Maps for the Journey (A Brief Overview)

So I changed my mind about what to do tonight, and rather than present any new material at all -- well, almost no new material tonight -- I will shave bits off from what I was going to offer tomorrow (and that's fine in the big picture, probably), and rather use tonight, I hope, to talk quite briefly and just give a review and a taking stock of where we are and the way we're moving through this, and a sense of overview. Because while for me it's extremely clear, it may not be for you, and I totally appreciate that. [laughter]

Okay. One of the things which I should have probably said in the opening talk, and I think I didn't, is that John and I, when we began these parallel retreats four or five years ago, whenever it was, we decided that the only way that would really work for us to do it was to each follow our own threads through. So just present what you want to present, and how that evolves. So we have two -- and we used to have Catherine as well -- two or three threads going through the retreat, and rather it's not so much one weave as two weaves. Sometimes they come together, and sometimes it feels like you're doing things in reverse order, and sometimes they go wide apart, sometimes they seem to conflict, etc. But if you're trying to piece it together, it's best to piece John's bit together as one, and my bit together as one, and have a sense of continuity with each of those threads. And in time, those, too, will hopefully also come together.

So as I said, I want to present something of a review, something of an overview, and a dash of preview of my thread. Okay. So let's go backwards a little bit. We started, I think, with a talk on samatha and the importance of samādhi and the unification of the mind. I want to highlight that and keep saying that's important. And I said either samādhi or mettā or something that brings that well-being and that sense of inner resource and inner gathering. I still say 50/50. In other words, half of your time, roughly speaking, just spent dwelling in a place of gatheredness, collectedness, the well-being of that, settledness of mind and the well-being in the body and the mind of that, to whatever degree that is at that particular time. I'll come back to that.

And then we introduced these ways of working, that phrase I used, ways of working, ways of looking that are the three characteristics. We said these are three possible -- actually four, even, if you divide the dukkha one in two -- four ways of looking at one's experience in the present moment, and those ways of looking bring a degree of freedom. We talked about impermanence. We talked about dividing the dukkha one actually into three even, if I remember: (1) things are unsatisfactory because they're impermanent (seeing 'unsatisfactory, unsatisfactory,' letting go), (2) a letting be or a letting go, and also (3) feeling the sense of relationship (aversion or clinging) and relaxing it. And then the last characteristic was anattā, learning to unhook the identification in relationship to phenomena that we usually would identify with.

So these three (or whatever), they're ways of looking, and an important facet of what's going on there is they bring a decrease in suffering in the moment. You actually feel, to some degree, more at ease, more free, less suffering in the moment. That's important as a skilful abiding. Learning, in this moment, how can I abide with less suffering? That's really, really important. It's a skilful means for that. But we went on and said there's not just that. They actually begin to bring -- we notice, "Oh, when I look at things that way, it changes my sense of self. It changes this, it changes that." So insights were coming out of these ways of looking, too, that are very important.

Then we introduced also the open awareness practice. We did that guided meditation. And I said that the more we practise with the ways of looking of the three characteristics, the more likely it is that the consciousness kind of expands and opens up to that kind of open awareness, etc., where there's that less substantiality, etc., and the other way around -- in other words, some people have a way of finding themselves or encouraging the consciousness to open back into that space, and in that space, the three characteristics become obvious. And you can pick that up as a meditation, as a sort of way of looking. And again, here, that open awareness is a resource, what the Buddha would call a "pleasant abiding in the here and now."^[1] So if it's something that feels like this really feels good, use it that way. Use it. Hang out there. Feel the resource of that. Feel the healing of that and the benefit of that. And, again, there are insights. So there's a double gift there.

And we also had the practice of the sevenfold reasoning, the more sort of conceptual practice, if you like, with the chariot and the Chandrakīrti thing. So, to me, it's very important, and I really, really hope that everyone can feel clear, quite clear, what one is doing in one's meditation practice. Quite clear. Understands that in the context of what I've just said. And I realize that may not be at times, or we lose that clarity, or we're not sure. But this is something we can talk about, and certainly in the Q & A, and certainly in the interviews. So to bring that and really have a sense of being clear what one is doing in meditation, it really, to me, feels so important. And that everyone, as I said right going back to the opening talk, everyone finds one or two or perhaps three ways of working that work for themselves, that actually you feel it bringing a sense of freedom, bringing a sense of release, relief, and actually taking you deeper in the investigation. A lot -- and you'll see even tomorrow, etc. -- is offered in terms of ways of working. As I said in the opening talk, no one's going to do it all. Very, very rare to do it all. Rather, just find what works for you. Find the ways of working that work for you. It's really, really crucial.

So in an interview, or in the question and answer, you know, if it feels like something's difficult in the meditation, or you're hitting a brick wall, or you don't understand something, or something happened and it's going backwards, whatever it is, bring that up, and I will say, "Well, how about trying this? Or try that?", and offer some, hopefully, way through that difficulty. But likewise, if it's going well and it seems that this is really humming along nicely, this is okay, or this is even great, also bring it, and I'll say, "Well, that's great. Fantastic. I'm happy. And what about trying this? What about trying that?", because we're interested, as I said, in deepening these practices, and really refining them and keep taking them to the next level, so to speak.

[8:36] So -- again, a lot of this is review; I've actually said it before, but it feels important to say it again, because actually, I don't know if you're aware, there's an enormous amount of information in this retreat. [laughter] Colossal amount. I don't know about John, you can ask him, but I less and less anyway conceive of talks for one hearing. I think of when I give a talk as something that -- and people regularly tell me that they listen to a talk five, six, ten times, and they still hear stuff that they haven't heard. So there's a lot of material, then. It's intended for repeated listening. You can take a talk, and it will unfold you into a depth of practice, etc. Occasionally I think of a talk as just a one-off -- that's it, you can listen to it once, and you've pretty much got everything. But less and less do I do that. And of course, like everything else, that has a plus side and a downside. But it is being recorded, etc.

So one of the things we've said before is this self and this sense of self, or we could say this idea, this word that sometimes people use, 'selfing,' that exists and manifests at a number of different levels; we could say a spectrum from the gross to the subtle to the very, very subtle. So selfing, in terms of defining myself -- "I am a failure. I am an angry person. I am a this, I am a that" -- is an important, actually quite painful level of selfing, and the psychological level of selfing -- really important. I touched on that near the beginning of the retreat, and ways of looking at that and working with that. What we could call the more obvious manifestations of selfing, these are really, really important. But selfing keeps existing at more and more subtle levels, more and more subtle levels. And in the most subtle levels, those are, if you like, the seeds, the roots of the whole deal of selfing. So those need looking at, too, at some point.

So we talked about, for instance, to stay at bare attention, or stay at contact, that's important -- it cuts a lot of the grosser levels of selfing, a lot of the papañca or psychologizing that comes in, the story, etc. But it won't, in itself, get to the deeper seeds of delusion, and the seeds that build self. I was talking with someone today, talking about the place of samatha and mettā in this, because when there's some degree of collectedness and unification and quietness, it's not that selfing has stopped then, when the mettā is going well, when the samādhi is going well. It's not that selfing has stopped. It's just the grosser levels of selfing have stopped. So it's not that there is no self at that point. It's not that selfing is not occurring. It's just that the grosser levels have stopped. One of the reasons why I say 50/50 samādhi/insight, mettā/insight, is [we] get to hang out in those spaces where the grosser bits are quiet, and actually begin to see, the eyes get used to, "Actually, there's still selfing going on here, but it's more subtle." It's still, as we said, still constructed. So it's not just selfing at the level of thought or story that we're interested in, as important as that is. It is important to work at that level too.

So this whole project here is multilevelled. It's multilevelled. And it's not that we throw out early levels. We keep them. But hopefully as practice deepens, we get more and more flexible. We can look at a gross level, this issue in my life and how the personality is kind of contracting around that and the old identities and all that -- that stays important. But we're also expanding our capability to look at the subtler roots of self-delusion and delusion in general. So we want to keep everything and kind of just also have more and more flexibility. [pauses, laughs]

Yogi 1: Are you wanting to know if we're still here?

Rob: I am, yeah. Is it too hot? It's too hot. People are fading. Say something. Please, please do say something, because I keep saying -- it's not obvious, but everyone's giving the talk. We're all giving the talk together. So if people start fading, it affects things. If someone would like to open a couple of windows, perhaps. [yogis chatter in background] All three windows are open? Something's going on. [chatter] Okay, thanks. We'll keep the door open. Can it open a bit ...? Yeah, thank you.

Yogi 2: If we open the door, Rob, the hungry ghosts will come in!

Rob: [laughs] Okay. Were you present enough to hear what I've said so far?

Yogi 3: Yes! [laughter]

Rob: Because you never know. [laughter] Okay. Now, at this point in the retreat, as far as my thread is concerned, we're going deeper and deeper, more and more into those subtle seeds, okay? And part of what I will be doing is giving a map, a possible map of the way some of these avenues might unfold for a dedicated meditator in time, in time. So with the three characteristics, for instance, we began kind of extracting conclusions from that practice that suffering was dependent on a certain way of looking; that self-sense was dependent on a certain way of looking -- in other words, the more clinging, the more self-sense (we've been through this); that substantiality and then, last night as well, that thingness, objectness, perception itself was also dependent.

This has to do with the -- we're getting now into, as I said right at the beginning, we could divide emptiness into the emptiness of the self and the emptiness of phenomena. It's the same emptiness, but just for pedagogical purposes. And beginning to get more into the emptiness of phenomena. So the route I'm taking meditatively is, when I think about it, it's like, what's easiest to see first? Let's do that first, and then build on that. So generally speaking, some phenomena, like a country -- we started with things like a country -- it's quite easy to see the emptiness of a country. Then we went to the self. Now we're starting to come back to phenomena, more subtle phenomena -- aggregates, body, etc., perception -- and actually look at those and see their emptiness, too. So we're moving deeper and deeper into this.

The delusion of phenomena inherently existing is actually, in a way, a subtler seed of the delusion of self. Later, next week, we'll talk about really the subtle end of this. If you want to, I have to see -- I'm aware next week I'll be putting out a map that, I don't know, maybe you'll be interested in, maybe not, and it's fine if you're not, but talking about: how would a meditator see that awareness is actually empty of inherent existence? How would a meditator see that time and the present moment are empty of inherent existence, that space is empty? You know, these kind of very, very subtle building blocks of our reality. So there's a journey into that subtlety. And what I want to present is possible pathways of the meditative journey if you follow these avenues.

So what I feel, in the thread that I'm trying to present, it will probably be enough for a dedicated meditator for a good few years of practice -- I mean, minimum. It's just: here's this, and take it if you want it. But not to get hung up there. So presenting different possibilities and the way they might unfold with dedication. But sometimes, as I said going back to the talk on relationship with practice, what happens when we hear about stuff when we're not quite there yet? What happens if someone lays out a map? How easily -- and maybe you've felt it already -- the inner critic comes in, and the comparing mind: "I'm not there yet. Maybe someone else is there." And what happens? Again, it's up to you guys -- you'll have to tell me if you want to hear that stuff, in a way. Sometimes we can have a sense of hearing about some direction, an unfoldment of some direction, actually beyond where we are at the moment, and someone thinks, "Ugh," or, "Shoot," to paraphrase what someone said in an interview this morning. [laughter] To translate into more ... [laughter] easeful English. Or, "Wow, gosh, look at that. I've felt this much freedom so far in practice, and now I'm hearing there's even more freedom. How wonderful! How wonderful! Would I really want to think this much that I've experienced so far is it? Maybe I have to find something else to do? This is great so far. This is great. I've seen this letting go, I've seen that letting go, and you know what? You can go a bit further, a bit further."

So we can see it as a kind of reflection on the inner critic, "Oh, no, there's more. Terrible. I'll never get there." Or actually, "How wonderful. More freedom is waiting. And some maps are available." So beware, beware, beware the inner critic, the comparing mind. It does come in. It comes in for a lot, a lot of people. It's extremely painful and kind of just jams up the works there, just jams up the works. People have very different histories. At some point in this retreat, if it's okay with you and we do continue that next week, I'm pretty sure that I will be talking beyond where everyone is in practice. So there will be points where everyone just feels like, "Okay, I've got this. I understand this. I'm putting this much into practice. And I'm hearing about this." And it's just like, "Okay, big deal." But what we stay with in the practice, and what I want to be hearing about in questions and in interviews, is where your practice is at and how that is unfolding and what's happening for you in your practice. But, you know, feed back to me, because it doesn't have to be that way.

[20:19] A general point here, which I haven't mentioned yet, and it may seem a little abstract: in the Pali Canon, some of you will be aware, in the initial [teachings] -- what's called the "first turning of the wheel" -- the Buddha was quite clear, for the most part, that certain questions about things existing or not existing, or "Does the world exist?", or this and that, or "Do I exist?" were actually out of bounds, that one didn't go there as a practitioner and a meditator, and actually it wasn't helpful to ask such questions.^[2] Rather, the emphasis in the Pali Canon, again, for the most part -- it's really not 100 per cent, but for the most part -- seems to be on the world of experience and learning to inquire into, relate to that world of experience, very, very simply, and learn to untangle the suffering from it, take away the supports for the suffering in it, but also for the experience itself. Before when we were talking about when perception fades, you're actually learning -- just in terms of experience; I'm not actually saying anything about a world out there, etc.; I'm just dealing with my experience and learning how to take away the supports for suffering there and actually for the experience itself.

So I'm not sure, but I've heard or read that in philosophical circles, in Western philosophical circles -- I could have this wrong -- the word for that is a 'phenomenological approach.' I could have that wrong, but maybe someone else knows; I don't know.

Yogi 4: 'Phenomenological' is the Western approach -- it's simply paying attention how your experience is, how we subjectively perceive our [?] ...

Rob: Okay, good. Yeah. So it's a phenomenological approach, without asking anything about what is the (another philosophical word) 'ontological status' of a world out there. 'Ontological' means the being status, the isness or not, the reality status of a world out there. In the Pali Canon, it's this phenomenological approach, just about experience. And how is the suffering and the experience both fabricated -- this word saṅkhāra'd or 'concocted' -- how is it being built, how is it being supported? And not going to questions of, "Do I really exist? Do I not exist? Does the world really exist?", etc. Just avoiding that.

Yogi 5: I don't know much about this, but a little -- in phenomenology, there's -- it's called 'phenomenological reduction.' It's a practice -- they also call it 'bracketing,' where you suspend belief, and you pay attention to some phenomenon or experience, but you bracket or suspend belief about whether it exists or not.

Rob: Okay, good. Did everyone hear that? No? So Bill's sharing that in philosophical language, they talk about the phenomenological reduction, which is learning to relate in terms of experience and the phenomena of experience, but kind of suspending the question of whether they exist or not really. So that's essentially -- you could say, that sums up pretty well the Buddha's inclination of the way he's teaching in the Pali Canon, certainly in terms of the approach to meditation.

Something happened -- I'm talking in generalities here; I'm talking in generalities. Something happened, and I don't quite know the history of it, but that changed gradually, or it seems to me to have changed gradually with the growth of the Mahāyāna in I think the third, fourth, fifth centuries. Two very important Indian Buddhist philosophers, Dignāga and Dharmakīrti, began to ask this question about, "What can we really know about reality?" And over the next ...

Yogi 6: Were they Buddhist philosophers?

Rob: Yes, yes, Buddhist philosophers. And over the next -- well, until the present, actually, the debate between these two approaches, but more between the understanding of emptiness and the understanding of what's called 'valid cognition' about the world -- that debate continues to this day. People have given different answers and said, "I've got it sorted," but there's actually a big difference of opinion. It's quite a complicated subject. I don't know if you've studied that part in epistemology in your course yet, Virginia. No? It comes later? This is taken to its sort of apex, really, in Tibetan Buddhism. And the different streams of Tibetan Buddhism debate with each other and don't actually agree. So it's a huge project. And as I said when Harry asked that question, it's like, it's hard to say what we're going to conclude about conventional reality out there. It's actually hard to say. And sometimes the tendency is, "Just don't ask any questions. Just agree that conventionally we speak of this and we speak of that, and just leave it at that." And that's one approach. I'll just mention that, and I don't want to go too much into it right now.

The last little thing is a partial response -- having said that, a partial response to Beth's question last night. She said, well, we're talking about clinging and the fading of perception, and she said, "Well, I'm not clinging, but you're still there. I'm still seeing you." And just a partial, partial response for now. It may be that much later, towards the end, I revisit this and fill it out a bit. Mostly, you would do very well just taking a phenomenological approach, ignoring the reality or the world out there, and just trusting, as I said, where suffering is in one's practice and going deeper and deeper with that and not asking those other questions. That will, I trust, change something profound in one's relationship with existence and bring a tremendous amount of freedom. It's very easy to get sidetracked with these other questions -- although, I have huge, huge respect, and I'm actually beginning to get more and more interested in that debate myself, but I can't say I understand it fully at this point.

So, "I'm not clinging, and you're still there. You're not fading." As I said just very briefly last night, clinging, like everything else, is a spectrum. So I can cling a lot, I can cling a little, little, little, and some of the very, very subtle clinging is hard to see. But 'clinging' is also a sloppy word that includes identification. In other words -- we talked about this -- what if I'm identifying with consciousness when I look at something, which I usually am, and I can assume that I am identifying with consciousness unless I deliberately, explicitly am practising unhooking that identification with awareness. It will usually be there, and it's a builder of experience. That degree of identification is a builder of experience. If this anattā practice, if one takes it and really develops it, and, as I said, expands gradually one's range of phenomena that one can drop the identification with, unhook the identification, eventually one is able to, for stretches of time or even just for a brief moment, drop the identification with awareness. And when one does that -- and I think I mentioned this briefly -- it's actually quite remarkable at that stage, because at that point, none of the five khandhas are being identified with, or perhaps only very, very subtly. So one of the most obvious things that can happen is basically the sense of freedom really opens up. There's very little identification with any of the khandhas, and it just opens up a very big freedom. Another is that things actually fade, that the perception of things, objects, actually fades. But a third is that our sense of time begins to fall apart. Our sense of past, present, future begins to fall apart. There are many different ways, meditatively, this can happen.

So it could be, for some, that even the visual sense of a thing begins to fall apart. It could be that the visual sense stays, but the time-sense begins to fall apart, no longer a real sense of a meaningful -- it's like the construct of time is not being supported with that degree of letting go. So the unfabricating of perception can happen in different ways. Could be that all three of those happen, or two of them, or whatever. But the principle remains that the deeper we let go, the less support we are giving to the perception of thingness of things, and that will come out of that. But as I say, that's only a partial answer, and I hope that later I can revisit it. Okay. Schtum from me, I think. Any questions about anything? Yeah, please.

Yogi 7: I'm wondering what the difference is between this fading that you're talking about that comes about through looking directly but not grasping in any way, and you know, this little pain sort of disappearing -- what's the difference between that and when pīti is around and that dissolves pain?

Rob: Yeah, good. Could you hear that?

Yogi 8: I couldn't hear the last part.

Rob: What's the difference between looking at pain and working in this way where one's letting go of the clinging or the identification or some other supporting factor of the thingness of it and it fading -- what's the difference between that and pīti coming, pleasure in the body coming, that sort of rapture from meditation or well-being coming and taking the place of the pain? Yeah? [whistles] In a way, there's no difference, okay? In a way, there's no difference. So someone who develops a lot of samatha meditation (and I think I threw this out at some point) actually gets very, very familiar with, say, the feeling of pīti in the body, the feeling of well-being or pleasant vibration or whatever it is in the body. And it becomes something that you can call up at will, in time, if you really do it, and kind of move around the body, etc., which obviously is a very lovely and useful skill to have, you know.

Not as remarkable as it might sound. It's quite possible for someone who dedicates themselves a little bit to samatha. So one way of doing what Richard is talking about is actually having that familiarity with the pīti and actually kind of spreading it over the body, and spreading it over an area that feels pain. And it begins to colour it, colour what was unpleasant as pleasant. That doesn't quite give the fullness of understanding, because oftentimes people even in here have reported looking at a pain and letting go of clinging, and actually in its place comes pleasure, and just seeing that and kind of reporting it. Very rare to find this, but one way -- how do I begin explaining this? Has everyone heard of the eight jhānas? Yeah? Well, four form jhānas and four formless. Yes? Who hasn't? It's fine, I can explain.

Okay, so the Buddha talks very commonly about eight states of deepening absorption in meditation. Really briefly, the first one is characterized by absorption in physical bliss or well-being. The second one by absorption in happiness. The third one by an absorption in kind of peacefulness. The fourth one in stillness or real deep kind of equanimity, still. The fifth one in an infinite expanse of space -- solidity has vanished, and there's just space. The sixth one, an infinite expanse of consciousness. The seventh one, space goes, and it's just nothing. It's not even space; it's nothingness. The eighth one, it's not even nothingness; we call it 'the realm of neither perception nor non-perception.' At that point, the mind is not even kind of landing on a 'nothing.'

So from one point of view, what these are are deeper states of concentration, of course. But they're also, and you probably would rarely hear this talked about, but they're also states of less and less fabricating of perception. Do you understand? They're less and less building of a world, which is why you can arrive at these via insight. An insight meditator will often find themselves stumbling into one of these because they're letting go of what's supporting our more solid view of reality. Does that make sense? So when we're letting go, it's not surprising that some of that other perception comes up. In a way, the perception of pīti and well-being is, you could say, less solid, more refined, less substantial, than a perception of pain which tends to be a real perception of solidity, etc. Because you're not feeding the substantiality, it's a more open, less substantial sense of, perception of the body. Does this make sense? Or is it ...? Yeah?

Yogi 9: [?] ... that you're talking about in the first instance, going directly to the pain ... [?] whereas the sort of cultivation of pīti is very much if there is pain [?] ...

Rob: Yeah. So I said there's a samādhi way of doing it, a samatha way of doing it which we've been working on: don't go straight into the pain, don't get sucked into it; actually learn to stay where it's nice and cultivate that, and then eventually you can spread that out. An insight way will bring the same thing because you're not supporting what it takes for the pain to be there as a perception. In a phenomenological mode, the experience of the pain is actually quite built, and when I let go, I'm not building it so much, so less and less solidity, substantiality, thingness comes in, and pīti is a lot less thing and perception than pain.

Yogi 10: And sort of a side question: is it like kind of [?], or is it like [?] ...? Is there a sort of healing aspect? Because I'm concerned: if I have pain that I can sit through whatever way, but I'm actually doing myself more damage if it's just a masking of pain, whereas if there's actually some sort of physiological change that's helping a healing process, then ...

Rob: It may be both. I don't know. I mean, I would certainly more tend towards the latter, that there's a physiological process that actually is opening the whole thing up, too. But I'd say more just a very practical thing, which is if it's something that when you get up from meditation you're still in some degree of pain ten minutes later, then best not to -- even if you felt okay during the sitting, you've overdone it, and just to watch that. So just not even going to your question but just being very practical about it.

Yogi 11: Why is it called 'neither perception nor non-perception'?

Rob: Because of the thing that I'm talking about -- well, actually it's a little bit related. To perceive something is to make a thing of something. So we tend to think, I make a thing of the body, but then I go beyond the body in the realm of infinite space, and I'm not making a body but there's space there. That's the next thing that I'm making. It's a much more subtle thing. I go beyond that until eventually I get to a 'nothing.' And I can still make something out of nothing, by the mind going, "Wow, it's nothing! It's nothing. It's nothing." And it's striking -- the nothingness is striking. So the mind is kind of landing on the concept and the perception, because remember, conceiving and perceiving, in the way I'm using those terms, go together. And then it even goes -- it doesn't land on the perception or the conception of nothingness; the mind has not gone completely beyond perception, it's almost struck by the fact that it's not landing on anything. So it's kind of not really perceiving, but it's not really not perceiving, either. It's almost like just falling endlessly through space and just not landing on anything, and the mind is struck by that, and that's what it's sort of perceiving. But, I mean, it's an incredibly refined state.

But rather than talk about abstractions for most people in here, what feels important for you guys right now? Yeah?

Yogi 12: Beth's question about why you weren't fading ... is that the same ... I was trying to do it with sounds, and they were still there.

Rob: Yeah, yeah, so when there's vision and sound, we don't tend to identify -- what you'll notice is, if I really don't like the sound, and I really get wrapped up in my aversion, it's going to be louder, okay? If I'm not too bothered with it, it just takes its place kind of in the background of things. But generally with sound and with vision, we don't think, "I am that sound." The identification there will be with the knower, with the awareness. And, like I said, that's a more subtle -- most people, it takes quite a lot of developing their anattā practice to be able to be able to disidentify with the knowing, the consciousness/awareness aspect. But if you can do that with sound -- it's hard to put it into words what happens -- you may find that it becomes more diffuse, and it's less thingy, less defined -- what's that?

Yogi 13: Less real?

Rob: Less real and less sort of ...

Yogi 13: Less punctuated.

Rob: Less punctuated, less defined, you know? So you will find that's on its way -- as an actual thing, a perception, it begins kind of [clicks tongue].

Yogi 14: Can an extremely advanced meditator make it disappear?

Rob: Sound? Yes. But I would say people are different with this. It's the same with samādhi. Some people's description of jhāna is that you don't hear anything; someone could come and chop your head off and you wouldn't notice, and stuff like that. I've never personally experienced that degree of absorption, but I'm sure it exists, and the Buddha recounts -- there was a story, again I don't know where it is, where there's a massive, massive thunderstorm -- colossal. Trees have come down, and a person's been killed, and they go to the Buddha and say this happened, and he said, "Oh, I was deep in this fading of things and I didn't ... sorry, I had no idea!", you know?^[3] [laughter] Again, what's more important is the insight, the insight, the insight.

Yogi 15: I've had experiences of jet fighters suddenly screaming through the sky when I was meditating, and it feels like they go completely through you. You become one with the sound. Has that got anything to do with this?

Rob: I'll come back to this. What's happened there is there's less of a separation between the subject and the object, but it's not -- it's all part of what fades. So partly, you know, we talked about suffering fades, self-sense fades, substantiality fades, also separation-sense fades -- that too. But there's still more.

Yogi 16: Well, I wanted to tell about an experience I had yesterday that sort of [?] what you talked about last night, which is how, when the sense of self loses its solidity, the sense of the perceived object also loses its solidity.

Rob: Say that again? Just so everyone can get it.

Yogi 16: The idea is that when the sense of self loses its solidity, the sense of the perceived object loses its solidity as well.

Rob: Yeah, yes.

Yogi 16: I think I need to tell the story with a bit of details because, as they say, the devil is in the details.

Rob: Okay.

Yogi 16: I was just walking for the walking meditation on the front lawn, and I was trying to get into this pace where I was softening the sense of building self, and the sense of separation between myself and the perceived object. To help me with that, I was using a technique I learned a long time ago, which is, as John said, the six sense spheres, other than looking at them as the six sense doors -- so for the visual, it's a little tricky because looking at [the] visual as 360 degrees, we are so used to look at things from the perspective of pointing out, straight forward, and sort of grabbing the object as a seen object, but with that perspective idea. So the technique is to sort of try to relax the eyes and [?]. May be a little hard to do, but [?]. So walking around with more getting a sense of what you see from the side, and that really softens things up.

Rob: Yeah, yeah, good.

Yogi 16: So as I turned around and took a pass to look at the grass stretching in front of me, sort of bathed in the sun, sure enough, there it was -- the grass was greener. So I thought about April, and I thought of that. But I looked again, and then I thought, you know, well, yes, the grass is greener, but it's not greener because it's a more beautiful object -- a photo with a better brand of ink, let's say. It's greener because it has acquired a sense of brightness, of radiancy. So then it came to me that actually, because my sense of building the self was loosening, then what I was seeing was not so much the object as a solid object, but more a deconstruction of the grass, and I was starting to see more the energy of the grass, more the sense of vibration. Then I thought also, in this sort of state of mind, it's really hard to just look at one blade of grass, you know? I was more drawn to sort of look at the general pattern. And that sense of dancing energy, which sort of made me think that's pretty much what you said when the object blurs. So then I thought, yeah, that's just what's going on. It's not seeing the grass as a more beautiful, sort of fixed, solid object, but it's seeing it sort of dissolving into a more subtle layer of existence. I mean, the grass was still there, but it was dissolving.

Rob: Yeah, good, good. Yeah, beautiful. A couple of things just to extract from that and what you started with. When the self-sense fades, the perception of the object fades. So like everything else, it's a dependent arising. There's a mutual dependency there. Self-sense is stronger, perception of object is stronger. That's another factor. We could say when identification is stronger, perception of object is stronger. So self-sense, clinging, identification -- all these go together as factors with perception of object. When there is the self (and we'll get to this at quite a subtle level later), there is the self-interest. Self is interested in objects for what they can give the self: "Will I like it? Will I not like it? Do I want more of it? Do I want less of it?" So wrapped up in perception is the investment of the self.

And to bring out another thing that Noelle was pointing to, it's like, because of that, perception tends to go to a particular in the visual field, that thing I like or I don't like, and draws out the perception of the particular. So one possibility is when the self-sense fades, the particularities don't get drawn out so much, and it's more a sense of the visual field. Again, you can go around exactly the opposite way, because of the mutual dependency. You could actually experiment with let's just see this as a visual field, open up the awareness -- instead of the constant moving from particular to particular, this thing to that thing, this person to that person, actually just open up. Like right now, can you get a sense? Just open up to the whole visual field, and see it as visual field, 180 degrees, maybe a bit more. It's just visual field, and there's less of a sense of drawing out particulars. Less drawing out of particular, the self-sense will also fade a little bit. Everything's built together. You can arrive at things from multiple directions.

Yogi 17: It's like the whole world becomes flat, like an oil painting or something ...

Rob: Yes, good, good.

Yogi 17: Particularly outside, like looking at distance. It's harder in a room which is [?] square.

Rob: Yes, yes, and very normal, in fact very helpful. That's the sense of solidity and substantiality beginning to go from the visual field. And what you want in that -- again, just to draw out something I've said before, but it's important -- someone came to me and they had actually done quite a lot of drugs as a teenager and were beginning to have this experience when they were meditating, and they were really concerned about it, that they were going crazy. But with a little encouragement, they were actually able to notice, when that happens, there's quite a sense of freedom there with it, and to notice that and enjoy it. As I've said before, that's part of what cements the insight, and it begins to take it deeper. So enjoy it, feel the freedom of that. Because what happens when the visual field is just seen as visual field, it loses some of its worldliness and solidity, and a sense of space opens. That sense of space has with it a sense of freedom. So that will help the whole thing.

Yogi 18: I was thinking along the same lines as Noelle, trying to get more insight out of these experiences, and I came to the conclusion that just as when we're caught up in our sort of self busy mind, we don't listen to, we don't hear birds. You don't hear anything. And then you let the self-sense drop, and then of course you can hear everything, just as you can with the visual. It made me think that we're projecting ourselves onto the visual when we're in our self-world. So we're projecting what we do want to see, what we don't want to see, just like we do when we hear, with everything -- smells. And then when the self-sense shrinks, we're turning into this beautiful self, you know, beautiful factors. And it's that that we're then reflecting onto reality. So it came to me as quite a nice thing, that you're seeing the beauty in yourself when you're in that state.

Rob: Yes, lovely.

Yogi 18: So everything is -- the whole duality just sort of disappears, and then everything becomes beautiful because it's a reflection of you.

Rob: The duality between self and the world, so to speak?

Yogi 18: Yeah, and the duality that you're projecting on the world.

Rob: Mm-hmm. Did people get that? Yeah? So, very, very important. This is key in a number of ways. We see what we project, to a large extent. You know here already in however many -- how long have we been here? Two weeks? In two weeks of retreat, you walk out onto the front lawn one day, and it's miserable England and Gaia House and rain and da-da-da, and it's coloured a certain way. Another time, the mind is in a different space, you walk out, and you're in a deva realm. Same front lawn. We project that out, and to realize that, that we don't actually experience something independent of our projections. So that's, going back to what I was saying about the whole notion of bare attention, as if there is some kind of middle point of attention that doesn't project anything out -- cannot find it. We're always projecting something out, and the question is what. What kind of world do I want to live in? As I was saying when I talked just briefly in the other question and answer, generosity shapes my world a certain way. Love shapes my world. Mettā, compassion colours my world a certain way. If I want to live in a beautiful world, that's what I've got to do, you know, in my acts and in my mind state. And it has the insight of emptiness. There's no world independent of that. That duality is something we imagine.

Yogi 18: I think for me it's interesting because I normally have more problems with my thoughts, but actually in that situation, I can see when I'm thinking bad things, then bad things happen. Most people, that's like a given -- if you're in a bad mood, then everything -- you wake up in the morning and everything goes wrong. But actually for it to affect what you're seeing, the phenomenological world rather than just the world in your head, is really powerful, because it just shows how ...

Rob: Absolutely.

Yogi 18: How incredible it is.

Rob: Yeah. So when I talk about the emptiness of perception, that's partly what I'm talking about, absolutely. It's there, we fabricate the perception of the world. You cannot get away from that. You cannot get away from that. As a consciousness, you cannot get away from it. And I think it's just immensely important as a practitioner to take that and keep going with that, and kind of realize the full import of it. Wonderful.

Yogi 19: I've got something around believing thought and when you're seeing thought, and you're doing this with the anattā style. And so, not-self, but it's got a different voice.

Rob: A different voice than ...?

Yogi 19: The voice of your normal thinking self. Accents and sort of just like completely different characters.

Rob: Like you have a Greek guy in your head or something?

Yogi 19: Yeah. [laughter] And words which sort of crumble, like the sentence becomes a Dali painting or something. [laughter]

Rob: Okay.

Yogi 19: And then ... [?] it's like, where does this nonsense stop?

Rob: Yeah, okay.

Yogi 19: And then that passes, the gobbledygook, but then there are thoughts which -- suddenly the 'I'-sense comes in. They're closer to my voice but slightly different. And then it's like, okay, and then -- I guess it's a spectrum. There are sort of my recognizable thoughts. [?] And there are quite wholesome thoughts as well. And it's like, well, they're the same stuff, but just with, like, different directions. It's not disconcerting, but the question mainly came from sort of knowing that there's a thought, and then actually wanting, "Yeah, I'd like to take that one, that's a good aspirational thought," versus this sort of other junk, more than a guy with some weird ... [?]

Rob: [laughs] Yeah, okay. Sure. So I'm not sure about the Northerners and the Greeks, but ... no Greeks? Yeah, okay. But this is important, in terms of -- it goes back to something about, it's like, we have different gears as practitioners, or different modes. So one mode I can be in is whatever comes up, I'll see it as not-self. In that mode, that stretch of a sitting or whatever, I'm just in that way of relating to things. It could be great, it could be not so good, it could be whatever. It's just not-self, not-self, not-self, if you're doing the anattā, it's just not-self, and just let it go, whatever it is. And that's the mode that I'm in at that time. That's what I'm practising. At other times, there's a really, really important place to differentiate and pick and choose between thoughts. The Buddha actually said it was a major turning point in his practice when he divided thoughts into two, the wholesome and the unwholesome, and decided, "These wholesome ones I'll encourage, and the unwholesome ones I'll try and let go of."^[4] So that's another mode. An aspiration comes in, and actually dwelling with that sense of aspiration and taking it on board and aligning oneself with it and letting it touch the heart, reflecting on it.

So, in a way, to do that second one, taking things on board and rejecting others, kind of letting go of others, you can also do that, in a way, without any self-view. It's just a thought, and a sense of aligning, none of which have to be self. Probably that might be difficult for a person to do without a lot of practice, but technically speaking, it's possible. It's certainly possible to reach a point where you think in those terms of alignment and aspiration without any self coming in. But for now, you might want to just think of yourself as having different gears, and it's really fine to go back into the gear of self, as we talked about early in the retreat, fine to be in the gear of self and "What am I aspiring to?What's beautiful to me? What's calling me? What do I want to give?", all that, and rejecting the thoughts -- not rejecting, but learning to let go of the thoughts that are not so helpful. And at other times, just in the mode of anattā, for instance. And seeing they will lead in slightly different -- both really helpful directions. Does that ...? Yeah?

Yogi 19: So is the unwholesome thoughts what they call Māra? Is that the sort of unwholesome thoughts?

Rob: Pfff ... people have different interpretations of what Māra is. I mean, if we do call it Māra, how will it help you, and if we don't call it Māra, how will it help you?

Yogi 19: I'd have to think about it.

Rob: Okay. Like I said, people have very different -- a whole range of what people believe Māra represents or is. I think what's more important, what's more fundamental, is knowing what's wholesome and what's unwholesome. That's a sense of things are wholesome if they lead to my freedom from suffering and my well-being and that of others. Then it's wholesome. You can trust it. You want to cultivate that. And unwholesome is that which leads to my suffering and the suffering of others. And it's just a sense of becoming more and more attuned to when the mind is in one direction or another direction, learning to, as the Buddha would say, starve one, the unwholesome, and feed the other.^[5] That's a huge part of practice, huge. So you can call it whatever you want. But that principle is really important. That stays with us; we never lose that, no matter how much emptiness practice we do. We never lose that distinction between what is wholesome and what is unwholesome. So we always have that ability to shift into that gear and see things that way, and it's really important. A lot of our happiness actually depends on that, our ability to distinguish the wholesome from the unwholesome and to nourish the wholesome. That's where a lot of our happiness comes from. A lot of our suffering comes from feeding the unwholesome.

Yogi 19: As we progress as practitioners, we get to notice more the unwholesome ...?

Rob: Both.

Yogi 19: Something won't seem unwholesome, but ...

Rob: I would say both. One notices more unwholesome, more subtle aspects of what might be unwholesome, and more wholesome as well. Both. It's just the general sensitivity and awareness increases -- not in a linear way, but gradually, with practice. Yeah. And that's a big, big part of practice. Very important.

Yogi 20: I wondered if -- I spent a lot of time today thinking about preferences and no preferences. And I found it really hard to think of myself or think of it ... [laughter] of not having preferences, and wondered if you would say some more about that. I mean, I can understand holy disinterest, but I don't quite grasp how to be -- not to have preferences.

Rob: Yeah.

Yogi 21: It's the porridge again! [laughter] The cessation of porridge.

Yogi 20: Or rice cakes and peanut butter. [laughter]

Rob: Okay. So this is an important question. I think partly, partly, just to begin, it relates to something I was trying to draw out at the beginning of the retreat, which is sometimes when we hear about some of these teachings, we jump to, "What would it look like if I had ...? What would I be if I ...? If everything was empty, then surely love couldn't exist, or everything would be meaningless. If I had no preferences, would I not then be completely boring?" or whatever, some kind of jumping to something, versus bringing it into the moment.

Yogi 20: I was.

Rob: Okay, good. So just wanted to say that, but that's good. So what does it mean to have no preferences? Well, I would say it's related with holy disinterest. It's almost like whatever's there is just -- what is Julia who said it's just a phenomenon? It's just a phenomenon. That can help your way in. There's a kind of equality of things.

Yogi 20: Just an acceptance?

Rob: Acceptance is going to be a big part. Basically it's just acceptance. It's a fancy way of saying accept everything. What happens, though, like everything else, is it's a journey. In other words, we start practice, and we have one sense of what acceptance means, but that just goes deeper and deeper. So at first, you can have a sense of, "I really don't like this, but I'm trying to accept it," and some sense of, "Oh, yeah, that actually helps." After a while, it's almost like a mode that one can get into -- with practice, it just deepens naturally -- of just almost like, because there's been a lot of acceptance, and because that acceptance takes away this push and pull of aversion that I've been talking about, coming into the perception more and more ... what I was saying at the start of the talk last night? It's like, because there's not so much push and pull, we're not pulling out one duality over another, and things tend to settle in a kind of equality. Does that make sense? And then that very perception of equality then lends itself to more 'no preferences.' So the whole thing -- everything good snowballs good, and everything bad unfortunately snowballs bad. So when there's that equality there, again, someone who has very little practice could hear that and say, "Well, that doesn't sound very nice. It sounds very bland and bleak and grey." But the actual experience of it, if it hasn't got aversion in it, is actually quite lovely -- a kind of unity and equality of things.

Yogi 20: I've re-read the quote so many times today and keep looking, thinking about it, and wondering what does it mean.

Rob: In a way, it's just another fancy way of saying what we've already been doing in terms of letting things be. But what will happen, as I say, is the more you do that the way you've been doing, the more it will just become easier and easier, and with that easier and easier, the perception of things as being 'not really that different anyway in themselves' -- that begins to get stronger, and that allows more and more an ease of letting things be.

Yogi 20: They're not that different anyway because they're ultimately empty? There's no intrinsic ...

Rob: Yeah, yes. And because we see that the very push and pull with things -- "I like this, so I pull it towards me. I don't like that, so I'll push it" -- that actually heightens our perception of things, different things, the differences of things. So as I begin to relax some of that, it's almost like everything begins to have one taste. Everything just -- it's not so drawn out in that moment, and then it becomes easier to let go and have no preferences. It's the same.

Yogi 22: But it doesn't have one taste! I mean, it does from your mind; your mind doesn't have the preference, but then your heart says, "Isn't this amazing?" or "Wasn't that interesting?" So that I've been finding really interesting. I used to have a real problem because one of my teachers used to call equanimity 'dispassion.' It used to make me go crazy, like how could you be dispassionate about everything? But your mind -- am I getting this right? -- your mind is dispassionate. But the place of your mind is then filled with -- your heart-mind, whatever you want to call it, but I tend to differentiate heart and mind -- and then your heart comments then in a really different, gentle way, just in a -- one of my teachers used to say, "Huh!" when it wasn't great, or "Wow! Beautiful!" But it's not at all coming from the head. Have I got that right?

Rob: I'd say yeah, maybe sometimes, but it can also even go beyond that. There's a sense more of literally not so much -- in that time, in that space of time and that state when you go deep into this no preferences or relaxing the aversion and clinging, etc., this kind of equanimity, that there's really less of a sense of the mind drawing out this and that experience and saying, "This is good, and that's ..." It's almost like everything has the same taste as you go deeper into it, and actually that the actual experience, as I was saying last night, it doesn't form so strongly in consciousness as a prominent sort of this or that experience, perception, object, whatever word we're choosing. But that's as we go deeper into it.

Yogi 22: That's what I mean, though, in terms of the mind, certainly -- there is no labelling.

Rob: When I say 'perception,' I'm not talking just about labelling. 'Perception,' 'experience,' 'object' I'm using synonymously. So, if you follow this -- I'm not taking away what you're describing; that's wonderful. But I'm just saying, if you stuck with it and went even deeper, things would fade, recede. Different things would not be so prominent, this thing and then that thing, and a sense of more -- well, less stuff going on, basically, and a kind of unity, equality of experience. And then even the whole texture of experience begins to recede, fade, disappear. But, you know, like everything else, it's a spectrum. What you're talking about is really good, and there's some other stuff to explore there too.

Yogi 22: That wasn't in meditation at all; that was just walking around.

Rob: Yeah, okay. In meditation, when you have a real chance to sustain this kind of letting go of clinging, no preferences, that's what I'm talking about -- practising ways of looking. You actually, "Okay, I'm really going to hold this way of relating to things," then it gets a chance to go even deeper. And then you'll probably find that when you come out of meditation, the world is -- and even in that state, it's not bland, bleak, boring, grey; it's actually filled with a loveliness, but it's less the loveliness of independent things, and it's more just the loveliness of freedom from all that, different things.

Yogi 23: I've been doing that with the consciously looking through the lens of all duality being empty, and it has this effect of kind of relativizing everything.

Rob: How do you mean, relativizing everything?

Yogi 23: Well, it's the kind of what you're calling 'equality,' I think. I mean, because -- in fact, looking through the lens of duality begins to seem like a pretty limited way of seeing the world, but without it, nothing stands out.

Rob: Right, good, good.

Yogi 23: Because all -- I mean, I started to see all duality as empty, just nothing bigger or smaller or up or down or better or worse.

Yogi 24: How do we function then?

Rob: So we have to distinguish here between modes of perception. We have a mode that we're looking at, and things will fade. We're looking at things through that lens, then, at that time, and what will happen is a fading of relativities, basically. What that does, ideally and in practice -- when we move out of that way of seeing and back into the world of dualities, etc., it does not make everything meaningless and pointless and without ability to function or ethical import at all. It actually, in the mystery of things, heightens our sensitivity to care and to ethics. There are reasons for that, and we'll get into it. This is fantastic -- so what you're doing is, through the understanding of the whole thing I said about duality, then you're actually able, you've reached a point of conviction that that means all dualities are empty, and then you're looking through the lens of 'empty, empty, empty,' and that will bring fading because one's not drawing out through the delusion of believing in the independent existence of what is actually dualistic.

Yogi 23: It actually means that nothing has, in a way, more significance than anything else.

Rob: Yeah, good, good.

Yogi 23: Or less.

Rob: Right, exactly. So we can say that, and it's really, really important -- that's true. At a conventional level, you probably wouldn't want to say that. In other words, this goes back to what I said right at the beginning: emptiness is a tool. I pull it out when I'm moving in the conventional world, when I need to let go of something, or when it's helpful. At other times, I want to make every distinction between relative worth of things and really bring some care to that. So ultimate reality, conventional reality both are important, and not to kind of either lose one or the other, or go too much to this side or that side. But you're not saying that, and that's not in what you said -- that's not the sense that comes across from you. So that's why I'm saying it's like, we can trust this exploration of emptiness meditatively. It won't make things meaningless in that sense. But it does give a sense, at some level, there is this kind of sameness of things, which is actually very liberating, and that's the point of it.