I give myself to mindfulness, etc., the kind of storying that I was talking about yesterday, and the way we complicate things by dragging in the story sometimes, that begins to subside at times with the mindfulness. And there's a letting go of what we call papañca, this kind of complicating, this over-layering with preconception and "this is like this," and viewing it and bringing the story in in a way that complicates everything.
And at times, we let go of the kind of personality self, as I was talking about last night, and the psychological self. It just kind of goes quiet. In a way, going in and out of that experience with dedication, over time, dedication to practice, we begin to see through the personality self as a so-called ultimately real thing. We begin to really question its ultimate validity. And with that comes a certain degree of loveliness, openness, unburdening, and freeing. A certain degree of that is definitely there with that.
And with that, it can be, with that process and the mindfulness and the sort of dedication to being present, that not only does the personality self go quiet, but it's almost like the senses themselves feel like they're getting cleaned, cleansed. And almost like, we feel like, "Oh, I've been covering over everything, and now I can actually see things in their, almost like in their essence, in their thingness." It speaks to me. And we see, we feel like we're seeing, in the Buddha's phrase, "things as they are," instead of things layered over with all this complication of story, storying and papañca, etc. So there's this possibility in that, what feels like the clarity and the immediacy of the present moment and the sort of cleansing of the senses that I was just talking about, that things -- the grass, the table, another person, this moment, the moment of sipping the tea, etc. -- they begin to have their own radiance, a kind of radiance of thingness, a brightness of their beingness. And this is very beautiful. This is a very beautiful way that practice opens -- very lovely, precious.
I found these haiku. Partly I just want to read them to you because I really like them, but ... [laughter] I'll try and weave them into the talk! Sometimes, it's hard with a haiku. You think, "What's the person getting at?" But sometimes it's this -- it's the kind of radiance of the immediacy of things.
Blow of an ax,
pine scent,
the winter woods.[1]
Drawing attention to something. Trying to enliven something. Kind of making the ordinary extraordinary somehow. Seeing the extraordinary in the ordinary, in nothing more than its very ordinariness. It's sensitive to the fleeting beauty of things as well, in that, with that radiance, with that beingness of things. Another one:
Washing the saucepans --
The moon glows on her hands
in the shallow river.[2]
It's great. However, it might be that in pursuing practice this way, that although the personality self has been kind of seen through and let go of at times -- it comes back and you let go of it, but one's seen through its reality -- it might be that this kind of deeper level, what we call the body/mind, or you could call it existential self (just the feeling that I exist somehow, in a very real way), that existential self may remain untouched and unquestioned.
So a second possibility, as practice deepens, is a kind of heightening of the attention to impermanence. Impermanence either naturally in the course of mindfulness and practice begins to stand out, it begins to become a very obvious and important factor of existence, or with deliberately tuning the attention (as we did one day here), deliberately tuning the attention into impermanence, and focusing on it, and wanting it to impress deeply on the consciousness, make a deep impression. And there's, you know, enormous emphasis in the teachings, in the Buddha's teachings on impermanence, on noticing impermanence, on waking up to impermanence. Countless quotes, but here's just one, from the Buddha:
The end of all amassing is depletion. The end of rising is collapse. The end of togetherness is separation. The end of living is death.[3]
So, you know, something like that, it's like: "Wake up! Wake up to something. Face it. Deal with it. Follow it. Pursue it as a seeing, because it will bring something, some freedom." And so, as practitioners, taking impermanence deeper, beginning to contemplate it, beginning to notice it more and kind of absorb that reality, that fact into the heart more, we find that we can't even really find this existential self. The feeling of the existential self is, somehow in this body/mind complex, or as this body/mind complex, there's something stable called 'Rob' or 'me,' and there's something stable called 'Michael' or whatever. That's the feeling we have of self as an independent, stable kind of reality. But when I look inside deeply with a kind of sharp mindfulness, I actually find, all I find in here is impermanent things, impermanent phenomena. There's nothing I can find that's a kind of stable, that corresponds to the stable reality that I feel myself to be and feel others to be. So, begins to question -- taking impermanence deeper begins to question what we could call the existential self.
Now, either this "things as they are," or this impermanence, or a kind of mixture of both, seeing that tends to end up kind of elevating the importance of mindfulness in different ways. So certainly if I have a sense of kind of being present, and being really in touch with a sort of basic reality of things, and I feel like I'm wiping the senses clean, and then I'm coming into touch with the naked reality, and we talk about 'bare attention' in the teachings, then the notion of 'presence' becomes very important. It's a beautiful thing to be present to the actuality of things. And that becomes something that really speaks to the heart: presence, because you're present with the reality of things, the fundamental, actual reality of things, this moment, this -- as I said -- this cup of tea, this moonlight on the hands. [15:23]
If I'm leaning towards the impermanence or some combination of both of them, and I say impermanence is the fundamental reality of things, and then I hear about the teachings emphasizing a kind of groundlessness, and I hear there's this groundlessness, and I take 'groundlessness' to mean 'impermanence' as the sort of basic and fundamental reality of things, and I realize, "Oh yeah, that's right." Always, as I was saying yesterday, as human beings, we're seeking security. We're seeking a secure ground. But "Aha! Things are impermanent. That means they're groundless, because the ground is always shifting. Nothing's staying the same. Therefore, it's groundless," using that sense of the word 'groundless.' That might be another relationship with kind of 'reality,' or perception of reality.
And then, again, mindfulness becomes the only sensible response to that, the only response that makes sense in the face of that: there's nothing but moments of shifting experience, a moment of this, a moment of that. Nothing stays the same. And mindfulness is a way of not looking for anything but that, just being with, simply being present with this moment of experience and this moment of experience, and kind of flowing in that way.
Some people would put it, what's happening is, when one is mindful there are kind of times of mindfulness when one is functioning optimally in relationship to a basic reality that's shifting all the time. It's basically a moment of impermanence, a moment of impermanence, a moment of impermanence. And mindfulness becomes the best that a human being can do, the kind of optimum way a human being can be in relationship to that. And so, being present without kind of losing one's balance. This comes and it fades, and this comes and it fades, and I'm present without losing my balance. I'm open to a degree. Or I'm not dragging in past hurts. I'm not dragging in yesterday and resentment or expectation. Just flowing with the impermanence of things. I'm not dragging something into the present. So in that way, too, I'm seeing it "as it is," because I'm not pulling something else in, and flowing in that way.
And in that sense, for some people using the word 'mindfulness,' it's like, "This is it. That's it. Just that. That's what life is. It's momentary arising and passing of phenomena, of experience." And some people would go so far, some people do go so far to say when the Buddha talked about nirvāṇa, what he meant was the temporary state of being mindful, and so being in a kind of balance with the impermanence of things. Then one goes out of that balance because one loses mindfulness, and one is out of nirvāṇa, and coming back into nirvāṇa because one is in that optimally functioning relationship with the momentary impermanence of so-called 'reality.'
How does that sound? Two options, which can be mixed, can be melted together. Third option for a practitioner, as practice deepens: this practice we've been doing in the afternoon, in the 2:30 sitting, strongly leaning towards a kind of sense almost of a ground of being. That's actually a phrase that came from the Christian mystical tradition. I think it was Paul Tillich. But people use it a lot: the ground of being. And so awareness, or this space -- or sometimes people call it Emptiness with a capital E -- this is the kind of ground of being, and it's felt and perceived to be vast and unchanging and still and imperturbable. And out of it arise phenomena, and back into it disappear phenomena, just like the images I've been using of the night sky, etc., and the shooting stars, etc. And with that can be a sense of the self, the capital S Self, is awareness, a kind of cosmic self of cosmic awareness. And with it also a sense of oneness.
Very beautiful. I don't know -- from the group, some people have been very, very touched by this. Other people it takes a little longer. You know, there's no -- and please, again, with the inner critic thing -- this isn't a race. People move at different rates. People have very different backgrounds. People gravitate towards this practice, where someone else gravitates towards [another practice]. I'm really wanting that to be okay, like I said in the opening talk, that we're all just human together. People are having different experiences, and it's really okay.
But anyway, at some point, that kind of experience begins to feel incredibly beautiful, probably more beautiful than any other experience one has ever had, and touches one deeply, profoundly. There's a real mystical touch to the heart there.
Okay, so two or three options depending on which way you look at it. Looking in the teachings, in the Dharma tradition, we can find, unfortunately, teachings that support both -- both a sort of "impermanence is the ultimate reality," the "this is it, things as they are, the shiny radiance of thingness of things," and also the kind of "ground of spacious awareness out of which everything arises, into which it fades." [21:42]
You can find support for all of that. And all three (or two), all three might be, can be very intuitively appealing to a person. And people find different ones of them very appealing on an intuitive level. Is that enough? Is that enough to give something a reality and take it as a truth because I feel intuitively that it's appealing? What are my tendencies, my predispositions personally, that I'm bringing to this? I want it to be that it's just momentary impermanence. Or I want it to be that there is a vast ground of being. Am I aware of even what I might be bringing, what I'm actually seeking at some deep level of my being? Am I even aware of the cultural influences that come into play?
And this, to me, has recently become fascinating. It's like, when Buddhism moved from India to Eastern Asia, to China and to Japan, initially it was completely rejected, because there is a tendency of the Indian mind to seek for what is transcendent, transcendent to all this seeming reality of things. Chinese, Japanese -- completely opposite tendency in their culture. Very much about phenomenal sense reality, and the moment, the beautiful momentariness of things, etc. So what happened -- one of the things that happened was, as Buddhism changed cultures, it actually changed. And quite deep aspects of orientation in the tradition actually changed. Now we in the West are receiving different streams, kind of either separately or mixed up, and also filtered through sort of turn of the last century and whenever it was, the Romantic poets and the Romantic philosophers. And they had a whole sort of -- also Asian influenced philosophies, mixed with this and that.
And we don't kind of realize what we're chewing on when we're fed stuff. When we go into it, there are actually many issues at stake here. And they're kind of philosophical issues, and they might seem abstract, but they come to be very important -- either intellectually, or what's even more dangerous, non-intellectually, because I don't realize that they're operating, and yet they are operating. So for instance, is there a given reality? Is there an independently existing reality there? Is it that matter is the primary thing, out of which awareness evolves, out of which, somehow, you stick matter together for enough billions of years and eventually consciousness evolves? That's the very Western, scientific, rationalist, materialist view. Or is it the other way round? That somehow awareness, mind, is primary and this matter does not have so much reality? All this stuff comes into this. And again, what am I bringing to it in terms of predisposition that I'm perhaps not fully conscious of or fully admitting to myself?
So sometimes someone who says, "This is it. There's nothing but momentary arising of phenomena which I have to be with and kind of deal with," sometimes it's almost like, subtly, they're casting themselves as a sort of existentialist hero: "I'm facing up to the reality of things." It's like, "I can do that. I'm brave enough to do that," as if that was the final arriving point of the teachings. "There's nothing spiritual. There's no more meaning in life. Don't read anything more into it. There's just the momentary arising and passing of meaningless phenomena. It's all impermanent. Get over it. Deal with it. If you feel anxious, stiff upper lip. Be brave. That's it. Good luck!" [laughter]
There are problems in both. There are problems in all three. If, again, through mindfulness, through dedication, the papañca, the complication, the story complicating, all that gets less, and I get a sense of the radiance of things, the "things as they are," in themselves, the beauty of that; if, with increased sharpness of mindfulness, I get a sense of the momentariness of things; if (as I was talking this morning briefly in the instructions), less reactivity, more sense of this spacious awareness, more sense of oneness -- and then I see, if any of that happens in my practice, and I see that and I think, "Ah! I've been overlaying things! I've been kind of fabricating an extra layer on top of things, either fabricating a story, and layering that on top, or the personality, layering that on top, or permanence or solidity or separateness or self." Whatever it is, however, to whatever level one has seen, one says, "Oh yeah. I see now. That's what I've been doing."
But a question: how do I know there's not more fabrication going on? How do I know that's the end of it? Where is the end of fabrication? Okay, I see through the personality. We were talking in quite a lot of detail last night about how the whole personality view gets fabricated and then enmeshed and entangled with my perception of things and the world. And I see, "Oh yeah, that's fabrication." And then I might have a sense of radiance, of momentariness, of whatever it is. How do I know the fabrication ends there? Where's the end of fabrication? In a way, seeing through the personality self in the way we were describing yesterday is a kind of non-building of the personality in that moment. Where does this non-building end? From the psychological self, the personality self going quiet, all the way down -- so far we've just talked about the solidity going quiet, the solidity getting less solid, things seeming less solid. Does it end there? Or, you know ...? [28:40]
So one of the problems in all these approaches so far is there's an assumption that one has reached a level that's real, unfabricated, not built. Now, I might not be conscious of that as an assumption, or I might be, but it's there. Second problem: psychological self, personality self might go quiet. I might even have less identification with this body/mind. But still -- this is where it gets quite subtle -- a subtle self-sense will be felt to have some degree of reality if the kind of elements of existence, or the elements that make up the body/mind, or the moments of inner experience are felt to be somehow real. That will give rise to a subtle sense of self, on which, at times, a bigger sense of self can get built, and there will be suffering with that.
So in some of the tradition -- actually, in the Theravādan Abhidhamma, I think -- they talk about 'basic units,' sort of fundamental building blocks like, "This is the ultimate reality. If you pursue reality deeply enough, if your mindfulness gets sharp enough, taken to the limit, you will see this, and that's it. These are the basic building blocks of experience, subatomic particles and moments of experience," etc.
Now, when the Mahāyāna came along and Nāgārjuna and others, they totally tore that to shreds and proved that it was completely a ridiculous notion, however appealing it might be to some people. And so there was a kind of answer: "Okay, okay, what it is is that these things -- these subatomic particles or these moments -- they disappear as soon as they arise." But if you pursue that, you see actually that doesn't make sense. If something disappears as soon as it arises, it means it actually doesn't exist. And I certainly can't amass anything to create anything out of that. I can't amass moments in time. I can't amass anything solid out of that.
So there are problems in terms of freedom and the limits on the potential of freedom if I take the elements of existence as real, even though the so-called grosser levels of self are not real. But there are also problems in terms of the limits on freedom -- this is very, very subtle; I'm talking about quite deep, subtle levels of freedom -- with the sense of the space of awareness being real. And again, to quote Nāgārjuna, "How could the afflictions, how could the afflictive emotions not arise for one whose mind has a base?" In other words, if I give some kind of reality to that spacious awareness, I'm giving a kind of ground of being to the space. Where there is a base, there is a foundation for building. Building what? Building experience, building self, building suffering.
I have to be very, very careful with this. And I hope I haven't disappointed anyone. [laughter] This is extremely skilful -- all those three approaches are all very, very skilful. And that's why we've been spending time doing it. They're extremely skilful, we could say, 'stepping-stones' to freedom. They open. We're talking about opening up views, shifting views, practising a shift in views. They are shifts in view that one can repeat and repeat. So every day, for instance, in the 2:30 sitting, we've been trying to gently encourage this shift in view. But they won't be a final freedom, and they're not ultimately true. So what am I going to do? Where am I going to go with this?
We need to look more deeply into the building of things. How is it -- we were talking about the personality self getting built -- how is it that suffering gets built? When I get into, you know, stress and suffering with something, and entangled, and it's painful, that has been built. We have had a big part in building that. The mind and its relationship and its views have built that. Suffering is built. This was the Buddha's great and fundamental insight: suffering is built, which means that it can be unbuilt. The sense of self is also built, to whatever degree: gross, personality, more subtle, more subtle, more subtle. Whatever sense of self is built.
Experience also is built. Not just suffering and self, but experience, too, is built, fabricated. Understanding that, pursuing that understanding is what we call dependent arising, looking into dependent arising. If I start my spiritual search, either consciously or unconsciously, with a notion like "things as they are" (maybe because I've read something, maybe because I've heard something or whatever), and that's kind of underpinning my spiritual search, or a notion of the radiance of things or the Big Self, capital S, or impermanence -- if those notions are underpinning my spiritual search, I probably will not pursue this question of building and dependent arising to such a depth, because I'll be looking in a different direction. I'll be looking for something else. And I'll tend to stop short when I find that thing, and I will tend to not emphasize enough a kind of probing into and playing with dependent arising so that it reveals its full, extraordinary depth. It's something that goes incredibly deep -- much, much deeper, certainly, than the psychological self. Much deeper even than notions of momentariness and impermanence, etc.
So practice, in a way, is practising with uncovering what it is that the mind does that builds suffering and self and experience. I'll say that again: practice is uncovering what it is in the mind that builds suffering and self and experience, and then learning to actually not build. So we talked a little bit this morning how clinging and reactivity, pushing away, trying to hang on, actually ends up being a builder of self, but also a builder of solidity. And it's even more than that: it's a builder of appearances, builder of the appearances of things. But so is self-view. Any degree of self-view I have comes in as a factor in the mind which ends up building suffering, building self more, and building experience and appearances of things. This is quite, quite subtle and remarkable.
It also turns out that my very belief in things being not built is a builder of things. If I assume a given, independent reality, that also kind of injects them with that sense. And that becomes another thing that I can play with. So partly in the spacious awareness, when it really gets going, we're withdrawing -- when I say everything is just an impression in awareness, and I kind of suggest that a little bit, it's withdrawing this belief in the solidity and the real existence of things. And that, too, begins to build things less.
Does that make sense? [laughter] It's okay if it's just seeds, okay? I'm moving through a lot of stuff quickly. I hope it makes a little sense. Yeah? Given more time, we would slow this really right down, and be very, very specific, and take one's time with really seeing this. It's a completely radical thing to see. Completely turns everything on its head. And it's difficult to understand.
There is, in the teachings, plenty of reference to the Unconditioned, the Unfabricated, the Deathless, the Unborn, that which is transcendent, etc. And sometimes people hear the teachings and they think, "That's awareness, because it's always here. No matter what I do, I'm always aware," etc. Or it's the space of awareness that we've been working with, awareness in that broader sense. But actually it can't be either of those. Or rather, if it was either of those, and to say that that's deathless, how do I know that either awareness in the ordinary sense or awareness even in the sense of something larger and more lovely -- how do I know that that's still there when I die, and is still deathless? It's there when I live, but how do I ...? It seems like things arise and they die back into it. But it can only be a leap of faith that that remains after I die. So there are problems there, taking awareness in any sense as -- or in any ordinary kind of sense -- as the Unconditioned, the Unfabricated.
And similarly with the space. We've gone through these different meditations and the different angles in the afternoon. Someone was saying, a couple of people have been saying to me, the space seems to be able to be coloured differently at different times. I can feel it as peace, unshakeable peace. I can feel it as love, as compassion. I can feel it as awareness. I can feel it just as space. But that very fact that it can be coloured in different ways points to the fact that it's still fabricated. It can't be a basic, independent reality, because I keep colouring it in different ways. It depends what I'm giving it.
So as I said, we have to be very careful here not to dismiss all of this too quickly. We've been here less than a week. What is it, five and six days? That's way too soon. So I'm talking now about later. It's way too soon to chuck that stuff out, especially if it's new to you. Someone might have been practising with this space of awareness stuff for a long time, and taking that as somehow ultimate and somehow, you know, the ground and the emptiness out of which everything ... etc. And it might be, it might be, one can't say, but it might be that one is getting towards the time to question it.
But they are stepping-stones, and really, really valuable stepping-stones. One has to be careful about clinging to them, or challenging them -- clinging to them forever, or challenging them too early. And so I don't want to be a party pooper and burst anyone's bubble. [40:50] It's almost like, if that feels beautiful, go with it. If it feels free, go with it. I want to lay something out that's kind of broader, longer.
So rather, in this search for the Unfabricated and the Unconditioned, it's rather that I'm pursuing this non-building and this idea of non-building, and just letting it get deeper and deeper, and not building the story, not building the self, not building the solidity, and going deeper and deeper with that. And eventually, appearances begin to fade. Appearances begin to actually not come up. And one even can go so much beyond it, one goes beyond awareness -- and they call it, in the tradition, call it a cessation experience. But it's not just about having this fancy and wonderful experience. What's much more important is understanding what has gone on there, and on that journey, understanding that things and facets of reality that we take to be completely real and unquestioned -- like space, like awareness, like time -- are actually also fabricated. Because in that going beyond, there is no time. There's not even a present moment, really. There's no space. There's no awareness in the usual sense.
So that's the important thing: understanding the building, the dependent arising. There's a lovely mystical saying of the Buddha, from the original teaching in the Pali Canon:
For one who sees, there is nothing.[4]
And a very similar quote -- I think it's from a Prajñāpāramitā text in the Mahāyāna tradition:
To see nothing is to see excellently.
So it turns out, in terms of awareness, that actually 'awareness' means 'awareness of something.' Awareness is always in relationship to something, to the thing it's aware of. And as such, it's also a dependent arising. One can see that the things, the objects, are also appearances that I've built. They are empty. Awareness is leaning on something that's empty.
Let's step out of this for a sec. Pursuing this inquiry, whether it's just finding the sense of things as they are, of the radiance of things, of the thingness of things, the beauty of that; whether it's the momentariness; or whether it's this big space of awareness that we've been practising with -- that should bring, practised well, and it does bring, all of them bring a certain amount of freedom, deep freedom, and love and compassion. They bring that. So again, I hope this isn't sounding abstract. They bring that with them: love, compassion, freedom. When I go even deeper into the dependent arising and the unfabricatedness of things, it's even more. Even more freedom, even more compassion. Now -- we've already explored -- this is much harder to understand. It's much harder to understand. It's relatively easy to see impermanence. It takes quite a lot to make the awareness really sharp to see very, very quick impermanence, but it's relatively easy. It's relatively easy to see things, so-called "things as they are" and the radiance of things. And it's relatively easy to get that kind of sense of space and ground. But this that I'm talking about now is much harder to understand, and it's much harder to explain.
For many -- and again, as I'm saying stuff, I know it lands in different places -- for many this has no appeal whatsoever. You might be listening and thinking, "That sounds horrible. I don't want anything to do with that." [laughter] "I like my reality, thank you very much." For others, it touches something very deep in them. As I say, might not even understand it, but there's some perfume here that's drawing something; can't even quite put my finger on it. It's not nihilism. Absolutely, absolutely, absolutely. It might, you might, one might be hearing this and thinking, "That reeks of nihilism." It's not nihilism. It's not saying nothing exists. It's not saying it's all meaningless. It's not saying that at all.
And a practitioner, with a lot of dedication -- I'm talking about people really dedicated now -- can actually know these different levels, and know what it is to experience really living with impermanence, and opening the heart to that, and being with the flow, and letting go with the flow of that. And there is beauty in that. But much, much deeper, much more radical, much more freeing, much more wondrous is this kind of mutual dependent arising of all things, this mutual emptiness, this mutual groundlessness of all things. And it's really not nihilism that it's pointing to.
So this journey, through all this, is really a journey of challenging deeply one's views and one's tendencies and assumptions about reality. And in that journey, in that challenging is, to me -- and by anyone who undertakes -- is wonder and beauty. Sometimes you hear practitioners and some teachers say, "There is no Unconditioned and Unfabricated. It's a mistranslation. They are mistranslations of certain words, and there's only actually one passage where the Buddha refers to it," which is absolutely not true if you know the Canon. And again, they're saying, "And there's nothing spiritual. Get over it. There's nothing spiritual, there's nothing mystical in life. This is it."
And they will say, "Things are empty. That's what the Buddha taught. That's what the tradition teaches." But oftentimes, what's happening is they're predominantly wanting to say that notion of the Unconditioned, that notion of a Deathless or something wondrous like that, that's empty. And so for them, the whole teachings of emptiness become something to get rid of this notion which they'd rather not have around because they don't kind of like it. But an experience of that, or even an experience close to that, with understanding, with understanding about this non-building -- profoundly transforming, profoundly healing. Again, if it sounds like nihilism, it's not. It's profoundly healing if the understanding is there. Healing, transforming, freeing -- incredibly so.
We could say, you know, what if we change words and say, "You say the Unfabricated is empty. What if I say, well, what about kindness or love?" You know, ultimately speaking, that's empty too. Love is empty. Does that mean that I dismiss it as an experience? That it has no place in my healing, in my growth, in my freeing?
So I have to be careful. One has to be careful in terms of -- I might say everything is empty, but if it's just words, it might just throw me back on my usual assumptions about things, and I'm still operating in the world with my usual sense of self, things, time, etc., or throw me back just to that level of impermanence, and equating emptiness with impermanence -- which it's not; it's something more. There's not the same degree of freeing that will come out of that. I might be using all the right words, but it's not freeing at the same level, because I haven't understood dependent arising so deeply.
So I have to look, and I have to be really, really honest as a practitioner. What's my predisposition here? Am I looking to dismiss and negate something over another thing? And as I said before, different people will want to get rid of different things. Some people are very intent on getting rid of this Unfabricated business. Some people really want to be sure that awareness is not taken as something mystical. Some people really want to get rid of the whatever it is, the solidity of things. And leave others untouched. You have to be careful. If I'm so intent on doing that, am I actually just leaving other stuff untouched by emptiness, by the seeing of emptiness? I have to look at my blind spots. I have to be completely thorough. I have to have total integrity. And as I said, it should lead to freedom. And if it's not, something else is going on.
Now, it does turn out that this Unfabricated, this Deathless, is also empty. It's also empty. Where am I going to land with that? What does it mean? Rather than dismissing it, I'm kind of landing in a whole new place on the journey, and we talk about the union of appearance and emptiness. Things appear, everything appears, and it's empty, and the emptiness of it and the appearance of it are one, in a way. You could call that the razor's edge between appearance and emptiness. And it's a difficult -- it's extremely difficult to be on that. It's easy to say it, very difficult to see it and live it and know it deeply.
So we can talk in the tradition about -- and in the Mahāyāna tradition, or some, particularly the Tibetan, some Tibetan teachings -- talk very much about teachings that are provisional and teachings that are ultimate. And you kind of talk about levels of teachings and stages. I think that's very, very skilful, and very important to know which is which.
So how are we going to sum all this up? Perception is governed by -- or rather, perception, when it's governed by delusion, builds and believes in a solid, secure, independent reality of what it sees. Perception governed by delusion builds and believes in a solid, secure, seemingly independent reality of things that it perceives. In a way, you could say all of practice is learning to see through that, what the Buddha called an illusion of magic. A conjurer's trick, he called it.[5] To see through that conjurer's trick, to see it for what it is. It's not to live in a kind of nothingness -- that would be impossible anyway. It's to see it for what it is.
It's completely a movement that's counterintuitive, very deeply counterintuitive, because our intuitive feeling of things, just as the self -- last night, I said it's one of the most obvious facts; one of the most obvious facts seems to be the reality of things that appear. So it's completely counterintuitive, and it brings freedom. It brings the deepest level of freedom. So how do I do that? How do I see through it? By practising this unbuilding that I was talking about. By practising shifting to another view that calls into question my habitual views, and then shaking the whole thing up. Also, funnily enough, by reasoning, which I haven't talked about on this retreat. But there's a real place for the reasoning mind to kind of expose the unreality of things. Or, more often than not, some combination of all those. And practice is a development of skills, a development of all that, the ability to do that, the ability to play with that and see deeply from that.
And so, you know, we might hear something like this, and hopefully, we hear it or we read something, and it does plant seeds, hopefully. And sometimes maybe not, and sometimes it doesn't even seem relevant to one's life. Or it could be that one has, in any of this stuff, with the space of awareness thing, one has a kind of one-off experience of something amazing. Usually, one-off experiences are not enough to change the life. They're not enough. And what one needs is to repeat that experience, but repeat it even deliberately with the understanding -- understanding: how is it that I'm unbuilding? How is it that I build? And how is it that I can unbuild? And repeat that over and over till it's letting those deep insights sink deep into the being. So it's not just about having an experience, but it's also not just about intellectually understanding something.
If we really inquire into this, we will see something kind of remarkable, which is that awareness or mindfulness, or you could say our practice, is always inclining to see reality in one way or another. And it could be in terms of things as they are and the radiance. It could be in terms of impermanence. It could be in terms of the space of awareness. Could be in terms of something else. That might be deliberately, from the way I'm practising and the way I'm leaning, but more usually it's from the hidden assumptions, and that's where we have to really expose things. Or I can be inclining the mind through practice to see dependent arising, and expose this building and dependent arising of things. But otherwise, awareness is, whether I like it or not, always inclining to colour and fabricate experience a certain way and see it a certain way.
Summing up or concluding, perhaps: we were just talking about this search for security, and the search for a kind of groundedness that we can rely on. It's a funny thing. What starts as a search for security, taken wholeheartedly, taken to its end, taken in a completely full way, ends up being a kind of trust, complete trust in non-building a ground. Not building, or not building generally. Not building suffering. Trust in not building suffering. Trust in not building the self. Trust in not building solidity. And trust in not building experience. Trusting that.
What was a search for security ends up being a trust in not building anything solid. I'm looking for something solid, and I end up seeing that the best way is not building it. And we learn how to do that over time. In doing this, in not building, what was kind of compacted into a seemingly solid reality becomes unbound. There's a kind of unbinding, opening -- a disentangling of things; you could say a dissolving of things, an unbinding of things as an experience. That experience should bring with it an understanding of this, how things have been built. Being built, they're fabricated. They're not really real in the way that we feel that they are. And that understanding brings the deepest freedom. And with it, a real bowing. And that's where it's really not nihilistic. It opens the heart in some mysterious way. Bowing. And it also brings with it, naturally, very naturally, a wanting to serve, a wanting -- we were talking about in the generosity talk -- wanting to give one's life up. Naturally come with that.
There is in the teachings this reference to the groundlessness of existence. But understanding that deeper and deeper, it ends up being something much, much deeper than just the impermanence, the momentariness of things, much deeper than that: the dependent co-arising of all things, all phenomena. And yes, this journey can be shaking the very foundations of our reality at times. Yes, it can bring up anxiety at times, but not to stop at the anxiety. The anxiety is not an arriving point. It's supposed to bring freedom. It does bring freedom if I take it, if I take it all the way, I take it as deeply as I can. Groundlessness, opening to groundlessness, seeing groundlessness, understanding groundlessness brings freedom.
Let's be quiet together for a few moments.
