Love, Healing, and Emptiness

What I would like to explore a little bit this evening is the relationship between emptiness and these practices that we're doing -- these teachings of emptiness, the exploration of emptiness -- and love, and compassion, and healing. So it may seem -- in fact, I have heard from some of you -- perhaps earlier in the retreat, but maybe even still at times, and certainly for someone who perhaps hasn't entered so much into these practices, it may seem for many people that it would be quite surprising that all this emptiness business actually led in the direction of love. It may seem the very word -- we've been through this before -- seems to invoke often in people a sense of nihilism and all that.

I think I quoted you one time Khyentse Rinpoche, a famous Tibetan teacher of the last century:

When you [realize] the empty nature [of phenomena], the energy to bring about the good of others dawns, uncontrived and effortless.^[1]

There's a real relationship here, and to me it's really, really important. That's why we have that candle. That's how I see the whole retreat, really. That's one of the primary connections I'm interested in, and perhaps you, more and more. To me, these practices actually should, they really should lead to a deepening and an opening in love and compassion, generally speaking, on the whole, and as I said, similarly with fear, etc. There may be periods when it's not that -- blips, the opposite, etc. But generally speaking, they really should. And if they're not, over a period of time, if that's not the case, something's been misunderstood. We've kind of got hold of the wrong end of the stick with emptiness. Perhaps it's gone into a kind of nihilism -- something. Other times, it can be, in a way, more subtle -- that it's just in the way we are engaging in the practices, something's just subtly out of balance, and that, too, can have a similar effect of kind of not allowing so much of an opening in terms of love and compassion.

So seeing the emptiness of the self, recognizing that, practising with that, and of phenomena should bring that. And what the emptiness does, the realization of emptiness to whatever degree, is it opens our capacity to love. It actually opens the heart and opens our capacity to give and to be of service and to want to be of service. Like I said, to me, that's one of the most central reasons for all this. So it opens our heart, our availability to give, and it also, in a way, purifies our love. It purifies our love and compassion. There's a beautiful little poem from Rumi, the Sufi mystic poet, I found the other day.^[2]

[3:31 -- 3:50, poem]

So it purifies our love. It purifies it of projection, of neediness, of self-centredness, self-interest, all of that. Many people involved in practice, or coming to this practice or other practices, again, that's quite a central motivation. A person says, "I want to live dedicated to love. I want to live serving love." And if I want that, one of the biggest aids in that will be my understanding, my practice with emptiness. It's what opens that capacity much, much wider. It's what allows it.

So I want to go into this and look at this and explore this a little bit. We've already seen -- we've talked about this several times -- when there's less clinging, there is less self-sense. When there's less self-sense, as a number of people have pointed out, there's less sense of separation -- me and other, self and other. Less separation, more love, naturally, organically -- it comes with the sense of less separation. So we want to see that connection, want to see that connection and actually not just see it and witness it, but feed it, feed that chain of causality, if you like, feed that dependent arising. If that doesn't seem to be the case -- and occasionally it is true that actually people are doing these practices and just get a kind of flat feeling, or blah, or whatever -- bring it up. We can talk about it. It's probably just that something is slightly off in the practice, that's all.

So the emptiness feeds the love and, in a way, when we are engaged in heart practices like loving-kindness or compassion, etc., how useful it can be to bring more emptiness in. If we talk about compassion for a second, it's very, very common with practitioners to see the practice of compassion as a kind of burden and actually feel it that way. It's like, "Phew. Now I have to kind of hold all this suffering," or compassion and living with compassion is somehow a sacrifice. Understandable, understandable that there would be that perception. I remember I was away for a while -- this was a few years ago -- and I came back, and someone had been on retreat for a while, and they were going through the brahmavihāras (loving-kindness and compassion, etc.), and they were on the compassion. They said, "I feel so tired, so heavy. I can't wait to go on to the next one." Something's not quite right there in the relationship with compassion.

A person can have every intention, every willingness to want to open the heart in compassion, but it always feels like it has limits, because it always feels like the self is burdened by the suffering, and the self is somehow sacrificing things if we're involved in service. So we can actually see or we can feel if that's the view, that the compassion is somehow suffering, compassion is suffering. But actually, lack of compassion is suffering. The heart brittle and closed and encased in self-interest -- that's suffering. Compassion is not suffering. It's self-centredness that automatically leads to suffering, not compassion. Automatically at some point and to some degree, self-centredness will bring suffering.

We could ask, in light of what we've been talking about and the teachings here: we might have a feeling of sacrificing the self, but what does that mean? If the self actually has no inherent existence, what am I sacrificing? Or is that just an illusion, as people were using the words last night? I might feel like I'm imprisoned in compassion, or that compassion practice might imprison me, but actually it's self-interest that imprisons me. I'm wrapping, I'm binding my life in that, with that self-interest.

So some of you are doing mettā practice as your kind of thing, but I want to talk about those practices -- loving-kindness, compassion, joy (some people call it sympathetic joy), and equanimity -- also called the brahmavihāras, and just talk about them and bringing (if it's for now or for later) the emptiness approaches into those practices. So sometimes you're sitting doing your mettā practice, your loving-kindness practice, and you don't feel good. The body aches, or the heart aches, or you just feel kind of grumpy. And what about introducing a sense of a thought, a reflection, quietly? "It's not about me. It's not about me." Actually mettā practice is about me, but in that moment, just dropping it in: "It doesn't matter how I feel. This is for you," whoever the mettā is towards. It's like dropping something into the water there that opens it out.

Sometimes, a lot of the time, the self-sense is our actual preoccupation. It kind of goes with the feeling of self more often than not. So maybe the self-sense doesn't feel good at a certain time of doing mettā practice or whatever. But maybe beginning to see more and more that the self-sense is actually not so important. It's not so important what the self-sense is at any time. It feels good, it feels solid, it feels light, it feels crappy -- it's just the self-sense. It's just the appearance. It's an appearance of self. It's a fabrication. What is it to drop that understanding in, that it's just the self-sense? Oftentimes the self-sense is there, and how the self feels, the sense we have of the self, ends up being the most important factor in our sort of organic, compulsive assessment of the situation, but actually it's just an appearance. It's just an appearance. It doesn't have to even be that significant, what the self-sense is at any time. It doesn't have to take centre stage, which is usually the role it likes to take. It's used to being the star of the show. It's just an appearance. One of my teachers used to say the dramas of the self, they're storms in a teacup. Storms in a teacup in the vastness of things.

So a lot of what I'm going to say tonight is actually -- and I said this before, and I can't remember when; maybe in the opening talk -- it rests on assumptions. I'm assuming -- and I know it's not quite 100 per cent accurate -- but I'm assuming you all know how to be with your experience, and particularly your difficult experience. When there's difficulty in the body, when there's difficulty in the heart, in the mind, in whatever, that you know how to care for that; that with your past mindfulness practice, etc., you know how to meet that, to be with it, to open to it, to embrace it and contain it, to hold it in love. This hurt, what is it to hold it in love, literally the way we would hold an infant or a child or a baby? I know it's not quite right to assume you've got that completely down, but a little bit the practices I'm talking about on this retreat are kind of building on that. So I'm assuming that's there, and like I said, it's fine to talk -- we will talk about that level in interviews. It's totally appropriate, because just that level takes years to develop, years.

And if you know that level of meeting things and being open and surrounding our pain with warmth and love, bathing it in warmth and love, if you know that, you also know that when we connect with our pain that way, in a very direct, open way, and we surround it in love, even though the difficulty is there -- the heartache, the body ache, whatever it is -- particularly in instances of heartache or grief, though the thing is still difficult, there's a sweetness to it because we're connecting, and we're connecting with ourselves and we're connecting with the hurt. And that connection brings a sweetness and colours the whole thing. I know some of you have experienced that. Very important. But anyway, the practice I'm talking about tonight and the rest of the retreat, it's assuming that we also know how to meet our needs emotionally and take care of ourselves.

So I'll talk about letting go of the self, but again, we go back -- self, not-self, just two different ways of going about draining the suffering out of existence. So I can go back into the mode of self and relate to myself as a self. What is it if we're not feeling well, in the body, in the heart, in whatever it is? What is it, as I said, in taking this self-sense, to actually recast it? We talked about the Buddha could have cast his narrative and his story in the most self-pitying and gloomy of terms. But actually what is it to cast oneself as a hero bodhisattva? "I, though there is pain right now, though there is heartache and I'm aware of that, I'm seeing myself now as dedicating through that, with that, in that." Self-sense is malleable. Self-story is malleable, so you can shape it how you want. Why don't we shape it in a way that's helpful? It's really appropriate to sit here imagining you are a bodhisattva, imagining that you will endure this pain for the sake of others. To me, that's something really, really beautiful. It's a beautiful approach.

And there's a sense -- and it's connected a little bit to what we're talking about, the holy disinterest and anattā practice -- of kind of, if you're doing mettā or compassion practice and it feels difficult, you feel in a difficult space, throwing it away, throwing everything away. Throwing away one's aggregates, throwing away the self, throwing away the concern. So usually when I teach retreats -- I haven't been doing it on this retreat, but usually at the end of the last sit I do a little blessing and a kind of dedicating of the merit: "Whatever blessings come from our practice today, may they be ..." It's like giving them away to other beings, giving them away to all beings. It's beautiful. We put all this work in during the day, and "Not just me. Not just me." Usually when we come to practice, it's about 'me.' I want 'me' to get better and less suffering. In time, naturally, it should expand. Not just practising for me. So that dedicating the merit is also kind of throwing it away, giving it away. All the beauty, everything that we've cultivated, all the beautiful factors, giving them away. That's exactly the same movement as the anattā. Do you see? Anattā, let go of identification. It's the same movement, but it's got more love behind it as well.

I have spent quite some time on retreat being ill -- long-term health concerns and this and that, and different kinds of things. At times, I used to do this thing -- really feeling not very well physically, and I would try and find ways of using that with practice and in practice. And one of the things I kind of came up with at one point was -- I was nowhere near death; I just felt really bad. I wasn't anywhere near death, really. But I would imagine that I was actually dying. This complete low-energy and really feeling not very good, that must be, as you begin to approach death, kind of what it feels like. And I imagined that I actually was dying. Then this that seems to be me, this that I seem to have -- the body, the vedanā, the perceptions, the mind and the mental formations, the consciousness -- giving it back to the universe, giving it back to the universe. I'm going to have to let go if I'm dying soon, and I give it back. There's a beautiful word the Buddha uses, paṭinissagga. It's in the discourse on breath meditation.^[3] Paṭinissagga, giving it back, throwing it back, relinquishing. And guess what? It transforms that state, that experience. At the very least it softens it and imbues it with love, with tenderness -- at the very least. So these aggregates, like we've already said many times, I don't own them. They don't belong to me. You could say it all belongs to the universe. Certainly this body does. That's where it came from. That's where it's going back to. That much is clearly obvious.

This retreat, these sort of parallel retreats, before it was an emptiness retreat, starting last year, for three years we had a Loving-kindness and Compassion as a Path to Awakening retreat. Very lovely retreat, and part of that was going into actually bringing things like the anattā practice into the practices of loving-kindness and compassion. So for instance, for you guys, what would it be to be doing a mettā practice or a compassion practice and then drop in the anattā kind of in the background? The whole thing kind of shifts to another depth, another gear. Or if you're having trouble accessing love, accessing a sense of emptiness can just open up the love. Same thing with the chariot and the other practices we do. But emptiness, we can find a way of bringing it into practices. It's another way of looking at what's going on in the moment, and it will bring that love. It will transform it.

[18:53] So if we talk about love, we should also talk about the blockage of love, the opposite, when there's judgmentalism of someone, or ill-will, or anger. We've touched on this before, but I feel judging of you or angry at you for some reason or another -- what if I begin to reflect: who exactly am I angry with? Who exactly am I angry with? And go through what seems to make up that being. Am I angry at your hair? Am I angry at your teeth? Am I angry at your spleen? Your fingernails? Can't find anything in the body that I'm really angry at. Maybe I'm angry at your, what, vedanā? Am I angry at your perceptions? Maybe I'm angry at your mental formations. It's probably somewhere in the mental formations. It can't be in the consciousness. It's probably somewhere in the mental formations. But if I look at that even more, a moment of intention -- intentions are a dependent arising. A person has an intention dependent on lots of factors, inner and outer, past and present. And that intention is not-self, and it comes up, and it disappears. What is there there to be angry at?

When there is anger, the mind, the perception tends to lock into differences, separateness. I see what's different between me and this other person, and it's in that locked groove of perception. So really helpful to start contemplating what we have in common, contemplating commonality there rather than the differences, what makes you different from me and how we are different: "I'm not like that!" Contemplating the commonality, the human commonality. And that's not to deny that there are any differences. Of course there are. Every thing, every moment, every person is unique. But when we get locked into that in a way that's actually supporting anger rather than shifting the perception in a way that opens something else up, allows the love ...

So sometimes you might be sitting across from someone on a train or something and finding yourself judging them for whatever reason, and it's usually not a very good reason. [laughs] But you might find yourself judging them. And right in that moment, without explaining to them what you're doing [laughter], you could begin contemplating their aggregates: "Body here, body there. Vedanā there, feeling-tones there, feeling-tones here. Perceptions there, perceptions here. Mental formations and thoughts and mind states and intentions there, all that here. Consciousness there, consciousness here." And I begin to actually deconstruct a person, but it's not really that -- it's seeing the commonality and breaking down, first of all, breaking down what we might get angry at, because anger needs something solid to be angry at. Ill-will, judgmentalism need something solid. So I'm breaking that down, but partly I'm also seeing the commonality. The same stuff is over there as it is here. It sounds, it may sound like that's kind of coldly reductionistic, etc., but actually try it. Try it. It will very probably soften things, create that real sense of connection, and the judging fades. The love comes.

Śāntideva -- I think we've mentioned him once -- he's one of the great Mahāyāna teachers from the eighth century. He's talking about this seeing the lack of real self in a person that you might be angry at, and he says if a brutal person wields a stick and goes around beating people with it, should I get angry with the stick? Of course not. The stick had no choice in the matter. Putting the stick aside, etc., "if I become angry with the one who impels it, then it is better if I hate hatred, because that person is also impelled by hatred."^[4] We're making a self out of something instead of actually seeing there's a process operating. Something's in the driving seat of that process for that time. It's not to deny responsibility, etc., but it's a way of looking, a way of looking, a way of looking that opens something up and brings freedom, brings love.

So what would it be to see the intentions, to see the thoughts, to see the mind states, all of that as anattā in the other person? Not just in myself, but in the other person. And again, with this, sometimes it's really appropriate to see in terms of self and my responsibility and my responsiveness, as we've said. We're not disregarding that. Half of our life is that. And then other times, it's kicking in the mode of not-self. All of it is ways of looking that bring freedom and love. Practising, developing, and making them really accessible and usable and powerful.

For those of you who have spent a little time doing mettā practice, loving-kindness practice, have you noticed -- you know, you have these categories. For some of you, if you don't know, just as a sort of crutch in the mettā practice, you put people in categories: a sort of benefactor who's easiest, and a friend, and a neutral person who you don't have much feeling about, and a difficult person, etc. But have you noticed how fluidly and how easily people change categories? The categories are just a temporary designation where you put someone. They say something wrong, they don't say what you would like them to say, they're a little late ... [laughter] It doesn't take a lot for someone to get demoted several leagues, divisions, or whatever it's called. It's fluid. It's empty. It's dependent. See how much the way we assess a person is actually dependent on our conditioning? How much of our conditioning goes into how we assess a person? Depends also on our experience. Usually we're assessing a person -- have you noticed? -- it's often very connected to our sense of self-benefit from them, whether they've been kind to us, whether they've given us something, whether they've somehow reflected in a way that makes us feel good. And that becomes the sort of horse-blinkered lens of assessing this person and assigning them "friend," "enemy," "completely indifferent." The person hasn't done anything for me one way or another, therefore just ...

Or identification. For different reasons, we identify with a person -- maybe because they're family or a partner or whatever, but maybe other reasons: "I'm that kind of person, like them. I'm not like that other person. I'm like them." And it's all based on self-view and self-preoccupation and self-interest. Appearances, the very appearance of that other person will depend on my mind. It's empty. What's in my heart will colour the appearance of the other person. Appearances depend on mind. This is something we need to see over and over and over. And we see it in close relationship. You see it in relationship with people you don't know. You see it in all kinds of things. The appearances of selves and phenomena depend on the mind. They are empty in themselves.

If that's the case -- which it is -- why not view everyone as a friend? The appearances are actually empty. Why not shape things? And actually I can choose what category to put you. I can choose how to see you a little bit. It's not actually that. Much happier for me if I see you as a friend, much happier. That's a possible choice, and it will bring happiness. A big implication of emptiness is that the view we have of things is malleable. It's malleable, it's shapeable. Another implication of this is that, in a way, a person and my experience of that person as such (that's all I have of them), is never separate from me. It's never separate from my heart and my view and my mind. I'm always seeing it through that. So already there, there's a non-separation. What if I bring that understanding in?

Now, someone can say -- and many people would say; many people do anyway say in relationship to loving-kindness practice, "This is very naïve. It's a very naïve practice. It's a beginner's practice." To me, it's not at all. It's a really, really profound practice. "And to go around regarding everyone as a friend is even more naïve. How ridiculous! Little, smiley, happy, pink person!" [laughter] Actually, with all due respect for that view -- which is not very much [laughter] -- the opposite is naïve. The opposite is naïve. To believe in the inherent existence of "They are this way. That's how they are," that's naïve. That's really naïve. I'm not seeing the dependent arising. I'm not seeing how fluctuating and malleable and dependent the view is, the feeling is, of another person. That's actually naïve.

So all this has actually to do with karma. It has a lot to do with karma. That's a very loaded word. What I really mean is -- well, let me talk about it, and then you'll get a sense. What I'm talking about really is this realization of how the sense of another person, the sense of the world (as we've already said in here a couple of times) depends on the heart. It depends on the heart. The amazing thing about the human heart is it has a staggering range. The range of the ways we can feel and experience the world to be is absolutely enormous because, as human beings, we have an enormous emotional range, from dizzying heights of sublime bliss, etc., to almost unspeakable levels of torment and anguish, self-hatred, all the rest of it. That's a huge, huge range, and with it, with every point on that continuum, comes a different self-view, and a different world-view, and a different view of others.

So there's that range, and as we've said a couple of times, I shape what I see, I colour what I see dependent on what I feed the heart at any time. If I'm acting generously, if I'm feeding generosity (and we've already said this), what kind of world do I experience? What kind of other do I experience? How do I look at others on this retreat? I live in a different world. If I'm feeding mettā, compassion, same thing -- the view softens. It brightens. It's more luminous. It's more connected. It's more open. It's more spacious. We need to really, really see this. We make our world. The world is not independent of how we fabricate it. And you could say we prime perception. Again, we've talked a lot about this. If I'm moving in the world like a shark, with a view of self-interest, acquiring, acquiring, acquiring, the self as a centre of acquisition (which the self will do, either brutally or a little more politely at times), if I'm moving with that, the acquisition, self-centredness, if I'm priming perception through the dualities that we were talking about the other day, possessiveness -- all this breeds what? Fear, separateness, competition, all of that. It breeds a dark world, a threatening world. It breeds other as threatening.

This is karma. We don't even have to think about past lives and all that stuff. This is karma, and I can see it in a day in my life. What I feed, how I act, how I think will shape the world that I live in, will shape my experience. Two people can be going through the same kind of illness -- very, very different experience, very different. One feels -- and this is an extreme example -- but one feels despite the illness, despite the pain, saturated, inundated, surrounded with blessings, rained on with blessings, and the other bitter and brittle. There's no judgment here; it's just a factor. We fabricate the perception. That's quite an extreme example.

So this is what is meant by karma and making karma. In this life -- actually, you can see it in a moment. Many of you will know this, the mythological story of the Buddha's awakening, which I really do take a lot of the description as a myth. Many of you know there's a point in the night, and he's staying up all night practising, and there's a point where he's assailed by Māra and the forces of Māra. Māra comes with armies and elephants and this and that. And all these armies start shooting arrows. So a horde, thousands of arrows flying towards the Buddha, and what happens? If you know the story, in mid-flight, they transform into flowers, a rain of flowers. Nice. Beautiful image. What's going on there? The Buddha, in that moment, how was his heart? How was his sense of generosity? How was the compassion? How was the letting go, and the emptiness, and what we've been talking about, fading? Perception is malleable. As such, why not ... malleate? No. [laughter] Mould, thank you. I like 'malleate.' [laughter] Why not mould it in the way that's helpful?

And sometimes what sounds like an outlandish fairy-tale story, you can even see that -- and all this business about fading that I've been talking about -- you can even see it in your own meditation. What would have been an arrow, what would have been a whole host of arrows, actually turns into flowers. Because it's empty, it's not inherently an arrow. So this business about karma and dependent arising and emptiness, they're two sides of the same coin. An understanding of emptiness that doesn't implicitly understand karma and the necessity of ethics and love and all that is a misunderstanding of emptiness. It's got something off there. Certainly emptiness does not imply that nothing matters, that ethics doesn't matter, that love doesn't matter. Quite the opposite. It actually points to how it matters even more, because it shapes everything.

[35:30] So in that stream, this fading that we've been talking about, that has everything to do, as I was trying to explain, with the understanding of dependent origination. Things arise dependent on supporting them with clinging, identification, delusion, etc. And things, with a lack of that support, will fade. In the Mahāyāna teachings on emptiness they say dependent arising is the king of reasonings. It's the supreme way of understanding emptiness, because it's wrapped up with karma, with dependent arising, etc., and that depth of understanding.

I used to really not be a big fan -- I know that some of you will not be big fans -- of some of these logical reasonings that I'm throwing out, and those as ways into emptiness. I know that's the case. I used to avoid them like the plague years ago. They actually turned me off. And people, someone I was talking to -- it was actually another teacher -- said it gives him the willies just hearing about it or thinking about it. Understandable. I'm coming more and more to see, as I said last night, they're incredibly powerful if we can find a way to use them. Incredibly powerful. And to me, I still think the dependent arising way, like the texts say, is actually the most powerful and the most complete, but the other reasonings really fill it out in a way, give a real fullness to the understanding -- in time. Some will really feel it's not their cup of tea.

This dependent arising business is really crucial, and it links into what I want to go into next. So as meditators, but even as human beings, we have an experience -- and you might feel like you have this often, or you might feel like just once in a while, or you might feel you've never had it -- but it's a common human experience and a common thing for a person to come and report to a teacher or a therapist or something: "I was sitting, I was hanging out, I was on my sofa at home. Everything was fine. And then all this stuff came up, and it felt like, it feels like, it feels intuitively obvious it's stuff from the past -- it's grief, it's anger, it's hurt, it's the woundedness, it's whatever. Stuff came up." And hopefully, as I was saying, going back to the beginning of the talk, hopefully I'm skilled in working with that. I'm skilled at meeting with it. I'm skilled at holding it in love. So important, so basic to insight meditation practice. I can be with it. I can open to it. I can embrace it. I can meet it.

And so a person feels like stuff came up and I was with it, and then eventually it subsided. And then another time stuff came up. There's something here that's a lot more rich than first meets the eye. So that view of stuff coming up and us being able to be with it, and in a way, it comes up, and then it's gone, it's released, I'm done with that little chunk, it's gone now, it's melted, and maybe I'm waiting for the next chunk -- that view, very helpful to be able to work with it. Very skilful. But given everything we've said so far in terms of dependent arising and fading and emptiness ... If I just hang out, letting go of clinging, letting go and letting be, and letting go and letting be, or if I hang out just letting go of my default, typical identification with things, the stuff comes up. It can be physical, experienced as a tension, experienced as a pain, experienced as an emotional pain, experienced as a mind-storm of this or that. I'm talking about all that. Do you know what I mean when I say "stuff coming up"? Yeah? If I'm just hanging out, letting go of clinging, letting go of identification, the anattā practice, etc., we've already said: what tends to happen as I do that?

First thing I'll notice is that there's a decrease. To the extent that I can do that -- hanging out, letting go of clinging, and letting go of identification -- there's a decrease at that time of the amount of difficult stuff that comes up. Would you agree? There's a decrease. And eventually, if I can really, really let go a lot, actually, no difficult stuff will come up at that time. And eventually, as we've said about all this fading, the deeper, deeper, deeper, deeper, at the time of deep letting go, deep non-identifying, nothing comes up -- or very, very little, and then eventually nothing.

Can you see what the implications of this are? I'll come back to this. I really want to be inclusive here. I'm talking about ways of looking. And just as with self and not-self, both are useful. There are ways of looking that are helpful here, and it might include both. So I'm not disregarding anything. If I have a model, either consciously or subconsciously, of 'purification' -- "There is stuff, past hurt, past trauma, past etc. inside me, and it comes up. In coming up, it gets purified. I release it. And hopefully, eventually," this model goes, "I'll release all of it and be done with it." Some people, even Buddhists, have a model that that is awakening. They call it saṅkhāras that you're releasing, all this stuff, and once you've got rid of your saṅkhāras, that's it.

So that might be the model. It might be conscious. I might explain that to others. It might be semi-conscious or unconscious. And we live in a culture that actually, that view, among quite a large portion of the culture, is very, very common, ever since Freud, really. And that way of feeling and thinking imbues our culture. So what happens to that notion of purification? What would happen to the purification? To have a sense of purification, I need to have a sense of something coming up and being purified. But if nothing is coming up, or at least nothing difficult -- when I sit here and nothing difficult comes up, in that model I don't have a feeling of something having purified. It's only when something difficult comes up. But if the difficulty actually coming up is dependent on my clinging, dependent on identification, hmm ...

If I go step further and say -- especially if I believe all this or am more convinced of this -- that the not-self view, in a way, is kind of more true than the self-view (if we say that; they're both good views), then when I'm more truthful, the purification model doesn't hold together, doesn't work so well. And again, I might say, "Well, you're doing something to block it. You must be repressing it or doing something that gets in the way." But again, we've touched this before: is non-clinging a doing? Or is it clinging that's the doing? Clinging is a doing. Non-clinging is a letting go of a doing. Like we said, anattā, letting go of identification is not a doing; it's a non-doing. There's nothing I'm doing to kind of block something or get in the way in some way.

And I could throw out that question that I've thrown out two or three times already: how much self-view and how much clinging reveal the real event or the real emotion or whatever it is, or body tension or whatever, that needs to be purified? A lot? The papañca self? The big, hairy, scary monster self? The normal self, etc.? Which self-view reveals the real one? What is the real thing that needs to be purified there?

One of my teachers has a very nice way of explaining what's going on here. It's not to say that there aren't influences from the past, that we are not wounded in some way, or any experiences from the past -- lovely or whatever, neutral, difficult -- it's not to say that doesn't exist and come into the present, bringing an effect or bringing effects at different times into the present. It's not to say that. It's just that the influences from the past -- we could call that 'karma' -- have to, always, without exception, meet influences from the present: my mind state at the moment, what I'm putting in, my view, all that. So you get this process all the time of this, things kind of meeting at right angles. Past meets present input. Past input meets present input. Do you understand? "Present input" meaning: am I clinging? Is there self-view? Are there all kinds of other delusions, other views, etc.? Reactivity to what's going on? It's always the two meeting. I cannot have a present experience without inputting somehow into the present moment as part of the mix of factors that fabricates my experience of the present moment.^[5]

Yogi 1: Isn't that causes and conditions?

Rob: It's causes and conditions, yeah. And what I'm saying is they're not just in the past. What we experience in the present is not there, kind of wrapped up and ready to reveal itself. It's not wrapped up in the past, ready to reveal itself, like a pre-package that kind of blops up, which is what it can feel like intuitively. But together, the past and the present create experience.

Yogi 2: Are you saying that the present is truer than stuff from the past?

Rob: No -- filtering, shaping. The experiences we have in the present are a kind of confluence, a meeting of influences from the past -- could be the past, two seconds ago, could be the past, forty years ago, longer -- meeting together, because always in the present moment I have something that I'm putting into the present moment. Let me finish and see if it's a bit clearer.

We say: is this thing that's coming up -- this pain, this experience of release of something or this difficulty, what seems like a purification -- is it actually anything inherently existent in itself, in and of itself? It's not. It cannot be. Sometimes people get into a kind of waiting -- their practice is a waiting. Lots of people practise for decades, and that's what the practice is about. It's like you just wait, and you kind of just be there, and it's an unpleasant process of emptying out. So sitting is kind of inherently difficult. The more difficult the better, because it really shows that you're getting the difficult stuff out. And it's stored there.

The Buddha has a sutta, and he talks about a salt crystal, a rock of salt -- a little rock like that. And he says if you put that salt crystal in a glass of water and then drink the water, it's going to taste salty, not drinkable, difficult, unpleasant. If you take that same salt crystal or one just like it and you put it in a big freshwater lake and then take a cupful (before all the lakes were polluted, but ...), barely notice it.^[6] He said the salt crystal is the karma from the past, the influences from the past, the hurt, whatever it is, and the water in either case is the state of consciousness, the state of mind, state of heart in the present moment. When -- because of greed, aversion, selfing, whatever it is -- the consciousness is small, wrapped up in its usual, default, small, little package, something comes up, and it's difficult, we really feel it as difficult. When, in meditation or whatever, either through loving-kindness or compassion or joy or equanimity or insight there's an opening up -- and so, for instance, the vast awareness that we've been doing -- and the mind opens, either through samādhi or insight, and that same thing comes up, it barely registers. The Buddha says one may not even notice it. I can't remember the exact words -- something like, "One may not even notice it." It's dependent. It's a dependent arising. It has everything to do with the fading.

If we take this just a little step further, if I even believe in a storehouse there, if I believe in this model of purification, if I believe that stuff is there waiting to come up, that very belief is part of my poker chip stack, and it's going to influence what comes up if I believe that. And as I said, I know very, very experienced meditators, been doing this for thirty years, and just goes on, partly because they believe it. The belief is enough to spin the whole process endlessly, endlessly, endlessly, stuff coming up, and not seeing the dependent arising of it. The belief is part of the dependent arising.

And I have a real question: will it ever end if I'm feeding it in that way? Will it ever end if I believe in that model? If I don't see the dependent arising here, it may be that I'm unconsciously creating "stuff" or whatever I call it in the present, over and over and over again for the rest of my life and, if you believe in all that stuff about future lives, probably for the ... until I see something about dependent arising. So this seeing, this emptiness has actually something very profoundly to do with healing in lots of ways. A person usually has a sense, "I'm not doing anything. I'm just 'being with.' I'm just being with, and this stuff is coming up. I wasn't doing anything. I was just sitting on my sofa, and then I was just 'being with.' I was just mindful," whatever. But subtly wrapped up in the so-called 'being with' is something -- views, subtle views, subtle reactivity, subtle clinging, subtle identification (maybe not so subtle), interpretations of what's going on -- all that feeding the process endlessly, endlessly and unquestioned.

So I can have a sense and it can really feel in practice like I'm just not doing -- awareness is just passively receiving experience. Partly what the deep teachings of dependent arising are saying is: is that even possible? Is it even possible to be in a state of passivity, passively open and receiving experience without interfering or inputting in any way, non-doing? To me, 'non-doing' is a little bit of an illusion, actually. We can feel like we're non-doing, but actually there's something subtle that's spinning that wheel of dependent arising, that's feeding into that fabricating. There is always an interpretation of experience. And it could be a gross interpretation -- big papañca story about my past and my mother and my grandmother and heaven knows what. It could be much, much subtler. So even when we say "bare attention," there's still an interpretation. Even when we say "stay at contact," there's still a subtle interpretation there, an object and a subject and time. Subtle. We'll get more into this next week. There's always a subtle interpretation. There's always a subtle view, at least a subtle view. And there's always a subtle doing. And as such, our experience of the world is always actually an activity. Going back to what Harriet said some time ago, "I feel like I'm existing things." It's active. The notion of a passive, receiving awareness doesn't actually hold together that well.

I really, really want to stress this, really emphasize this: both views, again, are helpful. The view of self, the view of past wounds, the view of meeting those wounds with kindness and holding them, and even releasing them, and them leaving us somehow -- really, really helpful. Really important. I've felt that in the past in healing different things myself, and many, many times with others. And the view, "Actually, that's not quite what's going on." Both views, really helpful. To be as inclusive as possible and actually see there's truth both sides. And can I have a practice that includes that?

Must also admit, if we're being really honest, sometimes, that healing -- and especially healing emotionally -- is often a kind of drama that centres around me. It's me and my story. And there's a place for that, but let's face it: it's often the drama of me. And let's face it again: we have something in us that's attracted to the drama of me, and a little bit addicted to the drama of me. The emptiness view kind of lets go of that in terms of healing. But a question as practitioners: am I able to see it both ways? Am I able to approach it both ways? Am I fearless enough to approach it both ways? Meaning: do I have a kind of fearless willingness to meet my painful experience that feels like trauma, that feels like old woundedness? Can I actually just meet that as it is? And do I also have the fearlessness to let go of the views and say, "This might also be empty and a dependent arising"? There are different kinds of fearlessness that have to go both ways. We, as practitioners, can have both. We can develop both.

To me, that's the question: is there fearlessness both ways? Am I being completely honest with myself, either about what I may need to feel and face about my own past and the difficulties that were there, but also honest with what is or isn't ultimately real? Is that full spectrum of honesty there, and full spectrum of integrity there?

[55:40] So this dependent arising is, as the Buddha said, central to awakening. The Buddha said -- and I think I quoted this to you before -- "First there is the knowing, the understanding of dependent co-origination, dependent co-arising, then there is the knowing of nibbāna, of awakening."^[7] So this thing I keep emphasizing -- how the world is built, how the self and the world are built -- that's the understanding of dependent arising. And it's gross, how we build it when we're in a tantrum, how we build it every day in the normal, accepted reality of things, how we build it very subtly and subtler and subtler. So tantrum, anger, greed, selfing, agitation -- they are builders of the self and the world, and they also bring with them less and less clarity. They're states of mind that have less clarity with them. Love, compassion, generosity, samādhi, equanimity build less. They're actually states that build less.

So all states of mind build; some states of mind and heart build more than others. Anger, greed, all that, build more than love and compassion and samādhi. At first with samādhi it really feels like you're building something: "I'm building this calmness and this well-being, and ooh, look at that," and there's a lot of huff and puff and everything. Actually, it's a less built state, and it also builds less, as we said in the talk on samādhi, in terms of the sense of self and the sense of the world. It's building less, all those factors. And also they all bring -- love, compassion, generosity, equanimity, samādhi -- all bring with them more clarity. As such, the movement of cultivating beautiful qualities is actually integral to the movement towards awakening, because they bring more clarity, they build less, and they are less built. So something inherently in that movement of understanding dependent arising and deconstructing.

Let's just talk a little bit about compassion. When we practise compassion, if you really go deeply into compassion practice, there are different levels, so to speak, of it. You can discover this for yourself -- it's a natural evolution -- but it's also in texts by Chandrakīrti, etc.^[8]

(1) The first level is a level we hear about more often. It's like, this being is suffering, there's a being there that's suffering, and I can give compassion to that suffering being. Very everyday level of compassion.

(2) But there's also what's called compassion to beings qualified by impermanence, meaning: what would it be to actually be aware of this person's death, of their mortality? You're thinking of this being, and seeing them, and aware of their death. What happens to the compassion at that point? It will deepen it, the sense of their fragility, their mortality. You can either use very fine, fast, microscopic -- what happens when I see you as just flickering, flickers? And even that, too, will allow more compassion, strangely enough.

Sometimes when you really go deep in compassion practice, without any trying to do anything, you get a sense: what am I actually compassionate towards? In a sense, it's kind of mind moments of suffering. This mind moment of suffering, this mind moment, this perception/consciousness conglomerate of suffering -- that's what it is that's going on when there's samādhi there and I think of the other person. It's just that. It's just these moments of that. And tuning into that rather than the person actually increases the compassion. So not seeing it in terms of self, but seeing it in terms of stream of mind moments, the impermanence there.

(3) Then a third level of compassion is compassion to beings qualified by emptiness. What would it be to actually, in the compassion practice, contemplate -- at the same time as the compassion -- contemplate the emptiness of that being? We talked yesterday about some of the ways the body is empty. I think of my friend and see her body is not actually separate from the universe. It's kind of permeable with the universe in the way the breath and all the molecules that made up the body were from a supernova somewhere. We share that, actually. The calcium in our bones comes from the same supernova, probably. We are permeable with the universe in terms of food, water, air, everything I said yesterday.

And, even more than that, our mental aggregates are also inseparable from the universe. I can't perceive anything without a world that I'm perceiving. I can't have vedanā, [knocks on floor] the feeling of the floor, the feeling of this, of that, of the coolness of the wind, "I like it, I don't like it." My very mentality is not separate from the universe. When you contemplate this in the compassion, you get the sense of there is not a separate person there. My friend, who I may love dearly and I may struggle with and I argue with -- actually, I have a different view of her in that moment, and it's almost like she dissolves into the universe. As I said yesterday, she's actually infinite. She's infinite. She's also not separate from past or future. I cannot find a separation there. Her nature, in one way of looking, is infinite. She's full of the universe. She's also unfindable as a separate thing in different ways. And strangely that unfindability increases the love and the compassion.

That might be surprising, that if I can't find you, I love you more. [laughter] But that's the way it goes. Emptiness touches the heart in that way. If I'm angry at you and I can't find you, I might be glad. [laughter] But to love you already some, and then contemplate that I can't find you, and the love just goes deeper. Finding ways to bring this in. I realize I'm throwing a lot out, and sometimes I realize people think, "I can't possibly do any of this," but we can. We can be more creative in our practice than we might imagine, and to play with it and just have fun with practice, and try this and try that without, as I said, going back to the opening talk, doing too much trying of this and that. But play with a few things -- if not on this retreat, another time.

All right, I need to finish. So just a few things. The relationship of emptiness and equanimity is probably more obvious to people. It's probably more obvious that when there's a sense of emptiness it brings equanimity into our loving, a kind of evenness and stability and more spaciousness there. Sometimes, often hopefully, we want to do something in the world that's helpful, either for one person or for a group of people or for humanity. And so we act, and then we look: what are the effects of my action? Has it been helpful? And oftentimes we feel like it hasn't. It hasn't made any difference. Just on a mundane level -- just, for instance, here on a retreat, John or I could say something about samādhi, and you find it really helpful, and we feel "Great!", and there's pleasure there. But maybe if that goes into grasping or a kind of carelessness or a lack of investigation, that very pleasure, what seemed to be the effect -- "Great! I'm really happy!" -- actually turns out not to be so good in the long run.

And vice versa -- you might be struggling. And I know, in different ways, as I said right at the beginning of this retreat, it's challenging. I know it's challenging in lots of different ways. People are challenged. It might feel I'm throwing something out, "Oh, people are challenged. It's difficult. I want it to be helpful," and people get angry and whatnot. If I can see if there's a way of relating to that difficulty and that negativity, and if one's relating to it with mindfulness, with letting go, with investigation, then actually positivity has come out of it. So not to read something immediately in terms of the effects of our actions. It could be for one person who's having difficulty, could be for a group, could be for the planet. Hard to see, hard to see what actually is the effect. Is there one effect? Is there such a thing as inherently existing effect of my kind intentions, of my good actions? There isn't. I cannot find it.

I do an action with a good intention to try and help a person or a group of people or the wider humanity, whatever it is, and what actually happens is the ripples of that action ripple out like on a lake, ripple out, and they interact with other ripples. They always are interacting. They cannot be independent. So what happens here, it will ripple with future teachings that you hear or don't hear, future practices that you do or don't do, future attitudes that you have or don't have, other meetings, everything. It has to have this confluence of a future rippling. And, in a way, it ripples out into an infiniteness, an infinity, an unknowability of what the fruits, the effects of our actions are.

I'll just finish. I know, again, there's a lot in talks, and it's impossible, and I don't expect anyone to be taking in every word. And if you feel you have, if you really listen to the CD, you will notice that you really, really haven't. [laughter] It's impossible. As I said, and it could be completely the wrong choice, and I'm aware of that, and I apologize if it's the case, but I really do intend my talks for ten plus listenings. The idea is, "Here, have a going-away present. There's lots of stuff here you will discover later." So it's fine, it's really fine. And as I said, it might be the wrong choice, and I apologize if it is, but that's more and more the way I feel about when I teach. And there are so many people here, so much drifting in and out of consciousness, wakefulness, so many different backgrounds, so many different propensities, inclinations, practice backgrounds, teaching backgrounds.

Yogi 3: I think of them, Rob, as time-release capsules. [laughter]

Rob: Oh, yes, okay, good. Good. Yeah. In a way, that's similar to my image of seeds, you know? Absolutely. Some you'll get right now; it will click. Others you won't even be there. It's fine. It's all fine. But just to finish tonight. Compassion -- I feel that, as human beings, something deep down in us, we may be really in contact with it. It may be burning in our hearts. It may not feel so prominent. Something in us longs for compassion, longs to live with compassion, to live giving love, to live in a way of giving. We long for that. It's deeply important to us as human beings. And that compassion needs the kind of equanimity (among other things) that comes from emptiness. Emptiness feeds compassion in the most beautiful and complete way.

So if I'm interested in that -- a life of love, a life of generosity, a life of selflessness, a life that the self isn't at the centre stage all the time, the centre of preoccupation, a life unbound in that sense, a life of service -- if I'm interested in that, if a part of me is interested in that, then the more I can go into emptiness, the wider and deeper I can go into emptiness, the more that is possible, a real possibility. In the Mahāyāna, they have this word bodhicitta. It means 'the heart of awakening.' You get lots of different translations. They talk about ultimate bodhicitta and relative bodhicitta. Ultimate bodhicitta is the realization of emptiness, and relative bodhicitta is the heart's deep inclination and longing to live and practise in a way for the sake of others, for the sake of all sentient beings and not just oneself -- including oneself, but for all sentient beings. That's relative bodhicitta, this giving away, this doing this for the sake of others.^[9]

But they say that the ultimate bodhicitta, the realization of emptiness to whatever degree, is what allows the fullness of the relative bodhicitta. Seeing the emptiness allows the fullness of our giving, the fullness of our abandon in life, the fullness of our selflessness. That's what opens that up, as I said at the beginning. Why? What is it? You hear about bodhisattvas and these extraordinary beings and just living lives of service, etc. What allows that? It's because when the self and time and suffering, all that is seen as empty, unburdening, unburdening -- it's an unburdening. I don't feel like I'm holding it. I don't even feel like there's anything to hold. And as I said at some point in a talk, even seeing suffering as empty brings more compassion. Strange, but it does. Everything is unburdened, and in that, it releases more space, more capacity. Huge space, huge capacity. Delight. That dedication of merit that people do, and sometimes it sounds kind of alien, it's like this throwing away is all part of that movement. That feeds the emptiness; the emptiness feeds that. A snowball, a beautiful snowball. The fullness of dedication, fullness of giving is just allowed more and more and more.

Okay. I'm going to stop there. Let's have a quiet minute together.