Transcription
I hope that you're feeling that in the interviews, individual or group interviews, and in the instructions, that you're kind of being met where you are, that wherever you are in terms of what's going on in your experience is being shared and met and addressed through the interviews and through the instructions. And in a way, sometimes the talk in the evening -- not always, but sometimes that allows the talk in the evening to kind of address questions of the bigger picture. Not necessarily where am I at, this thing right now that I'm dealing with, this or that experience. So both of those are obviously very important. This footstep, this step that I'm taking right now and the terrain right here under my feet matters very much, but also the map. The map of the territory, the direction, etc., that also matters. And I would like to go into some of that, the map, tonight. A part of the map, if you like. Actually some of the deeper dimension of the map. And so, for a talk like this, in a way, there's no pressure. You can just listen spaciously. We're talking about the bigger picture, so there's no pressure.
But this business of the footstep and the map is actually quite significant for us in particular in this tradition, the Insight Meditation tradition. As human beings, in our life, off retreat, but particularly on retreat, and on a retreat like this, we just sit, walk -- there's very little distraction, and of course what I am confronted with most of the time is my experience. That's what I run into. That's what I meet most of the time, is my experience. The experience of the inner phenomena, mind, body, and the experience of the immediate environment -- in this case, this retreat and the people on the retreat and the form etc. And I hope also that you feel like you're learning to meet the experience of the moment. That's one of the real strengths of Insight Meditation tradition and practice is that we start right there: what's going on? And then we try and meet that, and we try and learn how to meet that well. So that's a real strength, that rather than getting into lots of abstract stuff, we're dealing with learning how to meet the experience. It's a real strength.
It's also a weakness. Both. Because it might be, and actually it often is the case, we don't see the wood for the trees. We're so dealing with this experience, then that experience, then that experience, that something happens that we don't actually see the bigger picture so well. So it can be a weakness. And I know plenty of long-term practitioners, I'm talking years and years, even decades, have said to me after a while, "I thought actually that insight meditation practice" -- and they hear about foundations of mindfulness -- "I thought that basically you could sum it up by just saying kind of 'be with whatever's happening. Try and open to whatever's happening, and if you can feel stuff in the body that's great. So kind of be in the body, and kind of open to and be with.'"
But that's only a part. It's only a part of it. It's a very important part, but it's only a part. And something else happens: that through that (and very understandable that one would have that perception of things), through that a certain view gets kind of encrusted over time. And it's a view about reality. We practise mindfulness, and you can see, being with, and things start to disentangle a little bit, things start to calm a little bit. Equanimity might come -- a little bit, or a lot. All of which is great. You can also see that with the practice of mindfulness, we've been talking about it, we get this idea, "Oh, yes, okay. So when I'm mindful, in a way I'm taking away the tendency to bring a story to everything and complicate everything." And this word papañca, to proliferate, to make complicated with my story and my whole thinking about. And the very fact, the very activity of mindfulness calms that. We tend to think, and this is where the view comes in, we tend to think, "Ah, yes, then what I'm really doing in practice is I'm being with what is. I'm being with" -- and you may have heard these words -- "'what is' or 'things as they are.'" These are kind of buzzwords. "I'm being with things as they are." And one gets a sense that that's the kind of point. That's the point of practice. But that is not the point of practice. It's absolutely not the point of practice.
The Buddha is very, very clear in his teaching: he wants us to realize something, to understand something. Something not just about being with, but about understanding something. A couple of hundred years after the Buddha died, another teacher in India, Nāgārjuna -- probably the second, after the Buddha, the most influential Buddhist teacher, sometimes called the Second Buddha. And in his most seminal, famous work, one passage, one verse says:
Without recourse to the ultimate truth [without arriving at the ultimate truth],
Nirvāṇa [or liberation, awakening] is not attained.[1]
Without arriving, without recourse to the ultimate truth, nirvāṇa is not attained. And in the following verses, he goes on to say, "And because this is something quite difficult to see, the Buddha almost didn't teach," which is a famous piece of the myth.
So practice actually has many, many aspects. We're talking about the big picture now. Practice has many aspects, beautiful aspects: the cultivation of what is beautiful in the heart, the beautiful qualities; the opening of the being; the opening of the consciousness, of the body, all of that. The journey of self-discovery. How beautiful, to know ourselves and the ways we are, the patterns, the difficulties we get into. And also the healing that comes with all of that. All this is part of practice. And we're moving towards or deepening an understanding -- not an intellectual understanding, but an understanding that brings freedom. So practice is very wide. It's hugely wide, what's involved in practice, beautifully wide. And if we could say, its deeper thrust is towards this, what Nāgārjuna is calling the ultimate truth: wanting to understand, see, realize, the ultimate truth of things.
So sometimes, and many of you have been around a little while, some of you not so long, a person says, "Yes, I see that, and my understanding of what the ultimate truth is," a person might say, "is it's this ego, this self, that's the problem." Maybe you've heard something around that before, and maybe you accept it, or maybe that makes sense to you, or maybe you haven't, and you don't quite accept it. But that's oftentimes a sort of taken for granted piece of knowledge for people who've been practising for a while.
Now, very often, when we hear something like that -- "Ah, yes, what I'm really moving towards is to somehow get rid of the self or something" -- a person can pick this up and decide the ego is bad, the self is bad. And then they find themselves catching themself getting up to mischief, and the ego puffing itself up, or this or that, and they're sort of in hindsight berating themselves or just kind of tutting at the ego. But actually that's not that helpful, to see it that way. That way of looking doesn't really liberate anything. Maybe more helpful is to look and see that there is actually nothing I can find, there's nothing I can point to, nothing I can see -- when I look inside at everything that could be my self, I can't find anything continuous or permanent. This self feels continuous and permanent, and yet, when I look for it, I can't find it. And so I might conclude, "Well, there's no self." That would be a much better beginning, beginning of this journey towards ultimate truth. But really where it's going in terms of the self is an understanding that the self is illusory. It's an illusion. In other words, as human beings, we have the experience of self. We feel the self. It's almost the most obvious fact of my existence, this feeling, this experience of self. I feel it, I experience it, and it's illusory. Something in that ...
Now, what I want to emphasize tonight as well is, yes, that's part of it, and what is true of the self, this illusion of self, despite its appearance and experience, is true of all things. They appear, but they're illusory. And technically, in Dharma language, we say they're empty. They're empty -- that's the same as saying they're illusory. Why is that significant? It might sound abstract. Why is that significant? Here's a quote from Nāgārjuna again:
Wherever there's belief that things are real,
Desire and hatred spring up unendingly;
[And] unwholesome views are entertained
From which all disputes come.
Indeed this is the source of every view;
Without it no defilement can occur.
Thus when this is understood,
All views and all afflictions vanish entirely.
But how may this be known?
It is said that when one sees that all things are dependently produced [or dependently arisen],
One sees that all such things are free from birth.
I'll read that line again, because that's what we're going to go into a little bit: "It is said that when one sees that all things are dependently produced [or dependently arisen], one sees that all such things are free from birth." In other words, they're illusory. "This, the Supreme Knower of Truth [that's the Buddha] has taught."
So, a person might hear this and say, "Yeah, but I'm not that drawn to this idea of nirvāṇa or awakening or enlightenment." And of course there's always a mix: some people are attracted by that, and some people are really not. But basically, what's also being said is, the more we see this and the more we understand this, the more freedom there is. So I don't have to think about this word nirvāṇa or whatever; it's just, the more I see this, the more I open to this and realize it, the more freedom and the less suffering there will be in my life. That's all. All things, self and all objects -- inner objects, emotions, thoughts, moods, perceptions -- and outer objects. All things. And the Buddha says in the Sutta Nipāta, sarvam idam māyam, "all this is illusion." All this is illusion. Not just this self, but all this is illusion.
We have to actually be careful a little bit here, because there are levels of teaching. There are levels of teaching. So this is obviously what we call the ultimate level of teaching, and there's a conventional level of teaching (actually they're not even that black and white). We have to be clear what level we're talking on at different times; otherwise it gets kind of irresponsible a little bit.
This emptiness teaching may not always be the appropriate teaching. In other words, here's some particular suffering, and if I just come and say to you, "Ah, it's empty," maybe that's exactly right, and maybe it's really, really not appropriate. It's not the right thing. It's not the right view. It's not the right take that needs to happen. So there's really a question of skilful means and appropriateness here. And this whole journey, it's a real journey of understanding, and something incredibly profound, to begin to understand this, and then the understanding goes deeper and deeper and deeper. It's a profound journey, and it doesn't (almost ever) happen at once.
And so tonight, you know, there's not time to go into detail, so I just want to paint a big picture, talk more generally. And generally speaking, there are different ways of approaching or developing, entering this understanding, this realization. So just to name four right now, and they're kind of four main ones, very broadly speaking.
(1) One we touched on already a little bit is that, say if we take the self, for example, when I look for it, I can't find it. Now, that seems obvious: you're looking, and here's Rob, or I look, and there's Robert, there's Catherine. It seems obvious, "Well, the self is there." But when I really look at whatever it is, or the microphone, I can't find it. Things are unfindable in their essence, or the essence of things is unfindable.
So I'm going to lay out these four, and I'm only going to pick one and elaborate on it a little bit (that's the last one). So I'm just mentioning that right now. Any possible place this self could be, I can't find it there. Any possible location for it or essence of it, I cannot find.
(2) Second possibility is actually using logic. And this is very not popular in this tradition, but some traditions really use logic a lot. And you actually find that it's logically impossible for things to exist in the way they so obviously seem to exist. It cannot be that way. (I'm not going to go into this either; I'm just mentioning it.) Sometimes people shy away from that because it feels like where there's logic, there can't be heartfulness: "They are completely separate domains. They have to be." Maybe that's not true. If I'm going to the beach with friends on a sunny summer day, and we get in the car, and we're in the car on the way to the beach, and the car journey, maybe it's hot, and it's crowded, and there's certainly no sea there, and there's no sand, and there's no big blue sky, but when I get to the beach, then I have the sand and the big blue sky. So this, sometimes practice, if we talk about the logic, it's a journey, but when I use it in practice it liberates something. Something is released through the seeing of the emptiness, and the heart is released and opened. So I'm just mentioning that in case you run into it at different times.
(3) Third possibility is through the intuition or an intimation of this illusory nature of things, of emptiness. Sometimes it's not, definitely not about logic at all. Something resonates. Something speaks to one. It could be a poem. It could be through another person. Could be just through our own practice. We're getting a sense of some deeper dimension of existence, an intimation of it, a whisper of it, and it's speaking to the heart and opening something, and opening a possibility of freedom. And we're not even quite sure what it is or how that's working, but it's calling the heart. It's calling something. And that's definitely a possibility.
(4) And the fourth one, and the one I want to elaborate on a little bit tonight, is seeing how things are fabricated, constructed, and concocted. I think Jenny touched on this a little bit the other night. And this involves understanding our meditative experience. Not just having meditation experiences, whatever they are, good ones (so-called) or bad ones (so-called), but actually understanding them. What is going on, that I go through all these experiences? So this is what I want to elaborate on.
Because we begin to see something. If we're looking the right way, if we're asking the right questions, we begin to see something about our experience, and actually not just meditation experience. I begin to see, for instance -- have you noticed? -- when there is some issue, when I'm caught with something and I'm grappling and "ugh," there's an issue there, that in that time when there's an issue, the self-sense and the sense of the issue, the object, are magnified, solidified. There's a lot of sense of separation. The separate self gets built and made very intense. It's constructed, it's fabricated, through my wrestling with an issue. Through reactivity, the self and the object get built up, and they reinforce each other. The reactivity is what the Buddha called "the seamstress." It's stitching the two together and inflating them, pumping them up, through reactivity, their appearance. Something goes on all day like that, all day, meditation or non-meditation, and if I only can look and see that that's happening.
Have you also noticed, another -- related, but another way in: that the view we have of ourselves at any time, the way that I see myself and feel myself, have you seen how different that can be? It's so different, the self-view, dependent on, for instance, the mood. So when there's a lot of love in the heart, how different the self-view from when there's a lot of irritation, self-judgment, etc. How much the self-view depends on perspective, as well, on the assumptions we're having, on the beliefs we have. All this -- assumptions, beliefs, reactivity, perspective, mind state, heart state -- all this conjures a certain view of self in that moment. And we fall for it hook, line, and sinker. I believe that's me. Not to mention cultural factors, in terms of beliefs and assumptions -- spiritual beliefs, psychological, psychotherapeutic beliefs. All this is building something, and the reactivity.
And I begin to see: the way of looking matters more than anything. The most important thing there is is the way of looking. When there's a lot of mindfulness, I'm looking at things, I'm relating to things in a certain way. When there's a lot of mettā, loving-kindness, I'm looking, I'm relating in a certain way. When there's a lot of letting go, when the push and pull and the tussle with experience has died down, or [is] dying down, I'm looking, I'm relating to things in a certain way. And you start to see: what a range of how I feel the self, dependent on the way of looking! And not just the self, but whatever object I'm looking at, whatever situation, whatever event, whatever thing, inner or outer. Which is the real self? Which is the real one? Which is the real thing, the real event? It moves, and the more I meditate, the wider the range through which it moves, through the most sublime and beautiful, to quite contracted and difficult and solid and tormented. Which is the real one?
But it's not just how it moves, or that it moves from this to that, and I say, "Well, which one's real, that one or that one? Or the one in the middle, or that one there?" It's also how much the self appears as something separate at all, how much it gets built as a sense, as a separate sense. Or the object, the perception of the thing -- not just that it moves, but its very appearance is dependent on my way of looking. Its very coming together as a thing is dependent on my way of looking. So the perception, the experience, the appearance of self and objects is dependent on the mind, dependent on the way of looking and the way of being with. And we say, again, in technical language, we say a thing or the self is empty of independent existence. It doesn't exist independent of my way of looking, of the mind.
And again, why is this significant? Is this just abstract? Why am I going on about this? Because suffering depends on reality belief, as Nāgārjuna said. Suffering depends on believing in the reality of self and thing, whatever 'thing' is. It depends on that. Without that, I know it's an illusion. And the suffering can't stand; it has nothing to lean on. The Buddha is saying everything is fabricated, everything is conjured and illusory like this -- everything, everything, everything -- by the mind, by the way of looking. There is no basic reality. There is no basic way things are. It can seem like there is. It can really seem like there is, and in practice it can seem like there is. And as I was saying, the more we're mindful, we let go of a story, we feel like, "Now I'm just with this sensation, just as it is. I'm just with this emotion, just as it is; with this sound, etc." It seems like that. But that's only a stage in practice.
It's only a stage, that we feel like we're contacting some basic ground of reality. And it would be a huge, huge shame as practitioners and as human beings if we never get beyond that stage, and we end up just believing in this level of reality that's a given. Because mindfulness does not reveal the way things are, as they are. It does not, and nor does equanimity. Something much more mysterious starts happening the deeper I go into these practices, much more mysterious -- much more interesting, in fact.
So the most fundamental fact about anything at all, and the most fundamentally important fact about anything at all, any experience at all, is that it is dependent on how I'm looking, how I'm aware of it. And as I said, that means it's empty. And that's the most fundamental and fundamentally important fact about anything. So we talk, I and all the teachers, we talk about 'what is,' and 'being with what is,' and 'opening to what is,' and all that. But is what is, what is? What? [laughter] There is no objective reality that we arrive at. And if you know anything about, for instance, quantum physics, and the discoveries of the last century and ongoing, very similar discoveries. The way we look conjures what we see, at the most basic level of reality.
Imagine going into a room. There's a person in the room, and they've got their back on the wall in a lot of fear. You just enter this room, and this person is stuck there with fear. And you think, "What on earth's going on?" And they say, "There's a wolf in the room." And you look -- I don't think this is going to work! You look at the wall, and you see -- can we have a little technical special effects? [laughter] No? Okay, leave it.
Yogi: Turn the lights down!
Rob: Just try the bottom ones at first, Annie, if you would, please. The bottom ones, yeah, thanks. Okay, let's try this. Aahhhh, it's a wolf! [laughter] Okay, and this person is terrified of the wolf. Can everyone see this scary wolf? [laughter] And you say, "Well, what's going on?" They say, "There's a wolf, but I'm being with the wolf. I'm being with the wolf, and I'm being with my fear, and I'm practising mindfulness, and I'm being with it." And you say, "... Okay." [laughter] And they're not seeing their other hand [creating the shadow of the wolf]. They're not seeing their other hand. They're stuck looking at the wolf. It's a silhouette, the hand shadow. If you're listening to this on tape, I was playing with a light and a hand shadow, and a terrifyingly realistic impression of a wolf. [laughter] They don't see their other hand. They don't see the fabrication that's going on, because I'm stuck looking at the wolf.
Maybe 'being with' this wolf and being with my process with the wolf, maybe equanimity comes, and maybe patience comes. But ultimately the suffering won't be undermined. It won't be cut at the deepest level. Maybe I'm with the wolf and the wolf disappears. And maybe -- could we have the lights again? [laughter] Sorry, Annie. It's a busy night for you! Okay, the wolf disappears, and then a bunny rabbit comes! [laughter] Nice bunny rabbit. There we go. [laughter, applause] Thank you. And then bunny rabbit, aahhhh, huge relief. It's a bunny rabbit. How lovely! And basically what happens is phew, relief.
But something has not been learnt. I haven't learnt anything. Just the next experience comes, without asking: how is it that the wolf appeared? How is it that the wolf disappeared? How is it that the bunny rabbit appeared and the bunny rabbit disappeared? And me, or you, as a person walking into that room, what's the most compassionate response? What's the most compassionate thing to say to this person? "Keep being with it"? Or "It's impermanent"? Or kind of, you know, "Maybe it's something releasing"?
And this is where we go back to this thing about appropriateness. Don't forget what I said about that. But ultimately speaking, what's the most compassionate thing? We can learn to see the concocting, and that is the main purpose of meditation practice. The main, if we talk about the deeper thrust, it's to learn to see this concocting. If we do that, I don't know if some of you maybe had the thought, "Oh, that means it's my fault, because I'm projecting this and I'm doing that." And then there can come some judgment: "Oh, you're saying suffering is my fault." No, because not only is the self not real enough to be found fault with, but also this process of concoction is just what consciousness does. It's what consciousness does. It's the way it works. Please remember as I say all this, there's something about timing. When is the right time to tell this person? When is the appropriate time to share with this person and point out to them, "Can you see your other hand? Can you see the process that's going on?"
Oftentimes, as human beings, we're invested in something here, we're invested somehow in that projection, even if it's the wolf somehow. And there are all kinds of reasons for being invested, many possible reasons. Sometimes it's to do with we're attached to a certain identity, of a victim, or a hero who bravely stands up to the wolf, goes through all that. Or attached to assumptions about the causes of suffering, or what 'deep work' means, or what reality is. There are all kinds of reasons. And maybe in pointing it out, a person gets angry. They're maybe not ready, not ready to realize what's happening with the other hand. But in the long run, in the big picture, there's something about fullness of questioning here. There's something about fearlessness, and there's something about integrity. And that whole thing, and the balance of that, could be easily a whole talk. But as I said, I'm just talking generally tonight.
So even in hearing that and seeing the little projection of the wolf and all that, we say, "Yeah, okay, I kind of get that." And please relate this to your own experience. Where can you see this happening? So not just the deep end, but this happens at every level of meditation practice and life. And you say, "Yeah, okay, I can kind of see that in certain situations." But so often there's an assumption: "Yeah, I see that wolf is constructed. That's easy. And I see this pattern that I have, that I'm constructing something." But behind it, we assume, almost always -- in fact, always -- we assume that something is not constructed. "That's constructed, but there's something that's not constructed. There's some simple, direct contact with basic reality that's possible." It's not only papañca that's fabricated, that's conjured. Or we think, "It's only papañca. It's only when I go off in a loop." The Buddha's saying more than that. His meaning of papañca is much broader than we tend to talk about. He means everything. And like I said, it can seem like we contact a basic reality, but it's only a stage. So everything, all experience is fabricated, conjured, concocted, whatever word we want to use. And the mind that conjures, fabricates, concocts -- that also is an illusion. There's no basis to this illusion. Sarvam idam māyam: all this is an illusion.
The Buddha has a sutta. I'll paraphrase a bit and then read. He's basically saying, if you look at anything, anything that makes up what we could take to be ourselves, or anything that makes up anything in reality at all, if you look at it deeply enough and closely enough, you see it's void of essence. It's empty of essence. There's nothing really there. So he says, materiality, you look deeply, and it's like a mass of foam, like just foam -- it's nothing, materiality, body, and this solid reality. Vedanā, this thing that we talked about, he said it's like an airy bubble. Perception, the experience of seeing things and this and that, he said perception is like a mirage. You know, that vision that's in the desert, it's an illusory vision. Formations, the patterns that we have, particular difficulties or moods or thoughts or intentions, mental formations, are like a plantain tree. We probably don't understand that one! It's if you peel the bark of a plantain tree, you don't get to anything solid inside. I look to find the reality, like I said earlier, and there's nothing there. And consciousness, he said, is a magic show. Consciousness is a magic show, a juggler's trick entirely.[2]
What does this mean? It means, if we say 'consciousness,' it means the whole process of being conscious, the whole process of knowing anything, of sensing anything, is an illusion, is a magic trick. He's gone through everything that makes up what we call reality and ourselves -- everything: mental, physical, everything. And he said in one way or another, it's basically an illusion, a magic trick. It's a beautiful image. A magician's conjuring, the totality of everything in experience. And even things -- and this gets elaborated more in the later teachings, in the Mahāyāna -- even things like time, which we take as a given. As Einstein said, "Time is nothing but a stubbornly persistent illusion." This is also something -- even the 'now' seems so basic.
So when the Buddha talks about avijjā, it usually gets translated as 'ignorance' or 'delusion.' What he really means at root is what we could call 'realism': the belief, the feeling, the intuition that things are real. At the root level, that's what he means by 'delusion.' It's realism. And that realism is a feeling and a sense we have that's woven into perception. In other words, I don't intellectually think such-and-such is real; I feel it's real, without even thinking anything. The way I see it is as real. And we have a compulsion for realism. In other words, I find it very hard to let go of this sense and this belief that things are real. And on that stands suffering. On this compulsion of realism, I keep coming back, like a magnet, to wanting things to be real and believing they're real. And on that rests all suffering.
So that's ignorance and delusion. In contrast, there's wisdom or awakening, and that is this realizing or understanding of the emptiness, of the illusory nature. And that's, what we could say, it's the opposite of common sense. Common sense feels like everything is real. That's common sense. Wisdom is uncommon sense.
As human beings, like I said, we have this compulsion, so we want to leave something real. We want something to be real. We find it very hard -- we want something as ground. And that's a kind of clinging, to cling to something as ground, not trusting the freedom and the bliss of groundlessness, of nothing being real. And the complete openness of perspective and movement, in a way, that that allows. And what is that? Either it's materiality -- I can't let go of a kind of scientific materialist view of material reality being undeniably real and everything being based on that. Or maybe a person can't let go of awareness or consciousness as being real, or presence, or being, or the flow of things, or whatever. Or the web of conditions, or the 'now.' Something -- we have this tendency to want to grasp to some way of looking as "This is it. This is it." And we try to say, "This thing," whatever it is, awareness or whatever, "that's not a thing, so it doesn't really count, what you're saying." But it's still in the realm of concept, in the realm of an experience that is based on concept.
Either explicitly or implicitly, we believe that things have independent existence. And I'll believe that about whatever this is that I'm clinging to: that they're objective somehow, independent, that they even exist in time. So this awareness that I believe in, if I believe that it exists in time, I'm giving it a reality it doesn't have -- the 'now,' whatever it is.
To see that everything is empty is something amazingly beautiful. And I know that saying all this is landing in very different places. Some people feel amazed, and the heart is really touched. And some people are horrified by what's being said. And some people are just not interested. It has to land in all those different places. But eventually there's something incredibly beautiful, of what opens up in seeing this. Hallelujah, hallelujah! Everything is empty. Everything is illusion. Hallelujah! This is a magic world. Hallelujah.
So, and now I'm talking to the very experienced practitioners in the room, where's your last fortress? Where's the last bastion of reality for you? Where are you trying to put it? Some notion of 'this is it'? In awareness? In being? In emptiness as something real? In Buddha-nature? In the Deathless or the Unfabricated? Saraha was a famous Buddhist tantric adept and yogi. I think he's from the eleventh century in India, but I'm not sure:
The self is void [empty], the world is void; heaven, earth, and the space between are void; in this bliss there is neither virtue nor sin [neither good nor bad].[3]
So there's a phrase the Buddha used. I'm not sure how much he used it, but he used it, and it's become very influential over millennia really. I'll say it in Pali: yathābhūtañānadassana. You can translate it something like 'knowledge and vision.' And then the important part is the yathābhūta, and it usually gets translated as 'knowledge and vision of things as they are.' But the part that has got kind of yanked out of that is the 'things as they are,' and turned into an idea that there is some basic reality, and the point of practice is to be with that basic reality through mindfulness, through stripping away projection. As I said, at best that can only be part of my practice approach and a stage that I go through.
But what the Buddha, I would say, really means by 'as they are' is that things -- 'knowledge and vision of things as they are' means knowledge and vision of the emptiness of things. That's how they are. The illusory nature of things. Seeing and understanding that. Not to get technical or grammatical, but bhūta is also the past participle of 'become,' so you could also say it's 'knowledge and vision of how things have become' -- in other words, like the little projection of the wolf, how that is getting projected, the process of fabrication, of concoction. Knowledge and vision of how things are dependently arisen. So when the Buddha talks about liberation, he's talking about this. He's talking about liberation from seeing and understanding this. This is what liberates at the deepest level. I can't remember where I saw it, but there's a little sort of poster, and it says, "Liberation comes from being where you are." But there is no 'where you are.' It can't come from that because it doesn't mean anything.
So how am I going to see and understand? How is that going to happen? How can I make this journey? How do we make this journey? Just picking up the fourth of these possibilities, like I said, the fabrication, seeing the fabrication: maybe meditation can be training, training ways of looking, ways of being with things, ways of relating and being aware of things, that begin to reveal how things get projected, how they dependently arise. And maybe that's what meditation is. We're learning different ways of looking, and seeing how each way of looking shapes a different reality that I perceive.
Maybe I can learn to project and fabricate less and less. Take away all the assumptions that are feeding into the fabrication more and more and more. And as I said, this doesn't, we don't arrive at some basic experience. That's not what will happen -- some basic sound or sight or emotion, "This is what's happening. This is how it is." So meditation as practising ways of looking that shatter the projection of reality, that shatter the illusion of independent existence. I'm learning how to look. And even mettā, for example, is something like that, because I move through different mind states, and I begin to see, like I said before: which is real? What's real here? What happens to my whole perception of things as the mettā gets really, really deep? Say we were on a one or two month mettā retreat, this would begin to be really, really strong. What is the reality? Because my whole sense of things goes through all kinds of different perceptions here.
Words like 'fabricate,' 'concoct,' they're really good words, because they have in English the notion of building something, but also the notion of something not quite real. We say "it's a fabrication, it's a concoction." So there's the implication in it that it's not real, which is good -- it really points to the meaning here. But does it make things worthless, that they're fabricated? Everything is fabricated. Does that mean everything is worthless? And some streams of Buddhist teaching basically go there: all this is saṃsāra, and basically the job is to get out of all this by seeing the illusion. All this is kind of worthless -- it's just body and ...
But does it have to be such a duality? Maybe fabricating things, concocting things is not the problem. The problem is ignorance that they are fabricated. And if I know that the nature of things is magical, if I know that everything is magical and the process of making things is magic, then I might be free in a world of magic. And I'm free to create and conjure this and that, and I don't have to denigrate things.
So this is a journey. Like I said, it's a journey. You can see this at the simplest level, just when, for instance, you're really, really upset about something, and then after a while, you get less upset, and you compare the views of self and the thing when there was upset, and when there isn't upset. And you begin to see: what's real here? And question. And then it just goes deeper from there. You don't even need to meditate to see that much. And that basic thread of insight just goes deeper and deeper and deeper, and more and more subtle. The understanding evolves. It can evolve.
This is the best thing. It's the best thing to understand. Seeing, understanding this way, it makes an immense freedom possible in life. And also, as I said, the freedom to play with the magic. The freedom to take on this view or that view, to look this way and that way without getting locked in. To play in the realm of magic. To play in the realm of self-view. And it's available to us. It's something that is available to us as human beings, if we want it. So no one, and I'm not saying, and I don't think anyone has ever said, "You have to do this. You have to understand this. You have to explore this." So I'm not saying that, and I don't think the Buddha said that either. I'm very aware of how the inner critic can come in hearing stuff like this. But it's available to us, if the heart is called, if there's something that's spoken to here of a deeper mystery in life, of a deeper reality, we could say. If it's called, then it's available. And it's there for us. So there's something for the heart. It can sound abstract, but it's something for the heart.
