Concepts, Views, Reality

So there was a specific theme or area that I wanted to address tonight, and then, partly based on some of the questions last night and some of the interviews, etc., it feels important to also weave other stuff into that based on, basically, what you guys are going through and the diversity of your responses, etc. So I hope that it weaves in gracefully to what I'm trying to say, and it might feel like I'm spiralling around stuff. I hope that's just okay. I also hope that it's not too long.

Clearly, clearly everyone in this room, myself included, has different background, different background in terms of personal history, different psychological background, different practice background, different exposure to different teachings. All of that, all of that. And not only that -- a variety of predispositions as well -- predispositions in terms of practice, predispositions in terms of view and attitude, approaches to practice, all that. So what that means is that everyone's having a different retreat, in a way, and the teachings are landing in different places, and the practices land in different [places] -- and all that changes. So it somehow feels important to -- all that's obvious, it feels important to state it, and try and address all that diversity somehow in the teaching.

So if we jump off from there, actually, attitudes, views, preconceptions that we have will profoundly affect our life. They, in a way, colour and shape what we experience in life every day. So on a very gross level, but also on a very, very subtle level, and we don't even realize it's going on. So attitudes, views, preconceptions affect life and the way life unfolds, and also practice and the way practice unfolds, deeply. So many in this room are from the Insight Meditation tradition. In that tradition -- and I touched on this a little bit, I think -- and some Zen traditions, two things get communicated, generally speaking. Generally speaking, a person -- either whether it's explicitly said or somehow imbibed -- a person generally walks away with two meanings of something, or two concepts. One is the concept of 'bare attention,' and the other one is a kind of idea to put down thought -- and 'put down' meaning 'let go of' thought, but also in a way to denigrate thought and the value of thought, and seeing thought as kind of a problem in a way, or being suspicious, at least, of its value.

And so both of those concepts or strands in the teaching can be communicated explicitly or implicitly, and they're both really useful, actually. They're extremely useful. The concept of bare attention is very useful. But like everything else, has its positive and its potential downside. So this bare attention that we talk about, especially in the Insight Meditation tradition, this kind of capacity of attention to meet experience very, very simply and directly (so it seems), rawly, nakedly, that generally takes people years of practice. I mean, years to actually be able to do that and kind of get what that's about and feel in oneself, "Ah, yeah, this is beautiful. This is something really lovely to do that," the simplicity of it, the directness of it, the vitality of it. I said in one talk, in a way, that's a foundation for what we're doing here. So very much a foundation of what we're doing here. And it takes time to get that foundation. It takes time to feel like we're really able to meet experience -- lovely experience, difficult experience, difficult emotions, all that; it takes time. It really takes time. We develop that.

And in doing that, in trying to bring bare attention to experience, to some degree, definitely, we go underneath concepts. That's kind of what the teaching of bare attention is about. Underneath the veil of concepts of experience. But, in a way, is it enough? Is it enough? And I've brought this up before. Is it enough? Are we going underneath concepts enough? Is going underneath concepts really where we're trying to head to in terms of emptiness and understanding? Sometimes with paying bare attention to experience, as you've noticed, all of you, I think, most of you from Insight Meditation retreats, etc., before, is that what it brings is a kind of real vividness to experience. When we meet it more directly, free -- or to a relative extent, free -- of the veil of concepts, there's a brightness. People come into interviews and say, "The grass seems greener. The sky looks bluer." It's beautiful. It's precious. But part of the potential downside is that experiences, appearances, are becoming more vivid, and in a way, can actually lead to this accepting of appearances even more. It's like appearances become primary. Experience becomes primary.

So there's this word in the tradition, 'suchness.' Everyone come across this word, suchness? Not exactly sure what the Sanskrit is -- tathatā or something like that. But originally, if you read the original texts, this word 'suchness' was synonymous with the word 'emptiness.' It has come to mean in the tradition the exact opposite of that, the exact opposite. So when generally teachers talk about suchness or you read about it nowadays -- and I remember as a teenager reading Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell, and those kind of books that one reads when one explores in certain ways as a teenager, and he used it then. What was it -- he was taking mescaline or whatever, and the vividness, the beingness, the thingness of things was startling to him, their essence of thingness, and he was calling that 'suchness.' I don't think he started it, but that use of the word started pervading the teachings, etc. But originally it meant completely the opposite. It meant the absence of that. It meant emptiness. The suchness of a thing was the absence of its thingness, of its essence, of its beingness, etc.

Now, there are reasons for that that have to do with the way Buddhism spread from India, particularly to East Asia, to China and Japan. But though I find it fascinating, I'm not going to digress. I actually think it's very important, but I'm not going to go too much into it. Well, actually, just to say a little bit. [laughter] I talked about this balance of the Middle Way. There's a sense of kind of negating too much -- we'll revisit this -- kind of going too far with the emptiness into a kind of nothingness, etc., and the possibility of, in a way, not doing that enough, and the swing. Individually, there's a swing, but also within Buddhist traditions. Within one tradition, the historical swing -- too much, not enough, and kind of reactions to that. The culture in Eastern Asian countries was, unlike India where the philosophical milieu that the Buddha grew up in had a real strand of transcendence in it, the aim of a lot of it was actually transcending the phenomenal world, going beyond, experiencing something beyond the senses that's transcendent to that. That was completely absent in Chinese and Japanese spiritual milieus and much more about the is-ness of things, the moment of experience, the directness of the senses, the earthiness, etc.

So when Buddhism moved to China and Japan, actually they rejected it at first for different reasons, but that was one of them. So it had to find its way back in, and then, in a way, they took the Indian thing perhaps as going too far. All of which is good, because this swing is actually healthy. I don't know if that makes sense. It actually profoundly influences the way the Dharma has arrived to the West, because we've actually inherited a mixture. In this room, there's a big mixture. In the Insight Meditation tradition, there's certainly a mixture. So that kind of thing, we think, "Well, that's not really significant, I'm not really interested." I wouldn't have been interested in this at all a few years ago, but teaching so much and bumping into people's views and attitudes, one actually, "Where does this come from?" Anyway.

So we can have notion with bare attention, etc., of a kind of purity of perception, that somehow it's possible to -- Aldous Huxley -- scrub the doors of perception until they're clean and they see reality as it is, things as they are; the world is shining in its is-ness, and this is this, and that's it. And in that, the appearance can seem like a solid fact. It's the appearance, and that's what we're trusting. I will review this later. I'm not saying this always happens. I'm just saying it's a potential way that things can unfold. So sometimes one can have a sense of something like the talk last night -- it was a very intellectual reasoning, etc. -- and, given the choice, one doubts the reasoning and not the appearance. Appearances seem almost unquestionable, and reasoning seems questionable and unbelievable. I'm not saying it happens all the time, but that's a potential reaction or thing that can come up.

So sometimes we hear in the teaching -- again, it's kind of communicated -- it's almost like, "Don't think about experience. Just experience. Just experience." And, in a way, what that can kind of direct towards is this faith in what we see and what we experience. However, there's a problem there, and I voiced it before. It's that we sense inherent existence woven into our perceptions. So if I'm trusting appearance, appearances come with a sense of inherent existence to a degree, and the delusion is in the seeing. It's fundamentally a problem. The problem is deep in the perception, in the mind, in the perception.

I said this before too: I don't feel -- and again, this is just an opinion -- that we will actually uncover the full depth of understanding of emptiness just trusting appearances and experiences. Very difficult to reach something like the lack of inherent existence of awareness, or the fact that there's no real present moment, or this process that we were talking about yesterday -- that the process, too, and the elements that make up the process, and the time that the process seems to happen in, none of that is real, either. Very difficult if we're just trusting this bare attention; something in experience will always appear to have inherent existence. Something. It's the nature of experience, the default stream of experience. If it's not explicitly kind of made clear to us or us to ourselves that this or that lacks inherent existence, pretty much, I feel, we can safely assume that we're assuming inherent existence in things.

Yogi 1: Excuse me, Rob.

Rob: Yeah.

Yogi 1: Can you define 'inherent existence,' please? I'm struggling to know how you're using it.

Rob: Yeah, so last year I didn't define it until later in the retreat. This year I defined it right at the beginning, but it's actually quite difficult to understand what it means. It means that we have a sense that things exist independently of the way we're looking at them -- in a nutshell. There's different ways of saying it, but that's basic. So that's the sense we have. Now, all this, bare attention, and the kind of relegation of thought, etc., can lead to a number of outflows, one of which is we can also, in addition to what I just said, kind of have a sense that the point of the Dharma and where we're going is to kind of 'go with the flow' of things. Again, we'll come across this, we'll read it, etc., it will occur to us. And that things are impermanent, and therefore, obviously, because things are impermanent, we should let go and go with the flow.

That, to me, is not the same as awakening. It's really not the same as awakening. It's minus quite a big chunk of understanding there. Many of you have probably read this novel called Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse. Have you come across that? Beautiful novel, you know, and I found it profoundly moving. But his big kind of epiphany is sitting by the river watching the flow, you know? There's a sense that is the kind of fulfilment of understanding, and going with the flow, and letting it be, and kind of not reacting so much. One of my teachers, Ajaan Ṭhānissaro, Ajaan Geoff is his other name, wrote a fantastic essay; I'm sure it's somewhere on the web. I think it's called something like "The Roots of Buddhist Romanticism." It's really, really worth reading. He exposes some of the ways that, in this case, Western notions that happened around the Romantic philosophers and later actually have found their way into Western Dharma. Very big is going with the flow, etc., like that, and that's actually not what's most radical in the Buddha's teachings.

So this going with the flow can actually be given a kind of Romantic twist, and it has a real heart pull -- you know, Siddhartha by the river, and that kind of letting go, and it's very poetic, beautiful. It can also kind of be interpreted in a kind of grim, "Basically everything's changing, and deal with it. Learn to get on with it, and don't try and create anything more fancy than that." So it can kind of go Romantic, or it can go grim existentialist kind of deal. But either one, to me, doesn't seem like it's quite got the fullness of what the Buddha was trying to communicate, and to just say that, although it's a strong thing to be able to do that in the face of impermanence, it's not enough for the Buddha to have really questioned whether he wanted to teach. We could say something like that, write them on one of those self-help calendars or whatever that you peel off, "Today's thing is let go with the flow," you know? Nice, but ...

So emptiness, as I said before, is not the same as impermanence. It's saying something much more and much deeper and much more difficult to understand. So the Buddha in the Aṅguttara Nikāya says:

The Tathāgata [that's another name or himself], when seeing what is to be seen, does not construe an object as seen. He does not construe an unseen. He does not construe ['construe' means 'create' or 'conceive'] an object to be seen. He does not construe a seer.

And then the same when hearing, smelling, tasting, touching, when cognizing.

Whatever is seen or heard or sensed and fastened onto as true by others, one who is Such [another name for an enlightened person] -- among those who are self-bound would not further assume to be true or even false. Having seen well in advance that arrow where generations are fastened and hung -- "I know, I see, that's just how it is!" -- there is nothing of the Tathāgata fastened.^[1]

He's not hooked anywhere. There is nothing of the Tathāgata, nothing of one who sees that way fastened, hooked.

With no notion of subject [no notion, not even the notion of a momentary subject], there are no grounds for "I know, I see"; with no notion of object [of that which is known], no grounds for, "That's just how it is."^[2]

Clearly this is pointing to something way beyond the concept of impermanence.

Yogi 2: Would you tell us again the source?

Rob: The source -- Aṅguttara Nikāya, in the Chapter of Fours, number 24. So with a contemplation of impermanence, another word for anicca, the word that we usually translate as 'impermanence,' is 'uncertain.' Things are not certain, a-nicca. They're not certain. That also leads -- there's a very beautiful level of teaching here: things are uncertain, therefore we can't be in control, and kind of opening to that, and we can't know what's going to happen. But again, this notion of 'not knowing' has -- again, it's one of these notions. What I'm addressing tonight is our relationship with views and attitudes and where that might not be fully conscious, or where they might be coming from. So a notion of not knowing -- beautiful. And letting go of "I need to know, I need to know" -- beautiful. But like all things, can it go too much, and has a notion of not knowing in the Dharma been over-elevated? It's almost like a place that we want to arrive at is not knowing.

And it's interesting, I remember years ago I taught at work retreat up in Scotland in the highlands, and we would have Dharma discussions almost every day. At one point, one of the retreatants said -- he's actually a friend of mine -- he said, "Why do we always have to come to a conclusion when we have a Dharma discussion?" Which is -- fair enough point. But it can seem that knowing, or arriving at knowing, blocks a sense of openness and a sense of possibility. It can seem that way. It can also seem -- and I'll return to this -- that when there's knowing, the heart closes a little bit. I'm just pointing this out, and I'm just wondering whether those things need to go together.

For the Buddha, it's a very different project. If you open the Pali Canon, you don't really get a sense of him elevating not knowing as something to kind of go for and arrive at, a sense of not knowing. It's quite the opposite, quite the opposite. He's very big on knowing, and what do we need to know? What are we trying to know? How can I know? How can I know what I need to know? And actually working towards that. It's quite a different, again, paradigm.

So in communicating teachings and things, one of the problems, and the Buddha stated it as well, is all this is difficult to understand -- certainly teachings about emptiness and dependent arising. They're difficult to understand, difficult to explain, difficult to teach, you know? Another possibility is that -- and again, it's very common in Western Dharma, so I just want to highlight a few possibilities -- we get a little bit enamoured, again, of a notion of simplicity, that that's somehow inherently right or the right way to go. Just wanting to flag these things. And ideas that can be expressed quickly or zippily kind of can gain a lot of momentum and weight and kind of authority that way. Ideas that, because they're expressed quickly and easily, can easily get repeated very often. You can just throw something out -- "go with the flow" or da-da-da-da. And maybe ideas that also have an intuitive pull, and they seem simple because they resonate with our intuition.

So, danger -- I mean, 'danger' is a strong word -- potential pitfalls wherever I go. If I overemphasize or I dwell too much on complexity and intellectuality and precision, even as a teacher, teaching, there are obvious dangers there. We get caught in the mind and nitpicking -- obvious dangers. But there's a danger the other way. There's a danger the other way of oversimplifying, getting attached to simplicity, and in so doing, actually to imprecision wrapped up in that. So, for instance (and we'll retouch this again), an equation of emptiness with impermanence, or an equation of emptiness with oneness -- not quite the full deal.

I find, teaching, trying to teach this stuff, that to be precise is really hard work. I find it very, very hard work. It's really hard work to try and communicate things as precisely -- it's a hassle, to be honest. It's a real hassle. But to me, that's what -- it feels to me the thing that's most in alignment with my sense of integrity. But to be honest, it's more work. It's more work to kind of say in a lot of detail and say, "It's not like this, not like this," and actually carve things out that way. I could (and sometimes I do, and other teachers do as well) actually talk about emptiness, etc., in a much, much simpler and more open way, much more poetic way, much more kind of suggestive way. And I know that actually that's a more popular way of teaching it. It tends to -- people get less upset, often. [laughs] And less angry. And actually the heart is more touched when it's communicated that way. Again, I'll revisit this later. Sometimes in trying to be really precise, something, for some reason, happens in the hearts of the listener, that actually it doesn't feel so open as if one just kind of said something much more vague and poetic and left it quite open.

But in that openness there's actually openness to different interpretations, and people pick up very different meanings given the same sort of vague, open language, and actually talking at very different levels and depths of understanding. So that, to me -- I don't do it every time, but -- that, to me, it feels important to actually try and be really precise. But in that, there can be sometimes a loss of this kind of more open sense or mystery at times, I think.

One thing I said last night -- with the reasonings, sort of analysis, one of the difficulties that I think almost everyone will encounter is the decisiveness of it is troubling. That second step that I was talking about, that if something existed inherently, it would have to exist like da-da-da-da -- that's troubling, you know? That kind of really deciding, "Yes, that's really true." In a way, it feels like we're pitching up a battle with what seems to be real, in terms of appearance, and reason. And can really rock the boat inside and create a lot of unsureness.

It's interesting, too, because in a way, sometimes I feel -- and I also read this in other authors, that it may be some children you encounter, if you ever -- delightful children, begin questioning the appearances of things and the reality of things, and it's sort of very free-spirited. Somehow, sometimes, for some people in the course of life that questioning of appearances actually gets a bit trodden on, subdued, repressed.

As I said last night, you don't have to pick it up at all, it's really, really fine not to pick it up, but sometimes a person can think, "How could it possibly be the case that the conceptual would lead beyond the conceptual, that the conceptual mind would lead to something that's non-conceptual, which is where we're trying to go?" There's a sūtra called the Pile of Jewels Sūtra, and he says:

Kāshyapa [he's talking to this guy, Kāshyapa], it is [like this]: For example, fire arises when the wind rubs two branches together.

Obviously a very dry climate. [laughter] All that happens here is a bit of drops of rain fall. [laughter]

For example, fire arises when the wind rubs two branches together. Once the fire has arisen, the two branches are burned. Just so Kāshyapa, if you have the correct analytical intellect, a [noble one's] faculty of wisdom is generated. Through its generation, the correct analytical intellect is [also] consumed.^[3]

So it has a way of eating itself. It eats itself, done rightly. So there can be -- and again, talking about attitudes, tendencies, etc., views, opinions -- there's a whole range of views about all this stuff. And that's probably healthy. I think it is healthy. But one of the tendencies can be a desire to abandon concepts. Maybe too early, I want to get rid of concepts. Are you guys okay?

Yogi 3: What do you mean, "too early"?

Rob: Too early in the meditative process, or too early in one's process of practice.

Yogi 4: Too early in one's path?

Rob: Too early in one's path, or too early even in a sitting or a meditation. But what I really mean is too early in the path, yeah. Too early in the path. What will happen if I abandon concepts too early? Almost without a doubt, I will just revert to my default concepts of what reality is. I will just revert to my default. And I can think and have all, again, the romanticism of abandoning concepts, but sooner or later, and probably sooner, I just go back to my default concepts of what's real.

Sometimes you see this in practitioners or this tradition. All this applies to other traditions, too, much of it. Someone says something like, "Everything's empty. All things are empty. There's nowhere to go, there's nothing to do." And at some level, that's actually true. Ultimately speaking, you could say that's true. But if there's no translation of that understanding into the details of our life, if the kilesas, the greed and the aversion, etc., are still there, then one's using a kind of language of completion and having gone beyond, and it hasn't gone deep enough. It hasn't gone subtle enough.

So what we're interested in, and one of the things we'll keep revisiting on this retreat, is that notions and concepts construct our experience of objects. Notions and concepts construct our experience of objects. Okay? But that is a very, very, very subtle process. In other words, just dwelling without thought is not the same as being free of concepts and notions. Okay?

Yogi 5: I'm interested in and kind of worried about -- yeah, if there are no thoughts in the mind, there still may be assumptions operating.

Rob: Yes, and that's what I'm talking about. Yes, exactly. So sometimes I read translations of Zen texts and I really wonder, because I don't know Chinese or Japanese at all. And I wonder if it's a mistake in the translation or potentially a misunderstanding, or it's just that Chinese isn't rich enough, and not drawing a distinction between -- because sometimes it says, "Let go of thinking," or "Let go of the thinking mind," and to me, when I read it, it seems a much more deep and helpful thing to say would be, "Let go of the conceiving mind." It's just what Bill was talking about. It's like, I can be free of thought, and yet there is still the assumption, the conception of a self, of a world, of time, of objects, of awareness, etc., and I can feel very free of thought.

Yogi 6: By that you mean thoughts arising?

Rob: Yes, thoughts arising. So I can be free of thoughts arising, any thoughts, but still quite a lot of conceptuality going on. I'm calling it 'conceptuality'; I'm not sure if it's the right word, but that's what I'm using. It's a whole level of assuming reality to things as a given, taken for granted. And those concepts and notions actually build our experience of objects, and they construct our experience of objects and selves and awareness and time and all the rest of it. So what I'm calling 'conceptuality' and 'perception' go together. They go together. They're woven in together in this way. Very, very subtle. We're going to revisit that big time on this retreat as a concept. But just generally speaking, does that make sense?

Yogi 7: They're not thinking?

Rob: They're not thinking, no. So I can be free of thought and still have a concept, a sense of me and a world and time passing and awareness of objects and all of that. I'm not thinking about any of it, but it's there as a sort of base stratum of assumptions of reality as concept. But nothing's churning, nothing's moving in the mind on that level.

Yogi 8: It just occurred to me, if you're in the walking room and your mind is quiet, you hear the bell and you go for the door -- even though you're not thinking "door" and so on, you know what the door is. You have all kinds of assumptions about what happens when ...

Rob: Yes, absolutely. So all that's operating, and I'm saying it gets even subtler than that. Sometimes in meditation, it drops down. You don't even think about doors. The whole sense of everything just goes kind of blank. And I would still say there's still subtle conceptuality going on. There's still a sense of time, still a sense of awareness, still a sense of 'me' somehow, even if 'me' has no history, no personality, no nothing, and a world of objects. So this is like -- I keep using this concept of a spectrum, a spectrum of conceptuality, and it's very, very, very deep and subtle. That's why the Buddha had really second thoughts about teaching all this.

Yogi 9: Is it like the mind's sort of in neutral? The clutch is depressed and it sort of -- no thoughts are arising, but the [?] is still there?

Rob: Yes, exactly. So the mind in neutral is not really in neutral. It seems to be in neutral, and to a degree, it's disengaged from a lot. But as I keep using this concept, 'spectrum' -- there's still a kind of subliminal, levels of subliminal sort of engagement and assumption and conceptuality going on that are actually constructing our experience and our reality. We will revisit this in a lot more subtlety and depth. But just as a point now, the point is I can say, "Oh, I should throw out concepts." Unless I have access to that degree of subtlety and an actual ability to see that operating and let go of it or question it, my idea of letting go of concepts is just a pipe dream, you know? It won't address that really deep level.

Yogi 10: Awakened people still recognize doors as doors. I mean, I don't know, I just think perhaps an important -- to me, it's an emotional kind of thing: there's early concepts of self which are so deep-laid; that's what I think is very difficult to perceive and relax through. But you still see, you know, as far as I know [?], still recognize a door as a door. They don't just walk into a wall.

Rob: Okay, important. So a couple of things there. This goes back to a question Nick asked -- I was going to say "a few weeks ago," it feels like it. [laughter] Nick asked at some point. So there are two things in what you just said, Bill. One is what we can call a level of -- this goes back to the conversation of self -- a level of what's hidden on a psychological and addressing the psychological level. So yeah, we grow up in our families, we have these experiences and these ways that it didn't quite get met, etc., it was difficult with our parents, our siblings, school, and that can bury concepts and assumptions deep in the psyche on an emotional level that are very difficult to expose and heal and release, definitely. But again, I'm talking about a spectrum here. So it goes much, much deeper than that.

Even (two things I'll say) the most basic building blocks of what we take for granted: space, time, things, objects, and awareness -- even those. Now, you're quite right; of course, someone awakened or someone who's realized the emptiness of all that can still perceive all that. It's not that we're trying to get to a state where we actually never perceive any of that and then just go around bumping into walls or anything like that; obviously not. But something can be seen deep in meditation that exposes the unreality or the lack of inherent reality of all that. And then that experience fades, but the understanding stays. So we can use doors, use this, talk about time, talk about self, but one has an understanding of its emptiness, and it still appears. Does that make sense? That's really quite an important distinction.

Yogi 10: It's more than just an intellectual understanding ...

Rob: Yeah, I will get to that too. Yeah, definitely. It's much more than an intellectual understanding.

Yogi 10: Embodied.

Rob: Yes. Both are embodied. In other words, our default assumptions are embodied. They're not intellectual assumptions. And what we want is the wisdom of the emptiness of it to also be embodied and not just intellectual. Yeah? So we believe in moments. I believe in a present moment. I believe in a past and a future. I believe in object, subject, etc. And that's what we call delusion, and that delusion is the seed, in Dharma understanding, that's the seeds of our suffering, that's the seeds of dukkha. So it is important to actually go beyond concepts, but the point is to actually do it in a way that's really skilful and thorough, true, deep.

Sometimes, some interpretations of teachings of emptiness, Madhyamaka -- has John used that word yet? Madhyamaka? No? It means 'Middle Way,' is actually what it means. Madhyamaka, 'Middle Way.' And it's taken as the sort of highest exposition of the teachings of emptiness. Some people's interpretation of that is, what it's saying is it's a kind of radical scepticism: any view you have is wrong, and all views are bad. Sometimes people put it in other terms, like "Right View is no view," and it's that kind of, "Don't take up any view." The Buddha in the Pali Canon has -- Right View in terms of the Four Noble Truths is actually Right View.^[4] And if you go into the meaning of that more fully, his sort of full explanation of what the Four Noble Truths are, not really hidden in that but implicit in the second one, his full explanation of what the Second Truth is, the causes and conditions for suffering, is dependent arising and a non-understanding of emptiness. So even in the Buddha's Right View, there's this kind of right seeing about emptiness and dependent arising in the Right View.

So part of the way we've been approaching things is actually learning to put on, to take up, ways of viewing. When we do the anattā practice or whatever, we're actually learning ways of looking, ways of conceiving, ways of viewing, but ones that lead to freedom rather than a repeat of difficulty. Does that make sense? Yeah? So we are taking up a view. There are two words in Sanskrit, dṛṣṭi and darśana. I read recently that Nāgārjuna was actually saying that dṛṣṭi, which are views that don't lead to freedom, kind of false views, is what's eradicated by emptiness, but darśana, as views that are helpful, actually stays there -- that, we want. So similar to the Buddha's teaching of a raft, it might be that we even go beyond, at some point, in some way, even beyond the view of emptiness, or beyond the view of anattā, etc., but that's the raft that takes us beyond.

Similarly, in that Right View -- and people teach it differently -- eventually, or right from the beginning, we want an understanding that emptiness also is not something inherently real. Remember, going back again some talks, we said emptiness is actually an adjective. So as an adjective, it qualifies something -- this thing, that thing is empty, and as such, it depends on that thing. The emptiness of this thing depends on that thing. It doesn't exist independently of that thing. Do you see? So emptiness is actually also empty. Emptiness is empty. So at some point, or right from the beginning, that needs to be in our view, in our Right View.

In Dzogchen teachings, one of the strands of Tibetan Buddhism (some of you may have come across this), they talk about practising the view or sustaining the view. And, in a way, that's very similar to what we're doing with the anattā practice, with the letting go of push and pull, etc. We're sustaining -- use the word view loosely now -- sustaining ways of seeing in the moment, ways of looking, ways of relating, and we're practising that view, impermanence, whatever it is, anattā, because they lead to freedom. And what should happen is they unfold deeper and deeper freedom on one hand -- and we'll get more and more into this -- and deeper and deeper understanding. And that deeper understanding can then become the sort of expanded or deeper view, which one then can look at via that view, and go deeper and deeper into freedom. So that's why, when I introduced the three characteristics, I said this is your avenue, this is your tunnel. It will unfold. That's what I meant. This is the view. I trundle along with it. I have some freedom. It starts to expose other understandings. I then pick up those other understandings as a more powerful view, and so it goes, and so it goes.

So sometimes people hear teachings about emptiness and feel like, "I have to let go of the self in one go." Actually impossible. "An intellectual teaching has been presented about emptiness and somehow I have to throw it all out." Not possible. Not even a good idea. Or one -- this is relatively common -- gets hold of the wrong end of the stick and goes about trying to stamp out the self and kind of blot it out of existence somehow. The way that I've been trying to introduce this is in a very gradual way, that we're learning a gradual practice. These views that we're taking up gradually deepen a sense of freedom, and deepen and deepen, etc.

So we're also -- in that 'stamping out the self' or whatever -- we're not taking up a view of nihilism. As I said also, again, in one other talk, it's like, be careful of when aversion creeps into this practice, that actually you're trying to stamp out the self, eradicate it, or eradicate experience. What's happened is aversion has got hold of the practice, and aversion is actually in the driving seat at the moment. So when I used that word in the talk on the three characteristics, I said 'holy disinterest,' a phrase from the Christian mystics, the emphasis is on the 'holy.' There's something in the letting go that's not a rejection, that's not a disconnection, that's not a disembodiment, that's not a disgust, that's not a heartless nihilism, cold aversion, etc.

On that point, side issue: check. Check if this creeps in at times. And more generally, check, as I said in the opening talk: how's the love doing? How's the appreciation doing? How's the contentment doing? We really need to take care of these qualities on a retreat, on any retreat, on any long retreat certainly, and certainly on a retreat like this. Just to check in and notice. Different people at different times will really need to take care to balance the emptiness practices with loving-kindness and the well-being of samādhi. Last year I felt like I wanted to graffiti the wall with huge capital letters of SAMĀDHI and METTĀ, because it felt so important to address that balance. But need to check -- we need, as I said in the other talk, to be nourishing, nourishing the well-being, and really taking care of that.

In response to what Nick just said, the problem of delusion is not an intellectual problem. We feel it, as I said last night, on a gut level. It's a gut-level problem. It's not an intellectual problem that we have. And if I only approach it intellectually and not meditatively deeply enough, it won't really transform anything. Again, I'll have the right -- teacher will tick "correct," but so what? It hasn't actually transformed something and brought freedom deeply. And again, the default views are what will reign, what will actually be in the driving seat.

Again, I've said it before, but we're practising shifts in view, shifts in the way we're relating to experience unfolding. We're actually practising those shifts through the anattā, through letting go of clinging, through also the practice I introduced last night (the sevenfold reasoning). And that unfolds deeper and deeper freedom, deeper and deeper understanding. So, for example -- and this came up in interviews today and also in Q & A during the talk last night -- this sense of oneness, so beautiful, precious, that consciousness to can open to a sense of oneness sometimes in deep meditation or other areas. Now, sometimes John might say or I might say, you might read, it's like, "Emptiness is not oneness. That's wrong," da-da-da. And a person kind of feels like, "Ugh," bereft or something. Certainly the way I would like to emphasize, actually if you tell me about oneness, I would like to say: repeat that. Can you do that again? Can you get that again? Can you feel that oneness again? Can you have access to it and let that soak into your heart and the cells of your body? Over and over and over and over and over, get to know that oneness. That would actually be my approach in teaching.

What happens if the mind goes in and out of a perception of oneness -- oneness, normality, oneness, normality, oneness, normality -- eventually the default view of separateness actually gets really questioned. A one-off experience of oneness, probably not going to do much. But you go into it I don't know how many times and you start to wonder, "Well, hey, which is real? Is it separation that's real, or is it oneness that's real?" And on a really deep level. The heart really starts wondering. So it starts shifting and questioning the default belief in separateness. And that's extremely significant, because without this nurturing of -- I'm just taking oneness as an example -- a shift of view, we will just revert to the old default views which are not as helpful. The default view of separation is not as helpful.

So, and again, I've said this before, but emptiness is not a disappointment. It's not a teaching of disappointment. If it feels like that, I would feel that someone needs to kind of reassess or rebalance how they're going about it. It's not a teaching of disappointment. In terms of -- I'm just taking oneness as an example -- if that's the experience, I would never want to take that away from anyone at all. I would wish everyone could have that. But I would also say, you know what? There's something even more lovely that you can have as well, beyond that.

So this seeing of emptiness, this practising of a shift in view, we want to repeat and see over and over and over. We need to see emptiness over and over and over and repeat that for it to make a difference. And at first, it might not feel so powerful. We might have a glimpse of something, or practice feels like it's working, but it doesn't actually feel like a big deal. We have a deep habit of not seeing emptiness. That's basically what delusion is, a deep habit of seeing inherent existence, and we need to practise seeing in a different way.

I mentioned this before. Sometimes when we use the mind in a sort of reflective way or a conceptual way, what can happen is the heart closes. I'm sure probably everyone's noticed this. Why is that, and does it need to? Does it need to? Is it necessary that the heart closes when the mind is thinking and engaged in reflective thought? You know, we have intuitions and we have movements of the heart that seem to be saying this or that, and we have the possibility of being pulled, but also the possibility that we have pre-decided things, that truths have been pre-decided in us. The Buddha says -- this is the Sutta Nipāta, chapter four, number three:

How could one, led on by desire, entrenched in his likes, forming his own conclusions, overcome his own views? Entrenchments in views aren't easily overcome. A person [this is significant] embraces or rejects a doctrine [a teaching] in light of these very entrenchments.^[5]

Do you understand what he's saying? So we're listening to all this through those very filters of preconceptions, pre-decidings, likes, dislikes, all of which can feel very heartful and very intuitive.

There are reasons why the Buddha was really unsure about teaching all this stuff -- really unsure. Nowadays, it's interesting, too -- the whole notion of truth is very objectionable to a lot of people. If you give truth a capital T, people, it's like, "Whoa, whoa, whoa. Hold on." And people would much rather speak about my truth: "We can speak about my truth and your truth, and we can speak about" -- maybe even safer -- "your opinion and my opinion, your view and my view." Or sometimes people say, "It's all equally valid. Any opinions are equally valid." And, you know, maybe there are reasons, good reasons for that, in terms of humanity's history of religious oppression and scientific oppression, all kinds of stuff, and the brutality of all that.

Yogi 11: It's postmodernism, isn't it, really?

Rob: It's what?

Yogi 11: Postmodernism?

Rob: Oh, I was going to say -- it has part of its roots in postmodernism, yeah. But without realizing, again, we take so much as truth all the time. Things like, as I was saying, the self, things, time, space, all that. And also a whole manner of social conventions that we've just bought into. There was a quote, the Samādhirāja Sūtra -- I can't remember which talk I gave it in, but:

If the selflessness [if the emptiness] of phenomena is analyzed, and if this analysis is cultivated [in meditation], it causes the effect of attaining nirvāṇa. [This is the line I wanted to draw attention to:] Through no other cause does one come to peace.^[6]

It's a pretty dogmatic statement that's there, and a lot of people would take offence at that. Again, there can be kind of a sense of, "Well, all paths are leading up to the same mountaintop. They're just different paths up the mountain, and everyone has their own path," etc. But this can be taken -- again, I encounter -- too much to an extreme.

A while ago, I don't remember when it was, I was invited to a sitting group to facilitate a Dharma discussion. Can't actually remember what it was about, but I walked away with -- somehow we get onto -- it was something about what makes a path a path, what makes a path a spiritual path. And people were saying, "Well, it can be dancing or juggling," and it was like, "Anything can be a spiritual path," and someone at one point says, "Even murdering might be your spiritual path." [laughter] I have some difficulties with that. [laughter] You know? There's an excessive attachment to sort of not stating anything that might be exclusive or say that "This is true" or something else isn't true. What's going to happen? That we're going to lose our individual freedom or something? So there's some really important capacity of humans to boldly question. Someone says something, and it's like, "Well, actually, what about ...?" Or something we've been so used to, either from our own tradition or from societal convention, to really question that, bring our courage and boldness to question it. But sometimes there's just a lack of integrity as well. And to say murdering can be a path, it's like, maybe I'm just not bringing my integrity there.

Yogi 12: Did they really believe that?

Rob: It certainly seemed like it at the time. It was quite a heated discussion, and I don't think they wanted me to be so much in a teacher role, so ... I didn't realize that until sort of reflecting afterwards. So I was kind of leading people with questions and maybe offering a counter-opinion, and it really felt like it wasn't welcomed at all.

Yogi 12: There is always ethics.

Rob: There is always ethics, exactly.

Yogi 12: There's also a prison down the road. [laughter]

Rob: Yes, yes, which for a long time, when I was on silent retreat for many -- I was always convinced was a missile silo. I don't know why. [laughter] Either way, questioning the ethics.

Yogi 12: There is ethics.

Rob: Yes, there is ethics. And the Buddha talks about, at stream-entry, when there's a very deep understanding of emptiness, and that one's actually seen something very deep, doubt goes. Confusion about what one needs for awakening goes. It's very clear: ethics is part of that. Ethics is part of that, and doesn't really get abandoned. And one can reach a point of clarity. People might object to that, etc., but it's there.

Also something happened here, and again, I can't remember when this was, but as a teacher, I run into this all the time. People object and get angry with something I've said, or something someone else has said. And there was a retreatant who, very much in the realm of "No view is right, and you should abandon all views," and when he left the hermitage wing, as some people sometimes do, he wrote a little note leaving the yogis, and he said something like, "We are fellow stumblers in the dark," and something like, "I hope we together continue stumbling and falling," or something like that. And it felt like -- again, through conversations with him -- that there was this attachment to like, "There is no possibility of knowing anything, or a right view and a wrong view," and in his case, quite a lot of emotional attachment to that.

So "I know that I don't know" may be important, but that's not the limit of human possibility. It's not the limit. And certainly the Buddha -- you'd be hard-pressed to find the Buddha saying that. As I said, again, in one of the talks, most important thing is, if there is a God, if there is a soul, blah blah blah, is that it lacks inherent existence.^[7] And that we can know. That we can know, and know for sure.

This is a quote from someone called Dharmakīrti, who's also a very important early Mahāyāna philosopher:

Without disbelieving the object of [our misconception], it is impossible to abandon [misconceiving it].^[8]

This just repeats what I've said before. We actually need to penetrate the belief that we have and the way that we're conceiving, and not just kind of not go there.

Yogi 13: So penetrate our delusions?

Rob: Penetrate our delusions and really pierce them and cut them, yes, and expose them for what they are, and see in a different way. So what can we know? And what do we need to know? We need to know the emptiness of things, of all things, and their lack of inherent existence, all of which is another way of saying they're a dependent arising. I was reading a great book the other day, and ... I just realized I missed a whole section out, but it's probably fine. [laughter] It's definitely empty, yeah. I was going to read you something that I just thought -- I'll just throw it in now; it might feel random at this point, but. I mentioned there was a list of seven -- I don't know where this is from, but it's a list of seven factors that starve wisdom or give rise to confusion. I'm just going to throw this out there and not even comment on it.

(1) Number one: keeping bad company. [laughter] (2) Number two, laziness. (3) Number three, lack of curiosity or incuriosity. (4) Number four, distaste for analysis -- not liking using the mind to pull things apart. (5) Number five we touched on yesterday: thinking you already know things and thus do not need to study or analyse. (6) Number six, being influenced by wrong philosophical views. (7) And number seven we also mentioned yesterday: being influenced by thoughts such as, "Someone like me could never understand this," and believing that. So I'll just throw that out and I won't comment on it.

The thing that I was going to say was I was reading this book -- I can't remember where it was, the introduction or whatever. It was actually a book on Dzogchen philosophy. And the author, who I think is French or English, he said -- I'm just going to read this quote:

Generally speaking, in Buddhism the possibility of freedom is predicated on [it means 'depends on'] the possibility of enlightenment, and enlightenment is predicated on the possibility of knowing ultimate reality -- so to know what is ultimately true or real is to be enlightened and free. In this respect all traditions of Buddhism are essentially in agreement.^[9]

I found that extremely interesting, partly because (a) all those words -- 'freedom,' 'Buddhism,' 'enlightenment,' 'ultimate reality' -- all that mean very different things to very different people and different traditions. But even more significantly, what I see now in terms of Western Dharma -- and I'm sure not everyone in this room would agree with that statement. It's no longer a given in Dharma circles. I've run into a lot of people who don't believe in the possibility of awakening for different reasons, or don't believe that there is an ultimate reality, or don't believe in all kinds of ...

Western Dharma is taking a very interesting direction. And again, don't want to go into this, partly it's the way that the Dharma has come to the West through the different traditions, but also it has to do with this inner critic thing that we mentioned way back. Sometimes if that's too strong, can't bear the thought of some big goal. It's too painful, because I measure myself in relationship to it. Teachers will find themselves -- just talk about this moment, and just being okay in this moment, because the pain of that and the me in relationship to that is too much. And interestingly, then a whole kind of what was sort of edifice, root edifice of Dharma teachings actually gets changed. I see this going on as the Dharma is taking birth in the West. I just find it interesting in relationship to what we're talking about.

Yogi 14: Can I just ask something? You said something about ...

Yogi 15: It's to be expected, no?

Rob: What's to be expected?

Yogi 15: Well, this transformation of Buddhism ...

Rob: Absolutely.

Yogi 15: [?] to be flexible ...

Rob: Yes, yes, yes. Of course.

Yogi 15: It has to find its -- well, they talk a lot about what's the Western face of Western Buddhism ...

Rob: Of course, of course. So it's not that it shouldn't change. Like we were talking about with aspirations, it's not that our aspirations maybe don't change sometimes. It's that -- are we conscious of the forces that are shaping them? And are they forces that it's important to reckon with, or are they actually, hmm, we've actually lost something for not such a good reason there? This probably isn't coming across, but really what I'm wanting to do tonight is just throw all this up in the air. It's like, look at all this, this is all going on, without necessarily landing too much.

Yogi 16: Is it because of the emphasis on the pop psychology part of this now, the dumbing of it? It kind of like becomes -- you pick up any magazine, and there's something about mindfulness. Is it kind of ...?

Rob: That may be part of it. I'd actually not really want to -- don't want to so much go into it right now if that's okay.

Yogi 16: Yeah, I'm just curious.

Rob: There's a lot of factors going on, some of which are really lovely and important. You know, the meeting of psychotherapy and Dharma, I think, is really important and interesting. So it's not that it's bad that the Dharma transforms. It transformed radically when it went to China, etc., and all that. But it's just kind of being aware of what forces are operating, I think. Again, I'm quite concerned about time, so ...

Yogi 17: Just a quick question. You said something about if there was a God or a soul it would be subject to dependent origination.

Rob: Yeah.

Yogi 17: [?] you used this word 'ultimate reality' in a way which made me think he meant it.

Rob: Meant what?

Yogi 17: The word 'ultimate reality,' like a reality which wasn't dependently originated.

Rob: Yeah, yeah. We'll get to this much more fully, but what I mean is the ultimate reality of things is that they're empty, dependently originated. Let's say that. I will revisit this concept much later. At this point it would just be confusing. Towards the end, we'll revisit that. But that's basically what's meant, is the ultimate reality of things is that they're empty or dependently arising. Okay?

So this knowing, and what can I know, and what's important to know -- there is, as someone was saying, there is a mystery in life. Our existence is mystery. And there's beauty in that, when the heart opens to that and the consciousness opens to that sense of mystery. And to me it's an extremely important part of consciousness deepening and growing and practice, and to be touched by that, and touched by -- we don't know; how did all this happen? But not even a thinking mystery. It's just a palpable sense of mystery that actually doesn't have something specific I'm wondering about. And some degree of opening to that, or opening to that, I feel, is very important. I used to, when I first started teaching, emphasize it really, really a lot. But I think, although I feel it's really important, I also question how much freedom can be got just from that, just from a sense of mystery.

So the Buddha talks about -- a very, very commonly quoted phrase -- "knowledge and vision of things as they are."^[10] But that "things as they are" is not, what we were talking about right at the beginning, the bare attention of things: "This is like this. This emotion feels like this. This is how it is." It doesn't mean that. It means things as they are, how it is, as they are, is empty and dependently arisen. Again, it's saying something much deeper than is at first obvious. It's not pointing to bare attention. So, so far, what do we know on this retreat? So far, what have we touched? We've talked about this spectrum of self-sense, and I think everyone's, hopefully, beginning to get some sense of that, of how the sense of self moves. It's stronger, more built up, less built up, etc. Yes? Good. We will expand this and actually say the world of experience is similar. Haven't gone into it yet, but the world of experience is also something that's on a spectrum, built up or less built up.

So self and the world, built up, and they go with clinging. The self-sense, as we've said, goes with clinging. And I asked you one time, if a lot of clinging brings a very solid self-sense, a little less, a little less, a little less, brings a little less, a little less, etc., all the way down, how much clinging reveals the real sense of self? Now, we could take a question like that and say, "Well, it's unknowable. It's not knowable." But actually that's not the conclusion. The conclusion should be (a) that the self -- and later we'll talk about the world of experience -- are dependently arisen. That's the conclusion we want, not the unknowability of what the real self is. Do you understand? No? If I see that the sense of self is dependent on clinging -- the more I cling, the stronger the sense of self, the more built up it is; if it's papañca, there's a big self; no papañca, less self; less clinging, less self; even less clinging, even less self -- and then I say, well, which is the real self? Of all those, which is the real one? The really solid one? The personality one? The psychological one? The kind of bare-bones one? The one that feels like just a process? The one that even the process doesn't seem -- which is the real one?

Now, the answer could be, "It's unknowable." But actually the answer should be that it's dependently arisen. There's something very clear. Rather than a perplexity there, it's actually a clarity about its dependent arising. Self, and later we'll say the world, are dependently arisen. They're dependent on clinging.

Yogi 18: Isn't that the same as saying they're a process?

Rob: Yeah, but again, what we'll see is the elements of that process, too, don't exist, so you can't talk about inherently existing process. But that's all part of the spectrum. We'll get to that.

Yogi 19: Does the fully awakened person experience that spectrum of self? Or not fully awakened, but an awakened person walking around.

Rob: Does a fully awakened person experience that spectrum of self? Yeah, so, interesting question. You'll get different answers from different traditions. If we just take the Pali Canon, and the Buddha talking about his experience, he would go into, can go into experiences of total emptiness -- nothing is occurring, everything's just empty, everything just stops, and he can dwell in that and hang out in that. And then he comes out in a state of dealing with existence and doors, as Bruce was saying, and all that. But he would know that his self is empty. So there would be a whole range of self that would just be cut off from his range. You would not expect -- a Buddha who goes into papañca and kind of big self-critic stuff is not ... [laughter] That bit gets chopped off, you know?

Yogi 19: For those who might aspire to have slightly less suffering but not necessarily believe they're going to be a Buddha, do they still experience levels of self? You just don't attach the suffering to it?

Rob: I would say both. I would say that as practice deepens and it reaches kind of -- what's the word -- points of the understanding kind of precipitating shifts, or just generally moving on a spectrum, two things happen. One is that still some end of the spectrum of self just goes. It can't arise any more. It just will not arise like that any more. You know, the inner critic thing -- it just doesn't arise any more. There aren't the conditions remaining for that. One's seen enough with wisdom that that structure of self, or a very heavy, dense, it just cannot arise. It just can't. The conditions aren't there. So it's almost like, you could say, the more wisdom, the more you're chopping off of that unhappy, solid end of the spectrum. You could say that. But you're also saying that the more -- perhaps we should say the more time you have of a sense of the rest of it being empty. In other words, the more time you spend moving in the rest of it, but knowing that it's empty. Yeah? Okay.

So the conclusion is that self, and later the world, are dependent arising. But also how. So it's clear that things, the self-sense, arises, gets stronger, ceases, dependent on what? And that "dependent on what?" is what we're really going to fill out on this retreat. How does, exactly, this sense of self -- if I have enough seeing here, enough skill, I can actually see how to build it and how to stop building it. I can deliberately move on that spectrum. And the how of that is actually very important. And in that, the suffering decreases, of course.

In this question of what's real, and the sense of do we know, the Buddha talks about -- and again, this is from the Pali Canon -- he's talking to someone called Kaccāyana, and he says most people talk or see things in terms of "it exists" or "it doesn't exist." He says, "I teach the Middle Way, beyond concepts of existing and not existing. That I call the Middle Way."^[11] It's avoiding these extremes of reifying something or nihilism, saying it doesn't exist, the self doesn't exist, a thing doesn't exist. We will revisit this question much more.

I'm almost done. But sometimes as meditators, of course, in the course of a retreat or otherwise, we have experiences. We have meditative openings. Or even outside of meditation. Something happens, and it's a shift. And it's really important not to chase those experiences. You've heard this from countless teachers. Really important not to chase experiences. But it's also important not to dismiss them. It's really important not to dismiss our experiences, our meditative experiences. Sometimes in the depth of what's going on here or in the quietness or in the days, the nights, changes in perception happen. Loads of things are possible for the meditative mind, for the contemplative mind. Someone -- this is the ordinary reality, something shifts, and suddenly one experiences the nature of reality is infinite love, and we are all moving in infinite love. That's one possibility of a shift in perception. Countless, countless possibilities.

Yogi 20: Could you give an example of what chasing an experience might look like?

Rob: Yeah. Saying, "I had this experience a year ago, and I have no idea how I got there, but I'm really wanting to get it back now." Okay? The very fact of perceptions changing points to their emptiness. Because again, a person going in and out (and I'm just choosing another perception that can change, oneness or this or that), a person going in and out of this sense of "The whole fabric of the universe is love. That, actually, is the deeper fabric of the universe" -- this is a mystical perception that people can get in meditation or outside of it. Going in and out of it, we'll begin to wonder, which is the real one? Is that actually, in a deeper way, more true? Profoundly touching their heart and opening, opening the consciousness.

That points to the emptiness there. There's something about understanding how we fabricate and build the sense of reality and what we experience, and that's what we're going to be going into. I read the Dalai Lama saying -- I was talking yesterday about this possibility of water mixing with water and sort of going so deep into emptiness that there's nothing left but emptiness completely, and it's called a 'direct cognition of emptiness' in technical language. It's very non-dual. There isn't a mind and the emptiness. It's all just fused. He says it's true that that's inexpressible in words, that experience, but that inexpressibility in words of the experience does not mean that emptiness can't be reflected on conceptually.^[12] Okay? So arriving at somewhere non-conceptually doesn't rule out the power and the usefulness of conceptuality in relating to things.

I'm going to throw something out now, and it's a bit of a preview, to finish with. So John and I will be talking a lot about dependent arising. Dependent arising, or dependent origination, is a teaching that can be understood and explored at lots of different levels. So there's a kind of psychological level; it's really important to get into that level and understand it at that level. But again, it's a spectrum. It goes deeper and deeper and deeper. And, in a way, talking about dependent arising, it's a set of concepts that the Buddha's using. They were actually, interestingly, concepts around at the time. He just took those concepts that were in the current vernacular and kind of redefined things and rejigged things a little bit. So he's taking these concepts, but actually it turns out that this wheel of dependent origination -- I think John's already started talking about it, right? Okay. Well, it's actually, in the deeper understanding of it, it's not something linear in time. It's actually not a process that's happening in time. It's unfortunate in the way it gets translated, because that's how it reads: first there's this, and then there's this, and then there's this, there's this ... And there's a level at which that's true, but it's actually something that's happening -- it's not even that it's happening very fast, like so fast that you can't see it. It's actually not in time.

We talk about -- dependent arising means that things are mutually dependent. So not only does this give rise to that, but that gives rise to this in the same moment. It's pointing to something extremely radical, extremely radical, that the mind can just about approach but not quite fully get its head around, so to speak. So, for example, mutual dependency: where there's clinging, we've said, there'll be more self. So self depends on clinging. But guess what? Where there's self, what shows up? What goes with clinging? They feed each other. They're mutually dependent.

It turns out that time -- I'll revisit this much later in the retreat -- and the very elements of this process of dependent arising, the very concepts of dependent arising, are also empty. They are also empty. They're not actually real, discrete, real things. It's helpful to look at them that way at first, but it's not a process of real things that is happening in time, which is what the initial understanding would be. Time, as well, is a dependent arising. And the very things -- consciousness, ignorance, etc., all that, too, are empty of inherent existence.

So again, and I've said this before, if I don't explicitly understand that or make that clear to myself, there will be something I'm reifying. I can pretty much safely assume that. That's the default way that the mind works. However, similar to the oneness, similar to the big love, similar to everything else, still having a concept of dependent arising as happening in time like that, real things happening in real time, is still enormously helpful as a stepping-stone. There's still a real degree of freedom there. So we cannot jump to this complete non-conceptuality. The amazing skill of the Buddha's teaching is that he takes these concepts. He says, take this concept, that concept, and present them in this way, and they're concepts that lead beyond concepts. Incredibly -- the more I get into this, I just see the genius of it. The set of concepts and way of using concepts, it's like -- the image I use is a snake eating its own tail, and eventually swallowing itself. The deep contemplation of dependent arising and emptiness is the same as that. The contemplation of dependent arising actually begins to eat the concept of dependent arising itself.

Yogi 21: [?]

Rob: Say it again?

Yogi 21: The self can be a dependent arising of your own awakening?

Rob: I don't understand. What does that mean?

Yogi 21: As in, if you look at it in a non-linear time-sense, the fact that you're suffering in your self is okay, because it's all part of the circle.

Rob: Yeah, good, good. Did everyone hear that? So April's saying, in a way, then, if everything's part of the circle, even the suffering of self is part of the circle and kind of makes it okay. It's just what's part of the circle. There's a level -- again, it's a really, really important stepping-stone -- where that, for a lot of people, that realization that you've just voiced becomes really powerful, opens up a lot of freedom. I was just talking to someone the other day who's been, you know, long-term meditator, just, "Ah! It's okay that I'm feeling this. It doesn't mean anything other than it's just the wheel going round. That's all it is." And a lot of freedom there. I wouldn't, again, call it the final arriving point, but -- not for everyone, but for many people, really, really significant. Yeah. So instead of, like, making this polarity of, "There's suffering, and then there's less suffering, and then..." and keep trying to hold onto the less suffering or a state, etc., one just sees, "Oh, this is just dependent arising doing its thing," and it's like, "Ah! Self arises, self gets less, no self arises, self, no self, self, no self. Ah! It's all fine." Really, really important, very liberating to many people, but not the final.

Yogi 21: I have a tendency to sort of judge where I am on a particular day or month or whatever, because that's what we're taught to see with education -- you get better and better and better. If you don't look at it in a time-linear sense, you don't see total ignorance and total awakening. You see it as a wave happening all the time, and you're dipping into either end of the spectrum.

Rob: Yeah. So if that feels like there's some liberation in you for that, go with it. Amplify it. Dwell on it. Bring it in more and more to how you're seeing your own experience unfolding. Yeah, for sure, yeah. So all this business of dependent arising is something so deep, which we'll get into, that it eats itself, so to speak. Hard to understand. Hard to understand. As the Buddha said -- it's the Majjhima Nikāya 72:18 -- the Buddha's talking to a seeker called Vaccha, and he says:

Deep, deep, Vaccha, is this Dhamma [this truth, this teaching], hard to see, hard to realize, peaceful and refined, beyond the scope of conjecture, subtle, to be experienced by the wise. For those with other views, other practices, other satisfactions, other aims, other teachers, it is difficult to know.^[13]

He's pointing to something, well, "difficult to know," as he says. But all this business, this using of conceptuality at times in the practice to go beyond, unearth it, it moves to a place that actually -- and even in the process -- the heart can be very involved in that, the heart is very touched. It's a natural outflow. To me, it's a bowing. There's a bowing. It naturally leads to this kind of veneration, deep veneration, profound reverence. Not even clear what exactly it's to, maybe, but there's bowing that comes out of it. So it's not leading to nihilism. It's not leading to [being] stuck in conceptuality or anything like that. Something immensely beautiful of the heart comes out of it.

Yogi 22: What did you say the bowing comes out of?

Rob: It comes out of understanding emptiness more and more, and the radicality of it, the fullness of it.

Yogi 23: It's almost a reverence.

Rob: It is a reverence, absolutely. Sometimes when people first hear about emptiness, the fear is, "Well, that means everything's meaningless. It means everything's pointless." To me, it's completely the opposite. It's just in the mystery of that and the way it all eats itself, something extremely beautiful in the way the heart's touched, and very, very deep.

Yogi 24: Like devotion?

Rob: Yes, devotion comes out of it, yeah, I would say. Okay.

Yogi 25: Rob, I have a question. A quick one. How much emphasis do you think we should place on expanding the amount of sitting time? I'm sort of finding that -- I mean, it's not sort of feeling particularly kind of intuitive to do that every night, and I'm wondering if I should sort of try and push that boundary or just, you know, be comfortable with what's happening.

Rob: Okay, could everyone hear that? Yeah? If it's not happening naturally, just leave it. Be with what's comfortable. In its time, it will organically -- as you know already from past retreats, it will organically happen. It's causes and conditions. When they're there, it will. However, I would add, occasionally you might want to (like I was saying ... was it yesterday? The day before?) stretch yourself sometimes. So it's more like, "Hey, it doesn't feel like it's going quite well. It feels like there's some dukkha. I'm just going to sit with it." And here the pain comes in the body, here the restlessness comes, and just stretch the edges occasionally, maybe once a day or something. And the rest of it can unfold. It might be even that that stretching sometimes actually opens something up and it starts the unfoldment. Organically, without any pressure, just we want to sit longer. So really not a big deal.

And, you know, short sittings can be very -- and I'm talking even really short ... Maybe all of you know, you're out walking and you just stop by a fence, and you look at the grass and the light on the grass, and something in two seconds touches you way deeper than the three-hour sitting that you're hobbling away from. [laughter] So long sittings, sure, an important part of practice, but really can be overrated at times. So let it unfold, and play your edges, too. Yeah?

Okay. Let's have a bit of quiet together.