'To see no-thing is to see excellently'

Okay, so for some of you, and you may be aware of this in yourselves, the pattern or a pattern that you might get into is self-doubt: doubting yourself, doubting your capabilities, doubting your practice. And with that, sometimes self-criticism, dismissal of what one sees, or the work one is doing in practice and in meditation. This is a very, very common pattern. Not everyone has it, but it's very, very common. As far as I can see from the interviews and the questions, etc., everyone here, everyone is, in different ways (because everyone is different, and both John and I are throwing out so much), beginning to get some sense of the emptiness of things. It's absolutely happening, and if you're feeling like you're outside of that, it's just not true. So I hope that if that is your tendency that you can lean into beginning to really appreciate yourself for your practice, and appreciate what you're developing and what you're discovering, and feel good about that. To me, it's really a bedrock, a foundation of a healthy and penetrating practice.

Because, and I said this in the opening talk, so many people here, with so many different backgrounds, with so many different preconceptions and assumptions and different practices, it's actually a small miracle we get any of this communicated in any way. [laughs] It's impossible to kind of tailor it exactly to one person. It's just impossible. And especially tonight -- in the retreat in general, but especially tonight, I'm going to throw out some stuff, quite a lot of stuff. And it's kind of like seeds, and I just throw them out, and this person takes this, and this person takes that. Please, please, please, in the retreat in general, but especially tonight, don't feel overwhelmed. You know, if it feels like too much, just say, "I'll file it for later. I'll listen to the CD," or whatever, and maybe just take what feels useful.

Tomorrow I will talk about the relationship of love and healing to emptiness and to the understanding of emptiness, and what all that has to do with it. But tonight what I really want to get into more and fill out a little bit more is the emptiness of phenomena. So there are many, many phrases of the Buddha or other teachers, both in the Pali Canon and in the Mahāyāna texts, something like -- picking one at random:

One who does not see phenomena sees reality.

That's a pretty striking statement: "One who does not see phenomena sees reality." Just historically -- some of you know of this division, Mahāyāna and Hīnayāna, etc. -- it was felt or there was, I guess, a general feeling in India a few hundred years after the Buddha that a little bit of the compassion of the original teachings had gone out of the culture of Buddhism. And so a preoccupation of the Mahāyāna was to bring that compassion to the fore, to really be a central force in one's practice.

But secondly it was also felt (and it seems to me quite rightly) that in the teachings of the Buddha, it was just the personal self, the emptiness of the personal self that was tending to get emphasized, and a little bit people were losing the sense of the fullness of it's also phenomena, all phenomena, that are also empty. And to me that's totally there in the Pali Canon; it's not that it isn't there, it just seemed and it still seems in some Theravāda circles that that actually doesn't get emphasized quite enough. So you find this historical movement of the Mahāyāna to kind of reassert those two: one's a compassion factor, and one's a kind of wisdom factor and the kind of breadth and depth of what's meant by emptiness. So as we've touched on in here already, we could say anattā, not-self: "This is not-self, not-self." We could say the self is a process. We could say it's a kind of system interacting. We could say lots of things. But to me it's a pretty safe assumption that something will be reified. The mind of delusion will be reifying something in any of those approaches: in the anattā approach, 'not-self, not-self, not me, not mine,' in the saying that the self is a process -- all of that. It will tend to reify, to make a thing, that something (either the elements of that process, or the time in which it happens, etc., or the awareness, or something) will be, at an almost subliminal level usually, assumed to be inherently existent.

We can assume that's going on. That's how delusion works. And so the important thing is actually to air that, to shine the light on that, and to actually see that all of it is empty -- not just the self, but the phenomena too. So there's a real fullness here. It's huge. What is the fullness of that, to really understand in all the different ways that phenomena are empty? There's a vast fullness there of depth. So some meditators, particularly in long-term meditators who are just following their meditative instinct and the way experiences unfold, some will come to this conclusion that emptiness means the self is a process. Or some will say, like in that open awareness thing, that all is awareness. And it really feels like that from the meditative point of view -- "All is awareness" -- but not questioning the inherent existence of awareness. Or everything's insubstantial -- again, there's that sense as meditation deepens of everything being illusion-like, film-like, but somehow there's still something hidden in there that has inherent existence.

And so we've touched a little bit already, just over the days and weeks, on different ways to see the emptiness of phenomena. And two nights ago, we talked to introduce one way was seeing this duality, the dualities and how we emphasize one duality over another and pick it out. And also two nights ago, we started talking about this concept, or this fact to be seen and discovered in meditation, of perception (meaning 'experience' or 'object for consciousness' -- perception, experience, object for consciousness) dissolving and fading, and seeing that. And I talked about these two possible modes of inquiring in meditation. And one was called 'phenomenological' -- meaning just going with the experience, just seeing what happens to experience and experiencing and inquiring in terms of experience -- and a second mode that I called 'ontological,' which is probably the wrong word. But in terms of this fading, that's a radical, radical, radical thing to discover and see, and its implications are radical. So most people and most non-meditators, even, would agree, hopefully, that our perceptions of the way things are are shaped, certainly, or coloured, certainly, by different factors. Sometimes a situation or a thing or a person seems this way, and sometimes it seems that way. And that much, it's like most mature, conscious human beings would agree on.

They might even go a step further and may say, "And I can also see how there's no definitive vantage point to see the reality of something. In other words, my perception is shaped and coloured. And it's not like there's a zero point, say between love and grumpiness. When I'm grumpy, I see the world this way; when I'm in love, I see the world that way. When there's a lot of mettā, I see the world that way; when I have a lot of aversion, I see the world that way. And it's not like I can slide that scale along and put it on zero, and that's the real world." People might also admit to that and agree on that. But it seems like a whole other kind of disturbing level to go to, to say that without being built, this thing -- whatever it is, no matter how subtle, how gross -- this thing/perception/object cannot be without being built, fabricated, concocted, compounded, conditioned, etc. And without that, it would not actually exist. It would not exist for us. And that's what this fading has to do with. That's a whole other level. People start to feel very unsure then. It's questioning the seeming solid existence of things at a much deeper level. It's cutting that tree trunk even deeper. So this goes for perception, also vedanā -- I'll come back to that. It may seem like at first a step too far; it's too much to say that.

Yogi 1: Are you saying "exist physically"?

Rob: I'm saying "exist for consciousness," okay? We're just talking about the phenomenological mode right now, exist for consciousness. So the Buddha's original teaching is just relating to things on that level. We'll come back to another way of going about things. And I know, for some of you in this room, right now it might feel too much. It might feel like it sounds ridiculous, it sounds stupid, and whatever. And so please, again, I go back to the opening talk: asking -- and it sounds a ridiculous thing to ask for on a retreat -- I'm asking for a little bit of humility here, asking for a little sense of openness in the sense of what we understand and what might be understood. In that phenomenological approach and seeing how if I don't support the perception, the thing, the object for consciousness in certain ways, it fades, there's no metaphysical speculation there. That's not going on. We're not speculating a god or something or other. It's actually just when there's this, there's this; when there isn't this, there isn't this. So it's quite, you could say, scientific in that sense. And there's a lot of depth and a lot of subtlety of meditative discernment. So as we deepen in practice -- and you may be there yet, or you may be glimpsing it or whatever, you may not yet -- but as we go deeper and the subtlety deepens of the meditative discernment, we begin to see this over and over.

Famously, Ānanda said to the Buddha at one point, "I think I get it now. I think I get dependent arising. I think I've got it." And the Buddha said, "Don't say that Ānanda, don't say that. It's deep, profound, subtle, very hard to see."^[1] It takes a lot of wisdom to plumb the depths of this. And Ānanda had been living -- really, he was the Buddha's personal attendant for years, had heard lots of talks about this, meditated on it, able to ask the Buddha questions directly and receive answers from him directly, and still the Buddha said to him that. So, to me, as I think I said one time, dependent arising, the understanding of it, is something we can take at one level -- fine, the everyday kind of psychological level; we can take it deeper, can take it deeper, can take it deeper. So we're interested in, as I said last night, not just in the grosser selfing, the grosser kind of psychological constructs of self and movements of self, but actually also the subtle. So dependent arising is not stopping at a level that says, "This is it. This is how it is. Deal with it," or "Things are impermanent. Deal with it," or "Bare attention is the reality," or "Just stay at sense contact." That's a level and really, really important level, but we're beginning to go even underneath that. Profound, profound, profound. As I said, there were reasons why the Buddha really questioned whether he should teach at all, really questioned whether it wasn't going to be a complete hassle for him. [laughs]

So briefly, about that meditative process of things fading -- not just pain. So I wasn't sure if that got communicated, if that somehow got truncated. It's not just pain we're talking about, that I want you to explore with this, but also other aggregates -- the experience, basically. So for instance, the sense of body, the sense of the definition, the contour, the boundaries of the body -- that, too, when we let go, begins to dissolve, fade, blur, etc. Vedanā -- this pleasant, unpleasant, neutral -- what happens in relationship to vedanā when we let go of clinging, let go of identification, when we let go of delusion? We might have unpleasant vedanā; actually, you will see it becomes less unpleasant. And people have already talked about this with the pain thing -- it becomes less unpleasant. What happens to pleasant vedanā? That's an interesting one. Generally, sometimes when we let go of clinging in relation to pleasant, it actually becomes more pleasant. But generally, what happens with vedanā is the extremes begin to collapse towards the middle, collapse towards more neutrality. There is the fading of vedanā, and actually at some point goes even beyond neutrality. Does that make sense?

Yogi 2: Except for beyond neutrality ...

Rob: Yeah, I haven't got to that yet. I will get to that. When I mentioned the word 'cessation' the other day -- I will get, in another talk, to what that means to go beyond neutrality as well. Thank you. Mind states, the body, vedanā, mind states. What happens in meditation if there's some samādhi or some well-being or just some stillness there, and I take the stillness as an object? It's a perception, it's a thing, it's an object for consciousness, and I disidentify with that or disidentify with the awareness of that, or I let go of the subtle clinging that might be in relationship to that? Calmness, stillness, peace, whatever feels like it's there, or any emotion, fear, anger, joy, boredom, whatever it is -- these, too, are fabricated perceptions. They're fabricated perceptions. They cannot support themselves without the mind supporting their perception in a certain way. Harder (and this has come up in here and also in interviews) to do it with external objects because there will generally be not an identification with the object but an identification with the awareness. And that's more subtle and more deep to disidentify with the awareness. When we can, something else will open up, as I said last night. So in terms of instruction, to see and to do this if it feels like it's something that's working for you, to see and do this with as much as possible of inner experience. In time, you can expand that.

Two or three people today in interviews were saying it's easier to see the connection of, say, clinging and identifying feeding the building of things -- it's easier to see that connection. Or rather, it's harder to see it when the awareness is open and you're just kind of getting this experience and that experience arising, passing, and the whole thing gets a bit faded. But it's hard to draw that conclusion because it just seems like a general thing happening, and one isn't so clearly seeing the relationship between letting go of identification or clinging. So it's fine to do it that way, but it will be easier to see the relationship, the dependent arising relationship, if you look at one thing -- this calmness, this knee pain, this vedanā, one thing that's a bit steady -- and really look at that and say, "Okay, I'm going to let go in relationship to that. I'm going to disidentify in relationship to that." And then that relationship starts to get really, really obvious, repeated, repeated.

So the conclusion of all this, seeing it so many times just like a kind of scientific experiment, is that experience, perception, object, thing -- whatever name we give to it -- is a fabrication, a dependent arising, which means that it's empty. It doesn't exist as itself, by itself, in itself.

Sometimes meditators, and, again, experienced meditators find that things fade, they find themselves in a big state or space of emptiness, everything's kind of gone, but oftentimes haven't understood how that arises. It just seems to be a deepening in meditation, then: "I've kind of arrived at a space." Not understood that actually what's happened is one hasn't been supporting the perceptions of the more normal reality and actually taking away the supports and taking away the supports, without maybe even realizing it, and so the whole of perception just fades, and it gets to be space, or nothing, or emptiness or whatever. If I get to a place like that and I don't understand how it came about, then I will tend to make emptiness into a Thing, give it a capital letter and not an adjective. And that kind of emptiness as a metaphysical space or whatever, beautiful and helpful, but it's lost its connection with dependent arising and it's become a Thing.

Okay, so, like I said, tonight I want to throw out -- there's all that, what I've just said about the fading, and hopefully it's a little clearer now, if it wasn't before. Shifting from the phenomenological approach to the more ontological approach, we can ask, "What about things that kind of exist a little bit?" There's another reasoning, in the same way the chariot was a reasoning, but this is much simpler, much quicker, and can be very powerful, quick and powerful and deep. And again, remember what I said in the beginning: take it or leave it, shelve it for later, whatever. 'Neither one nor many,' it's called. These reasonings are not just philosophical trains of thought. We can take them into meditation and, again, use them as ways of looking at things that will bring freedom. They can be, if you find a way of doing it, can be very, very powerful.

So let's take some thing, let's take the body, or even something like an emotion that's manifesting in the body or a bodily pain or a discomfort that's manifesting in the body, or a clock, any thing. Let's take a thing. And let's say, look at that thing, look at the body, and say, "The body is not one." Quite clearly, the body is not one thing. It's many things. I've got fingers and fingernails and hairs and ears and gallbladders and all that. It's many things. The body is many things. And even I can take some of them away and still get a sense of a body there, and some that I don't feel so much a part of the body. So you say, "Okay, the body isn't one. It's many. That's the nature of the body: it's many. It's a collection. It's a 'many.'" But if it was really many, inherently many, I would need to find within that something that is really one, because 'many,' by definition, is a collection of ones. It's a collection of singularities, and together they make up many. Do you understand what I mean? What does many mean? What does the word 'many' mean? The word 'many' means a collection of things that are one, right? One and one and one and one and one, and together they make many. Right? Or what else would 'many' mean?

Yogi 3: Several.

Rob: But 'several' is just another word saying the same thing. It's a collection of things. To be really many -- really, inherently many -- it has to be a collection of what is really ones, what is really one.

Yogi 3: Units.

Rob: Units, yeah. 'Units,' good word. So if I say the body is clearly many -- it's obviously not one; it must be many -- and if it's really many, I have to find some things that are really one, really one, really a unit. So I can look at the body or an alarm clock or whatever it is, or an area of discomfort in the body, and I can say, "Okay, it's got parts, and I can look at those parts." So for instance, I take a finger, and I see that it's got this part and the knuckle and the bone, etc. Okay, it's got parts. Then I take those parts, say the skin, and is that really one? Or is it many? And again, it's many. There are many parts that make up the skin. And I go down, and I go down, and I go down, and I end up with atoms. Atoms are not one; they're a nucleus and whatever. And I go down, and can I find something that is a 'one'? So I will always have, even with a subatomic particle, so to speak, I will always have a part -- or if we just think on the level of the skin -- a part that touches this and a part that touches that. It's many. On a subatomic level, I have a part of a particle that's interacting with particles that way, and a part of a particle that's interacting with particles that way and that way and that way, whatever it is, facing this way, etc. If I say, "Okay, but eventually you're going to get down to something that's partless" -- if it's really partless, it has no interaction this way or this way, or a part that's facing that way or facing that way. And if it's really partless -- which is sometimes what you hear in Abhidhamma teachings, that the world's made up of partless particles as a sort of postulation -- but if it's really partless, it can't actually occupy any space. How can it occupy any space? It wouldn't have a part that faces this way and interacts with particles that way or that way. If it doesn't occupy any space, does it actually exist properly?

Also, if it was dimensionless like that, it wouldn't be possible to amass particles together to create a mass of particles or a composite of something down at that level. And somehow, if it was dimensionless and partless and had no part facing that way and part facing that way, a part facing up and down, etc., all the particles that were around it would actually end up touching it at the same spot, and they, too, would be partless, and all the particles of the whole universe would actually be in one spot. So clearly it's impossible that you actually find a 'one' of anything, a unit that ultimately, really exists. So you say, "If I can't find one," and then going back to what we said before, "I can't really find many, either," because to find a real many, a real many, I have to have real ones, real units. To say something inherently exists means: it is what it is, independent of anything else. It is what it is by itself, in itself. If it inherently exists, it has to be either one or many, or nothing at all. It has to be either one or many, if it inherently exists. Otherwise its oneness or manyness, again, depends on the mind, which is what we're saying, another way of saying what emptiness means. So that might seem like a lot to swallow. It might seem like you haven't followed it. I don't know. It's actually very, very powerful, and you can get quite quick with it, and it can take you very, very deep. Like all these things, it needs some reflection on and to kind of convince yourself of and really work with it. And you can find your way through it, that sort of reasoning, in different ways and quite quickly in meditation.

Let's take another thing. Let's take something like an emotion, or a feeling of discomfort or something in the body. And so you might have some pain, or it could be something like anger or fear.

Let's take something like physical discomfort, or anger, or fear, or illness, or something like that, or a situation, even. This is a different approach now; it's somewhat related to what I just said, but actually it's different, and this is moving back more into the phenomenological approach. So again, I'm throwing out lots of approaches tonight. Take it, shelve it, use it, leave it for later, ignore it, whatever.

Any thing, any experience -- do you remember, going way back in the retreat to the beginning, I talked about how the mind does this dot-to-dot thing? Let's say I have a tummy ache, or some discomfort in the body, and when I actually go there with mindfulness, I realize it's actually a point here, and a point here, and point here, and the mind is joining those dots, or joining dots in time. Do you remember this? We talked about 'dot-to-dot.'

When you actually look at experience closely with just bare attention or mindfulness, what we get is actually a dot-to-dot, and we see the mind is joining these dots, and we get a feeling of a whole something that's been made for experience by joining the dots. So we could say the whole is imputed or extrapolated from the dots, from the instances, from the micro-instances, from the parts, we could say. As such -- and remember, I remember asking, how many dots could we leave out and still have the sense of something there? You get the sense of how much the mind is filling in.

So I'm back to talking about fabrication again. We say the whole, the sense of the whole, is imputed on the parts, or actually extrapolated, kind of concluded from the parts. It's created from the parts. As such, it's a fabrication. It's not actually as solid as it seems, the experience, without mindfulness, without a close investigation. We see that we created something that feels like a whole solid entity, and we've actually dotted-to-dotted it from the parts. So we say the whole is empty from what it seems like being. It's not actually that; it's fabricated from the instances, from the parts, from the dots.

But it doesn't stop there. It doesn't stop there. What about the parts? So if we talk about something in time as well, I might have an emotion of depression, an instance of depression, a moment of depression, and usually I feel it as "This day or this year or this life is depressed." It's some big, solid block. When I look closely, it's actually dotted-to-dotted. But if I've created that whole, what then happens is it feeds back on our perception of the parts, and it feeds back in the way of -- the parts are then interpreted, so to speak (none of this is conceptual), as being part of this burdensome, big whole, whether it's a pain or a region of discomfort or an emotion or a situation. Do you understand?

Yogi 4: It's like a feedback loop.

Rob: It's a feedback loop, yeah. So we're saying the whole is actually not really a reality. We've joined the dots. We've fabricated the whole. But then, when we feel that moment that actually is an instance, we could say, it's actually got a lot more solidity to it because it's interpreted as being part of a bigger whole, a burdensome, big whole -- either something in time or something in space. And so the part actually ends up as also empty. It's being given its solidity by an interpretation of being part of the whole. What if we went around the loop again? So we said the whole is empty because it's dependent on the parts, the parts are empty because it's dependent on the whole, but even more than that, the whole is then being built from parts that are empty. This goes on. This is the way perception works. This is what we fall for. So, again, these are meditations. I can actually look at something like a tummy ache, the body feeling discombobulated in some way, an emotion that seems to stretch out in time, a situation I'm having difficulty with, and actually reflect, consider meditatively, meditatively, in the focus of meditation, that this is what's happening. Seeing that, again, my poker chip pile of delusion is less and the perception, too, will begin to loosen, to de-solidify, to unfabricate. So I'm talking about possible meditation.

Whether we take the first one, this one or many, and going back to partless parts, and kind of -- as Robert Thurman says, "exploding it to smithereens" -- whether we do it that way, or actually see this interdependence of parts and whole, instances and whole, either way it's empty.^[2] Either way the thing is empty. The phenomenon, the experience is empty. Both of these can get pretty quick and pretty easy with practice. They're something you just pull out of your toolbox and kick in with a little practice and really quite powerful.

When we say (it came up; I can't remember which talk) things are mutually dependent, there's a mutual contingency, a mutual arising of things in the world, in a way, that mutual dependency of parts and whole, or whatever it is, grasping, and grasping at the thing, we talked about -- that mutual dependency, it actually refutes inherent existence. We say two things leaning on each other must be mutually empty. But in a way, at the very same time, it affirms all the phenomena of the world in mutual interconnectedness, in a mutual web of contingency, of co-arising, co-arising, paṭiccasamuppāda, *sam-, '*together,' 'arising together.' It actually affirms, through the interdependent relationships with each other, all the phenomena of the world.

So we talked a little bit about the body at some point before, but the same thing here. I just went through the reasoning: it's not one or many, the body. It's also parts and whole. You could look at it that way. What about -- some of you may have heard this before from other teachers -- when does the famous Gaia House porridge, if we take that, when does that become me? Porridge is a great example because it's very kind of ... umm ... [laughter] When does that become me? It goes in, and it's already kind of slimy and glutinous and all that. When does it actually become me? When does a banana, which is also kind of mushy, when does it become me? Where is the borderline, where is the boundary between what is me and what is not me? When does the air I breathe become me exactly? When does the water I drink become me? Or rather, when does it become the body, excuse me -- we're talking about phenomenal emptiness. So when does it become the body? When does the water, the porridge, the air become the body? To reflect on this. It's pointing to that you can't actually draw those boundaries. One of the meanings of emptiness is the lack of real boundaries and real separation between things. At some point, and again, I can't remember when it was, I said imagine if I sat here and gradually chopped off bits of my body, my foot, and then my other leg, and then my arm, and slowly, slowly ... [laughs] At what point, what you're remaining looking at, when is it not a body? Now, different people will say different things, or the mind will feel very unsure, and you get a sense of the way the mind is actually imputing "It's a this-ness" on something.

Just to throw out, and just in the service of brevity tonight I won't go into this, but that chariot meditation (last year quite a few people picked it up, but this year it seems like less people are picking it up), you could also do it on things. So you could also do it on the body, and go through the seven reasonings in relationship not just to the self but to the body, or to a thing, or to an alarm clock, or to whatever, to an emotion, even. And actually, is it the parts? Is it separate from the parts? Is there something called an 'emotion' that owns the parts, that's separate from the parts? Is it the shape of it? Is it the continuum of it? Look into all this for phenomena too. Again, if you develop that -- and I know when I present stuff like that it seems like, "I could never do anything like that," actually we can learn it. We can absorb it. I was sharing with a couple of people in interviews: I learnt that chariot thing off retreat. I actually taught myself it off retreat, and my point is it's not a big deal. It's nothing about me; it's that it's really not a big deal, and we can learn to do it, and it can be something that's part of our daily practice. It's really not that big a deal, it just sounds like it is. It just takes some reflection and some thinking through.

Also in meditation (just staying with the body now and the emptiness of the body), some of you have or will at some point in your meditation unfoldment have a sense of the body actually beginning to blur its boundaries and to dissolve a bit in the depths of meditation. It's very hard to say: where does my body end and the rest of the universe begin? One actually has that sense, and sometimes -- we were talking way back in the samādhi talk -- of the subtle body. And sometimes it feels like the subtle body is bigger than the body. Is that the body, or is it something else? Where does that begin, and where does it end? Is the subtle body different or the same as the gross body? So many, many ways to contemplate the emptiness of phenomena. But all this applies to all the aggregates, all the khandhas -- body, vedanā, perceptions, mental formations, and consciousness. So, from Nāgārjuna's Precious Garland:

As long as a conception of the aggregates [the khandhas as inherently existent] exists [as long as we conceive, feel them to be inherently existent], so long then will a conception of the 'I' [the self as inherently existent] exist.^[3]

They are the seeds; seeing them as inherently existent is the seed of the delusion of self, self-reality, self-concept. That's what we're saying, going back right to the beginning of the talk: it's not enough just to say, "Self is like this: it's just the aggregates in a process," or whatever. You actually have to see the emptiness of those too.

So we've talked about some of this. We talked about body. We've talked about vedanā a little bit, perception, grasping. Grasping at vedanā -- we push away unpleasant vedanā, we pull towards us pleasant vedanā. When is that movement, or is that movement found inseparably from the vedanā? At first it seems it can be, but when we go deeper into it in meditation, you actually cannot find the intention, the mental formation, the grasping separate from the vedanā. So all these aggregates -- something like discomfort or tiredness; tiredness is a very interesting thing to feel. I can feel overwhelmed by tiredness. If I actually go looking for it, what exactly is the tiredness? I cannot find it. I will not be able to find tiredness. It's very interesting, when you're tired, to actually go looking and see if you can find tiredness. What you'll probably find is some sensations, somewhere in the body, often just behind the eyes, and some relationship with those sensations that's feeding those sensations so that they spread and build, and maybe some thoughts and beliefs and self-view, etc., and it's all compacted, and I actually cannot find tiredness. So again, the dot-to-dot thing would apply to that and the way that the instances feed the sense of the whole and feeds back on the instances, etc., or partless parts of that, etc.

In terms of our experience, the appearance, as we've been saying -- and I hope this is being communicated -- the appearance of things for us is dependent on the way of looking. It's dependent on the way of looking. So I can experience a body sensation, pain or whatever, as flickering atoms of sensation. I can experience it as an impression in awareness, in a vast awareness. I can experience it as pain, etc. All that is possible. I keep going on about this learning ways of looking. The default human ways of looking at things, unfortunately, most of them lead to suffering and lead to a building of experience. The usual ways we look and relate to experience build suffering and build experience. I see a big part of what meditation is as learning other ways of looking, other ways of relating that actually drain the suffering from what's going on and actually don't feed this building process, don't feed that building process.

So someone brought it up today, and it's very important (I don't know if I've mentioned it already): part of this building process is also the mental labelling. People have brought it up once or twice, and it's very important. So something like fear -- we get some sensations inside, and it's interesting: the mind comes and says "fear." Now, it could say "my fear," and that's identification. But even if it doesn't say "my fear," even if it's just saying "fear," or it's saying "pain" -- not even "my pain," just "pain" -- that labelling is part of the constructing, fabricating, concocting, compounding process. Labelling something tends to actually solidify it as what the label says. So again, pointing to meditation, what would it be to actually be aware of the labelling process and kind of see that you've got two things going on: a set of sensations, let's say, and the labelling. Instead of letting them gel together and [letting] the amorphous experience become what the label says it is, actually see it as two separate processes, so to speak, that one is feeding the other. (Actually, they're feeding each other.) And again, what happens when we can see that way? Actually, the labelling of something is often inseparable from our reaction to it. So all this stuff is intertwined, co-dependent, co-contingent.

So, that leaves consciousness. As I said yesterday, I'm planning my sort of thread through all this and thinking about it, and seeing, "What's the easiest way that a meditator might deepen?" It's hard, hard, hard, subtle to see that consciousness has no inherent existence. Hard to see. Easier to see that things, experience, objects depend on the mind. They depend on the mind. That's easier to see and work with in meditation, and that brings a lot of freedom to see that. I don't know who's in the hermitage wing, but there used to be in the kitchen -- there's a postcard, a beautiful picture of a view, and it says, "It's your mind that creates the world." It's a lovely postcard of a window frame and looking out onto a beautiful scene, and the caption is: "It's your mind that creates the world." And it's [supposed to be] a quote of the Buddha; I don't know where the Buddha says that or if he even said it.^[4] But what we're pointing to is, well, there is that, but understanding what that means. What does it mean, the way that the mind is creating the experience of the world?

Yogi 5: The Dhammapada [?].

Rob: Yes, actually some translations translate it that way. Other people translate the same verse quite differently. It's quite interesting.

So we've touched on a little bit the mutual dependence of consciousness and its object. Consciousness and object are mutually dependent. So consciousness means 'to know something,' and 'to know' means 'knowing something.' We're going to go back to this in a lot more detail. But if I only say intellectually, "Yeah, sure, I understand consciousness needs an object, therefore it lacks inherent existence" -- if I only see that at an intellectual level, it's not going to bring the profound freedom that actually seeing it really for ourselves meditatively can bring. A huge level of freedom opens up. So it's one thing to say, "I understand that intellectually: consciousness needs an object." It's another thing to be able to bring that into meditation and have it inform the way of looking and learn to look at things that way. That's quite profound.

So what would it mean, even (and we will get back to this), what does the 'cessation of consciousness' mean? The Buddha talks about the cessation of consciousness. If we talk about fading, what does it mean to see consciousness fade? What on earth could that possibly mean? We will revisit this. To me, the way of seeing phenomena fade in meditation and the emptiness of phenomena is a very important stepping-stone to be able to meditatively see the emptiness of consciousness, the lack of inherent existence of consciousness. Again, I doubt it's something that anyone can really jump to meditatively. It's quite difficult.

So from a Prajñāpāramitā text, the Perfection of Wisdom:

The Tathāgata [meaning the Buddha] teaches that one who does not see forms ... one who does not see feelings ... does not see perceptions ... does not see mental formations [and intentions] ... does not see consciousness [mind or mentality] sees reality.^[4:1]

Again?

[The Buddha] teaches that one who does not see forms [this is going through the aggregates, the totality of our life experience] ... does not see feelings ... does not see perceptions ... does not see mental formations [or intentions] ... does not see consciousness [mind or mentality] sees reality.

This is where we're going. That's a text called the Prajñāpāramitā Verse Summary, Perfection of Wisdom Verse Summary. But as I said at the beginning of the talk, you get statements like that littered through the Pali Canon as well; they're just not picked out so much, interestingly. But any Prajñāpāramitā text, that's standard in there.

It's not that this non-seeing of forms, feelings, etc., that it's forever, because otherwise how would I go to the toilet? How would I go shopping? How would I do anything? I cannot function in that state. But that depth of seeing reveals the fullness of the meaning of dependent arising -- and the fullness, therefore, of the emptiness of things.

So, we are learning ways of looking that drain the suffering out and that also are actually pleasant abidings. They're heading in a certain direction -- not to grasp at where they're going, because the insight, as I said, is one thread all the way down. Even if I haven't ever seen a meditation cushion or cannot spell 'meditation,' I can still see that when I'm in a tantrum, things are a lot more solid, things are a lot more prominent to consciousness. When I'm less -- less, less, less, less. The meditator is interested in going deeper, deeper, deeper with that insight, more and more subtle.

Okay, I'm going to leave a bunch out, which I'm sure is fine. The aggregates, then, this non-separability of things -- at first, when we begin meditating, when we begin hearing about the aggregates, it's important to see, "This is this, and this is this, and they're separate." When you go into them more, the aggregates, you see that they're not separate, and they're not even separatable. The aggregates arise together. The khandhas, the skandhas arise together. I mentioned a sutta of the Buddha in the Majjhima Nikāya, the Shorter Series of Questions and Answers, I think it is. He says, "Perception and vedanā are not separate."^[5] What I perceive, meaning what I experience, there will be a *vedanā-*tone, and I cannot extract the vedanā. I may feel like the vedanā quietens, but it's only going to go to neutral. So what I perceive, I feel. It has a feeling to it. Perception and vedanā are not separate.

Sometimes people ask, teachers ask, "Where does the awareness of something end and the perception of it begin? Consciousness and perception, are they separatable?" They're not. If we get even more subtle, where are the boundary lines and the separation between attention, consciousness, and the intention to pay attention to something? [They] sound like, and they get listed as, different things. You cannot separate them. You cannot separate them because they're not actually separate. Also -- and I'm not going to go in to this now -- but when we go into this and the way that experience seems to be happening in moments, I can't even separate one moment's aggregates from the next moment's aggregates. We'll come back to time and the emptiness of moments in another talk.

What I want to skip to now, to end with, although I'll go into it in quite a bit of detail, is walking. So yesterday when Noelle was sharing, we talked about vision. And what about walking? We haven't said much about walking. If I am doing walking meditation, and one is walking up and down, and there is this kind of stillness there, and one is really into it, and there is a kind of receptivity there of awareness, one begins to really get a sense that the walking, as a thing, as an experience, depends on and is inseparable from the causes and conditions that support it. Walking is inseparable from the body. Where does body end and walking begin? Walking is inseparable from causes and conditions like earth, the earth. It's inseparable from gravity. It's inseparable from my intentions. Sometimes in the beautiful kind of silence and openness and receptivity of quietly walking up and down, slowly walking up and down, sometimes you actually get a sense that the whole universe is involved in my walking, the whole universe. And 'emptiness' actually takes on the meaning of 'fullness.' Sometimes people get afraid of the nihilistic implications of emptiness. Actually, walking is full of the whole universe; it's kind of infinite, to that open and receptive mind in meditation.

We talked also about the dependence on opposites and relativity. Walking is relative to or opposite and, as such, dependent on non-walking. If you're walking really slowly, really slowly, when is walking not walking? When is it standing? When is walking running? When is running jumping? The mind makes these distinctions. If you walk really, really slowly, at any point asking, "Is that walking? Is that walking? Is that walking?" You can inquire in this way in the meditation. You see, I have to cut out something that's not walking with the mind. The mind does this kind of automatically. What is the mind cutting out of the concept of walking to create walking? Interesting question when we walk. And one begins to get a sense that the nature of things, we could say -- it's a kind of poetic way of putting it -- the true nature of things is infinite. It reaches everywhere. It includes everything. Again, in the quietness and the depths, if one's walking, the less self-identification there is and identifying, the less grasping, as they quieten, the whole sense of walking can begin to just disband, unpack, dissolve. And of course, if someone was looking they would say, "Well, of course they're walking. I've seen them walking up and down for two hours. Obviously they're walking." And one will say afterwards, "I was doing my walking meditation." But there's a sense to perception of it just dissolving; the walking is actually dissolving. Phenomenological approach.

Let's move to the other approaches and an approach of reasoning. I'll read you something from the second chapter of Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, which is the most seminal text on emptiness by Nāgārjuna and probably that exists in the whole of Buddhism. The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way, or Verses on the Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way -- something like that. This is from the second chapter, which is about motion and about walking, and could also be interpreted to be about change. So think about your walking path, think about your walking up and down meditation.

On the path that has been travelled, there is no moving. On the path that has not been travelled, there is no moving either. And in some other place besides the path that has been travelled and the path that has not, motions are not perceptible in any way at all.^[6]

Let's translate that a little bit. Here's a miniature version of a walking path, can you see that?

[Transcriber's Note: A diagram might be helpful here:

{width="6.048611111111111in" height="0.6145833333333334in"}

Section A Section B

End of Transcriber's Note]

It's got one part that's white, and one part that's brown. Can everyone see? This is my path. I can divide it into Section A and Section B. Section A is the section that I have traversed already; I'm halfway through my walking path. And Section B is the bit I've got left to go. And I, the body, is somewhere in the middle there.

There's no walking in Part A; the motion has already been there. It's been and gone. There's no motion there. In Part B, there's also no motion. I haven't got there yet, right? But there's no other part outside of A and B that actually exists. Where's the part that walking happens spatially? No motion on what one's traversed, or where one's not been yet, and there's no third part. There's no motion in a third part somewhere.

You could do that also with time -- not just spatially, but with time. You could say, if motion exists, for anything to exist, there must be a time at which it exists. It must exist at a time to exist. But there's a little problem here because motion is actually -- if we think about what does 'motion' mean, 'motion' means 'a change of position over time.' Motion is a change of position over time.

The present, the present moment, has no duration. It has no duration. The present doesn't last. In other words, 'over time' -- the present is not an 'over time.' Otherwise it would be: "There's a bit that was present and a bit that wasn't present right now." We could say then, "Okay, that means motion exists in the past or the future, or both." But what that implies then is that now there's not moving, there's not motion. So you might say, "Okay, but that's just a kind of language thing because it was in motion, or I was in motion, the body was in motion, and it will be in motion. It's just a play with words." But if that was the case, if it was then, or then, or will be then, that then implies that all motion is in the past or the future. You could say, "Okay, it's just a matter of words: 'All motion is in the past or the future.'" But I can say that at every moment. At any point in time, I could say that, which means there's no time at which I can really say that a thing is in motion. It gives you an example of the mind-boggling philosophical process that goes on in Nāgārjuna, his kind of explaining of the Prajñāpāramitā texts. Brilliant, brilliant, philosophical mind to prove that if something is inherently existent, it brings with it complete incongruities -- ridiculous, absurd contradictions. So this, what we said about motion, can actually apply to change as well -- not just walking, but motion, also change.

There's another one; I think it comes a few verses later in this chapter. And you can contemplate this when you're walking. So if it applies to change, it also applies to something like breathing, or some thing, some situation that's happening, or some emotion that's happening. It goes like this:

walking cannot begin in a moment of stationariness. Why? Because a moment of stationariness, by definition, you can't have movement in a moment of stationariness. It can't begin, since by definition it's not moving. It cannot either begin -- so looking for the beginning of walking, beginning of motion, beginning of a breath, beginning of an emotion, whatever it is -- it cannot either begin when there's moving*,* because by definition it can't begin there; there's already moving there. Hmm. [laughs] There's no possible moment, of course, where something is both in motion and stationary -- that would be a contradiction in terms -- and no moment when it's neither moving nor stationary. And I could try chopping the moments up really small, but there's always going to be a part where it hasn't yet begun and a part where it has begun. I cannot find the beginnings of things. I cannot find the beginnings of things. I cannot find the ends of things. It may sound like, I don't know, it may sound like some of these are just mind games, etc. Bring them in, reflect on them, reflect on them, bring them into the meditation, find a way, and extremely powerful, extremely powerful -- can be.

Yogi 6: Is it a bit like animation? You can create an illusion of movement ...

Rob: That's part of it, yes, that's part of it. Yes. That, in a way, has to do with the dot-to-dot thing as well. That's part of it, yes. And I could say, "You know, motion -- okay, I can't find the beginning, but it's always begun in the past." That would be ridiculous; that's not our experience. Or it's always yet to begin -- that's ridiculous too. In the present, there's no time to go anywhere.

So this approach, there's a word, it's called Prāsaṅgika. The Prāsaṅgika, what it literally means is 'consequence,' and it means an absurd consequence of believing that things have inherent existence. And so Nāgārjuna's approach, and Chandrakīrti, too, was to say, if things have inherent existence -- whether it's walking or motion or self or aggregates or whatever is -- if they do, it always implies a totally absurd consequence, and therefore they cannot [have inherent existence]. It's proving it by contradiction, by absurd contradiction. And in the Tibetan, I think it just goes as far as Tibetan, Tibetans have very sophisticated sort of hierarchies called 'doxographies' of teachings and schools of thought, etc., and they love to classify things, much like the Indian philosophy, love to classify this school and that school, and "This one's a subtler version of this one," and so it goes, "This one is superior to this one." Prāsaṅgika, this kind of absurdity of the consequences of inherent existence, is held to be the highest school of the understanding of emptiness in the Tibetan tradition, certainly, and maybe in the other traditions.

If you're going to use some of these analyses in meditation, you just have to be careful that the mind doesn't get out of control and spin off. So it takes a little bit of samādhi to gather the mind. But with the samādhi, if you've got used to the reasoning, you can actually bring them in, in ways that are incredibly powerful. But it takes both a little bit of samādhi to reign it in and kind of focus it, and also having thought them through so they feel like they're really handy, so you can just pick them out and plug them in kind of thing.

So, I'll return to some of those quotes. And again, this one's from the Pali Canon:

For one who sees, there is no thing. [Or: for one who sees, there is nothing.]^[7]

It's from the Sutta Nipāta. It's one of the earliest of the Buddha's teachings. "For one who sees, there is nothing; there is no thing." It's pointing to something very, very profound here. And again, I think it's from a Prajñāpāramitā text; I'm not sure:

To see no thing is to see excellently. To see nothing is to see rightly.

Peppered through -- "All this is unreal" -- we had that before, the Buddha again from the Sutta Nipāta, the Pali Canon.^[8] So this business, it's saying something quite counterintuitive about the universe. It's different than our intuitive assumptions about the universe and the nature of phenomena. And the beautiful thing is we can realize it. The beautiful thing is it's possible to penetrate it. It's possible to expose the fabrication and everything that comes out of that exposition -- not a letting go of ethics. Certainly not a letting go of love. Actually more love, more freedom.