Transcription
I want to talk for a little bit, probably maybe even about an hour now, and I'll be done, and there'll be time for questions. So be comfortable, because probably about an hour length. I want to just recap where we've been. We're talking about emptiness kind of means 'illusory,' or 'illusion.' And there's a lot of depth to that, but we can begin at quite simple, almost obvious levels. And to take this thread of, 'illusory' means 'constructed.' The mind is constructing something. It's building. The mind is building something. It's fabricating something, and therefore it's illusory. And take this principle, this thread, and just start following.
We talked about blame as one of the ways that happens, one sees that whole process. Let's start following a little bit -- still quite simple, actually, but then we're going to end up going quite deep. And let's stay, for now, with the emptiness of self, this self-sense as illusory. But even within that, let's just speak, for now, about what I would call the personality level of the self. And there's a reason for just dwelling on that. Partly it's, meeting so many people, and listening to so many people, and for myself, knowing or seeing that nowadays, in our modern Western culture, in the safety of our current environment, most of the dukkha that arises for us in this culture, where we don't have famine and that kind of thing (... yet), is actually at the personality level. That's a lot of where people really, really struggle, and there's all kinds of pain and knots and difficulty wrapped up.
And I think that's actually different than at the time of the Buddha and the culture of the Buddha. The whole notion of self, the whole sense of self and personality -- they just didn't feel themselves or think of themselves in the way that we feel, now, is very natural to us. The whole sense of an independent self on a journey, with my story, and the complexity of psychological personality, feels very natural to us these days. Wasn't really there. That's a whole other thing, but just at this level of personality -- let's dwell on that a little bit, because again, here, what happens is we construct and crystallize self-view at the personality level.
So for example, when we talk about blame, that blame -- just recapping now -- that blame, very easily, about this incident, then becomes a more general conclusion about how I am or how that person is, their personality or whatever. So what was relative to one incident becomes more a general conclusion, a more pervasive kind of shame, sometimes. So what we get is a lot of self-definitions operating within the mind, within the psyche, at the level of the personality: "I am an angry person. I am a kind person. I am a loser. I am weak. I am wounded. I am passionate." These are definitions, ways we define ourselves at the level of personality. And we believe them. They're constructs, and we believe them, and then we're kind of tying ourselves into something.
Now, oftentimes, actually, these constructs are painful in themselves: "I'm a failure," or "I am" -- whatever it is. To think of oneself in a negative way is actually quite painful. But even when they're positive -- "I am fantastic. I am creative. I am" whatever it is -- even as a positive self-definition, it's binding something. It's wrapping something. It becomes a prison, even when it's positive. And we don't always realize that. What is fixed constricts our movement, constricts our freedom of expression, our freedom of seeing, etc.
Some of the ways we define ourselves are actually fairly obvious. And some of the ways are actually quite subtle, and we don't even realize that we're defining ourselves in these ways. Sometimes we repeat them to ourselves. We actually hear our own mind calling ourselves, or the inner critic or something, kind of, "You are" something, or "I am" something. Sometimes they're non-verbal. That's interesting too. And how am I going to expose and get clear and then get free of a kind of self-definition that's operating below the verbal level?
Sometimes it's not so much to myself that I define, but to others. It's in relationship. I tell people, "I'm like this. I'm like this. I'm like this." And sometimes it manifests -- again, it reveals itself in my behaviour or the roles I habitually end up taking in relationship to others or in little groups or communities. I always end up taking this role. I'm showing a certain character: "Hey, I'm the funny joker who's always getting things wrong," or whatever. It has a payoff, but it also has a cost.
Again, when that kind of thing is operating, when these self-definitions are operating, they will influence perception. They cannot help but influence the way we start seeing ourselves, others, and the world. They're not mutual, harmless factors. They're powerful in the way they shape our whole world. For example, if I have a negative self-definition, I start to focus on what is negative. Just that definition starts to orient the perception towards seeing what is negative, in line with that definition. And more than that, it starts to tint my perception. Things get coloured more negative because of the negative self-view, self-definition. And so I'm walking around in the world with that, if you like, way of creating perceptions, and channelling, looking, and thinking, and seeing, colouring it. And what happens? I'm culling (in inverted commas) 'evidence' for the very self-definition through it.
What have we got again? I've got a vicious circle. I've got this self-definition. I start seeing in line, and colouring perceptions to fit with that self-definition. It reinforces the self-definition, which makes the perception in that direction stronger, which reinforces the self-definition -- tight, bound tight. It's what I meant before: ways of looking, habitually, that tighten, exacerbate, or lock into place our dis-ease, and the self-sense, and the self-views that go with them.
Thankfully, we can practise with this, and begin shaking it up, opening it up, breaking it up. And actually, just simply sustaining a continuity of mindfulness, a continuity of awareness, does wonders here. It can do wonders here. Because if I'm able to sustain mindfulness -- you know, not exactly every moment, but generally speaking, over perhaps a day, like today, or more, or longer if you're on retreat or something, and there's generally quite a lot of mindfulness, it begins to reveal a lot of times where there's the absence of this quality by which I define myself. If I say, "I'm an angry person," I start to see, actually, there are plenty of times when I'm not angry, plenty of stretches of time when I'm not angry, plenty, plenty. Or the opposite: "I'm a kind person," or whatever it is. "I'm passionate. I'm creative," whatever, "I'm not creative. I'm a failure." You see there are times when that's not true.
You also see, one also sees times when the opposites are true. There's not just the absence of that quality, but the presence of its opposite. So if I think I'm kind or whatever, and that's how I define myself as a rigid view, I start to see moments where actually I'm not so kind, or vice versa, if I define myself as unkind. If the self-definition was really true, it'd have to be true all the time. That's what I am. How could it admit of other movements, other ranges? I start to see the gaps in things.
One of the benefits of doing it this way, through mindfulness, is that I'm not just replacing one view, like a negative view with a positive view, and trying to coax myself into believing that I'm actually this kind of person as opposed to this kind of person. The continuity of mindfulness will start revealing holes in everything. Everything's got gaps in it. I start to see: I can't really fix on anything very much. So it's not that a different self-view has then become rigid, and then I identify with that.
So again, practice, practice, practice. And for some of you, this may sound quite familiar. But it's really about practice. That's what will make the difference. That's what will open things up in freedom. So to begin with, just getting familiar with how this works in the mind, in the heart, in the psyche, it's like, where there is dis-ease, or when there is dis-ease, when you find yourself in pain in relationship to something, caught, trapped, with difficulty, you can actually ask: is there a self-definition wrapped up in this? That's actually a really, really helpful question to ask: is there a self-definition somehow wrapped in this? Is it supporting my dis-ease, my dukkha? And what is it? What is the self-definition that's perhaps lurking here? Sometimes it's really obvious, as I said. Sometimes it's not obvious at all. But it has a really important place in the fabrication, the construction of the dukkha.
I'm describing a practice now, so this is the second sort of main practice I'm describing. We won't do it, but I'm just throwing it out there for you to play with, if you like. I can also do something a little more thorough, which is: take my time, over time, maybe a few days, even, maybe longer, a few weeks, and just start to begin to notice and then list -- actually make a list on a piece of paper or a computer or whatever, of the ways that I notice that I define myself, of the self-definition. Actually make a list over time. Then there's the possibility of actually looking at that list. By making it, putting it on a piece of paper -- you know, 1 to 10 or 100, or whatever it is -- actually, it's externalized. It's out. Instead of just being so close inside that I can't even get perspective on it, it's out there, and I can get a sense of space and distance with it. That's priceless, really priceless.
So I can look at it with more of a sense of space and helpful distance. What, then, if I, as mindfully as I can, slowly, mindfully, start reading this list, and actually reading the self-definitions, the items? So I'm bringing mindfulness to what usually operates without much mindfulness. It's usually, these are programs, these are circuits. They go around and around and around, and mindfulness doesn't even get a chance to get in there. Externalizing it, articulating it, making it clear, and then bringing mindfulness to actually looking at this thing, slowly, starts to inject mindfulness in -- really, really helpful -- where there usually isn't mindfulness. And how does it feel as I read this, as I read through these definitions? Do they strike me as true or not true?
And then, possible -- and this is a great thing to do on retreat, if you're ever on retreat, to take this as a theme. Pick one. Pick one of these definitions, and take it as something to really keep your eye on, metaphorically. And try and develop the continuity of mindfulness, which we're doing anyway on retreat, and begin to notice the absences of this, when this quality is just not there, and the presences of the opposite. So simple. Really simple. If I don't do it, then it's just like, "Yeah, whatever." If I do it, it has a chance to actually work and break something up. So simple. Can be very, very powerful at this personality level, very powerful. Practice, practice, practice, practice. [13:41]
How does it feel to begin puncturing these self-definitions, puncturing holes in them, gaps in them? We see this thing is not so solid, so pervasive, so dense, so all-encompassing. How does that feel? There's a degree of liberation that comes, a space of ease, of relief, actually. It's really, really important to notice that. The noticing and the feeling of that relief is what allows insight to go deeper, so it's not just an intellectual process. You feel a degree of freedom with that. Really, really important.
Earlier this morning, we said sometimes it's very common to get afraid or for fear to arise when we talk about emptiness, and especially the deep end of emptiness and that kind of thing. This is a really good place to start. As I let go of the self-definition, perhaps it's imprisoning, and I can feel the freedom that comes from that. And that allows me, as I said this morning, just to trust the next step, because this little step that I just took felt freeing. If there is that [fear], which there is actually, for most people, in relation to emptiness, it's really helpful to start, very easy, and you're just following this thread. So that was the second one. Just a brief explanation.
Now, some of you know, some of you have experienced times, perhaps in meditation, or outside of meditation, where the whole personality just goes quiet, to some degree. Maybe there's a complete fading sometimes of the personality level of the self. All that goes quiet. All those propensities and patterns, everything just goes really quiet. It dies away through the power of the meditation or whatever else one's doing. Sometimes people say, "There was no self then. The self was gone, or I had an experience of no-self." Actually, I would say it's died down to some extent, and there's still a more subtle sense of self. We could it call it, instead of the personality level, the existential level of the self. That's still there, the sense of just a being here in contact with a world out there. Very simple, but still there. And the Buddha, the Buddha's teaching says that's also empty. That's also illusory. That level, too, is also a fabrication of the mind. Doesn't seem like it at the time. How am I going to see that? How am I going to see through that, too, even that level?
So, there are, summarizing one of the central themes of today, many ways of looking that we can develop that deconstruct the self. They actually take away the habitual ways that we build up the solidity, the separateness, the contraction of the sense of self, and also of the world. So instead of our usual, habitual ways of looking -- which tend, as I said, to construct, construct, and solidify -- these are actual ways we can practise that do the opposite. They deconstruct. They take away the construction.
Actually, mindfulness is one of those ways. We don't tend to think of mindfulness in this way, but that's actually partly what it's doing. We say, "Can you be with a thing more directly? Can you be with the sensation, or this emotion, or this sound, or whatever it is more directly, and not get so spun off in your interpretations, and the views, and the colourings, and the projections, and the stories, and the memories -- everything that comes to create this vortex?", so that with mindfulness, we're not building so much. So this principle is also operating even in basic mindfulness practice.
Thing is, we can just make it much more powerful than that. There's a possibility of going way deeper than that. And I just want to toy with one of these a little bit today. And actually, it's the easiest one for most people, but unfortunately, it's also probably the most limited. There are many, many possibilities of ways of looking one can develop in practice that are very powerful in the way they deconstruct the self and the world, and bring that profound sense of liberation and opening. The easiest, and perhaps the most limited, though, beyond mindfulness, is impermanence, the contemplation of impermanence. So that's what I want to just pick out a little bit today and develop a bit.
So what do I mean when I say, "Develop a way of looking"? Probably everyone in here is aware that things are impermanent, right? [laughter] It's not a staggering insight, is it? You know, one of my nieces is six or seven. It's like, probably, she's at that age where she, "Yeah! Things are impermanent. Everything's impermanent." Okay, so it's good to know that and to repeat that awareness, but this is something slightly -- just a subtle shift. It's not so much noticing that things/phenomena are impermanent, because that's relatively obvious. But what would happen if we developed a practice where you're sustaining a way of looking that's deliberately tuning into impermanence? That's what it's interested in, more than anything else -- more than the texture, or the intimacy with the experience, or being with it, or whatever. Just impermanence, change, change, change, flux. That's what we're deliberately sustaining a way of looking at.
So we're noticing impermanence, but deliberately remaining focused on that change, on that fluidity, tuning the attention into it repeatedly, staying with just the sense of the change, the sense of change, the sense of change, the sense of flow, of movement, of alteration. The perception of what they call anicca in the tradition: impermanence, change, flux, the birth and the death. That's what we're interested in. Everything's being born and then dying, born, birth, death, birth, death. That's what I keep tuning into, that level of my sense of things, the shifting textures, the dynamism of things, the fluidity itself. That's where I tune into and keep trying to come back to. [21:02] I don't have to force this to see something really fast. If some of you know, certain traditions put a lot of emphasis on seeing really, really fast impermanence. Actually, I can just let change reveal itself as fast as it is in the moment, and let that take me deeper and deeper. So check it out. Try this.
If you're really new, you may not even be familiar with the teachings of mindfulness or bare attention. So we tend to, for instance [rings bell] when ringing the bell, to really bring the attention to the texture of the sound, without ideas about, "It's a nice bell. It wonder if it came from Burma or Hackney or whatever." [laughter] It's just bringing the attention as much, as directly as possible, to the actual texture of the experience. So many of you will be familiar with that kind of teaching, right? To some, it might be quite new. But do you get the principle? Yeah?
So this is taking that just a step further. I'll explain why all this is important in a minute, if you're feeling like it seems a bit irrelevant. Taking that a step further, I'll ring this with the microphone, and see if you can really prioritize, just again and again, tuning into the shifting of the textures, the pulsating, the waving, the way that the sound actually changes from moment to moment. Yeah? [rings bell three times]
Can you hear, at least, the throbbing, the pulsating of that? Could you hear that? Yeah? Okay. So I'm just talking about how you would practise this. That's what you would be tuning into more than anything else, just noticing that change, and putting yourself intimate with that sense of something undulating, or changing, or shifting textures.
We can really expand and deepen this practice. And I'll explain why after I just outline it a little bit. If we take a sound like the bell, or the sound of an airplane, or something else, there's a way that the mind can focus on that sound, take one object, and then narrowly focus on the impermanence, on the change in that one object. Okay? And then, of course, just like watching the breath, the mind moves off, it gets distracted, or whatever -- no big deal. Just not a big deal. Just like with the breath, come back. Come back to that sense of change in that object.
You can also, when the mind moves, and then comes back, it's also impermanence. The mind is changing then. So you can't go wrong with this practice. Even the mind moving -- it's just more impermanence. Everything, whatever happens, you just put it in that channel: impermanence, impermanence. All I want to see -- it's like I've got glasses on, and all I want to see is impermanence, like Polaroid lenses on. That's all I'm interested in, whatever happens -- mind, body, environment. We can also listen in a much more open way, instead of a narrowly focused way. What, right now, if you actually just open up the listening, 360 degrees, wide listening? Sounds from all directions, the voice, the shifting textures of the voice, sounds from within the room, from out of the room. But it's the impermanence, the shifting, the fluidity, the change, the birth, the death of sounds. That's what I'm tuning into, again and again and again. Doesn't matter what sounds they are: nice, ugly, wanted, not wanted. It's all just shifting. Can you get the sense right now? [laughter] Do you get it?
Everything, all this arises, shifts for a while, and then passes away -- born, dies, born, dies. Can do it with the body sensations. So if you take your right thumb, or left thumb, whatever -- there's a place somewhere around where the jaw curves. And if you press, it's actually a little bit intense there. You can find -- just jiggle around until you find that. Press it, you know, reasonably hard, without doing damage. [laughter] And then just keep pressing, and stay, sustain the attention on the change. See how much fluctuation there is within that sensation, how it's throbbing, it's changing, it's shifting, it's undulating, ebbing and flowing. So you're really tuning the attention. You're sustaining a way of looking.
You could do it with the whole body. Just opening the field of the body, and just like we were doing when we were standing, just open to the sensations -- come and go, shift. Could do it with taste at a mealtime. What would that be? I mean, we just had lunch. But we put something in the mouth, and the subtlety of flavours arising then disappearing, shifting, getting stronger, ebbing away -- change, change, change. Could do it, obviously, with smell. Can do it with sight as well. That's quite interesting. If I do this, you could say, "Well, he's waving his hands around" or something, but could you see this, can you see it as just shifting textures in the visual field? [27:45] Do you understand what I'm getting at? It's a different way of looking. I will explain why this is relevant. [laughter] But do you understand? We're shifting the way of looking. You're practising a shift in the way of looking. This is immensely powerful, it turns out to be. And it's by far the most limited of the ones that are possible.
So there's the possibility also of just tuning into the pleasantness, unpleasantness of things -- and just noticing, like for instance, with the food in the mouth at lunch, and just noticing: "Wow! Explosion of pleasant, and then really not, and then something that's not that nice." Same with the body -- all these shifting textures. Could do it with thoughts, when the mind is a bit more settled. Just like we did with the standing meditation, settle in the body, open to that, and open to sounds. And all of it's just coming and going. And then quite naturally, at some point, the thoughts will be included -- just the impermanence, the changing, birth and death of thoughts. Just that practice with thoughts makes a huge -- if one really develops it, it's hugely powerful, changes the relationship with thought long-term, instead of just always being entangled because I'm following this, I'm following that, and believing this. We just start to have a whole different relationship with thought through seeing their ephemeral nature. [29:16]
You can also do it with everything at once. So just open the awareness, a kind of global awareness, and just change, change, change, flux. You get the idea, right? Okay. You don't look very impressed. [laughter] If we were on a retreat, if this was, let's say, a three-week -- Kate did this, and maybe some others; I just recognize Kate right now -- what was it, a month? I can't remember. Three weeks? And I gave three practices. This was one of them. Incredibly powerful. You listen to it and, "Eh, whatever." Incredibly powerful. But practice, practice, practice, practice. That's what will make the difference. You listen to someone -- it's just words. It's just, "Yeah, I'm kind of tired. It's 2:40, and whatever." But it really is powerful. Why? Why is it relevant? What's the point? What would be the point of doing this theme, just taking this one theme about impermanence?
Well, as Kate would probably testify, if you do this, and you sustain it for -- actually just for a few minutes, I would say, for a few minutes, and you really just keep trying to do that, tune into the impermanence, you'll start noticing something pretty interesting, which is that letting go starts to happen right then, and not in a conceptual, intellectual way. It's not like, "Oh, yes! My goodness! Things are impermanent. Therefore, it would be a really good idea not to cling to them, because they're going to change, and I should let go, and then I will feel better at some point." Somehow, right then, as I'm looking, as I'm tuning into the very impermanence, and just sustaining this, moment to moment, something happens in the consciousness, and lets go, lets go, lets go right then. And letting go feels freeing. There's release. There's a sense of release, of openness, of lightness, release, right then in that moment. And that's actually what we're after. That's the point of practice: release, relief, freedom. And it feels good. It should feel good. And it doesn't take that long. But you have to actually do it and develop it. And you start to feel it, very palpable, and it just gets deeper and deeper and deeper -- quite intense. So it basically brings letting go. We start letting everything come and go -- automatically, organically. Palpable, strong freedom comes out of it.
So that's one piece. But second -- this self-sense, it feels so fixed and permanent. When you feel into the sense of self, it's like, "Well, I know that bits of me change, and my body doesn't look the same as it did, you know, when I was a young boy or whatever. Yeah, aspects of personality maybe developed." But still somehow we have this intuitive gut feeling that there is something solid and fixed and somewhat permanent here, somewhere here. That's the sense of self. [32:24]
When you really start developing just this practice of impermanence, this way of looking at impermanence, you start to really see, firsthand: I can't find it. I cannot find this sense of self which seems so real, so undeniable, so unquestionable, so palpable, palpably obvious. I cannot find it. It's not there to be seen. I will not find anything that is not impermanent. I cannot find anything fixed -- nothing at all, nothing at all. And I see that -- not in just an intellectual way. I see it firsthand, in a way that really makes a deep impression on the consciousness, a deeply liberating impression on the consciousness. Where is this self that I so intuitively sense? Where is it? I cannot find it. All I see is change.
At this point, let's go off on a little bit of a tangent. But it's an important one, so ...
Some of you will be familiar with the Buddha's teaching on what's called the aggregates, the khandhas. There is this body, this materiality of the body. There are feelings. There are perceptions. There are thoughts and intentions. And there is consciousness. Sometimes that teaching is interpreted to say, "This is what the self is. You are not the personality. You are not a fixed self. You are a process of these aggregates. You're a process of phenomena like thoughts and feelings and sensations arising, and the knowing of that. Phenomena and consciousness: that's what the self is. It's this impersonal process happening in time." Have you heard something like that before?
The Buddha didn't actually say that. It's somehow -- I don't know how to say it -- misunderstood, perhaps. To feel oneself -- and again, meditatively, some of you may have had that experience at times: actually, the whole personality dies down. One just feels this sense of a process. Sometimes it can be very beautiful, this sense of just a process unfolding in time, very simple, kind of miraculous, and very freeing to a certain a level. But it's just what I would call a level of deconstruction. It's only a level of deconstruction. It's not yet fully deconstructed. It's not the ultimate truth of the self that the self is a process in time. It's not. [35:12]
Let's pause for a minute. Right at the beginning of the day, I said I'm going to try and say something for everyone. And so, it might be that the blame thing was great -- that's it for the day. It might be the self-definition thing -- that's it, thank you very much, got something to go away with. It may be this bit now. Maybe this bit now feels like, "I don't know what you are talking about." That's the difficulty and the challenge of speaking to groups larger than two or three people, really. [laughter] And this is a large group. So you know, it's just a few more minutes -- well, half an hour's a while. [laughter] Twenty minutes or something. But just be aware, there's lots of people in the room, and everyone needs something different. Someone might have just heard something they've never heard before: "I thought the Buddha was saying it's a process! I thought that's what the self was! Now I've just heard it's not a process. It's not the ultimate truth. What, then, is the ultimate truth?" So even if you're not following this part, or if the part earlier was boring because you knew it already, just hang, you know?
That sense of a process, the self as a process, is a level of deconstruction only. It's only a level of deconstruction. To me, it's a kind of reductionist view. I don't know -- how do you feel if I say to you, "Your true nature is just an impersonal process of experiences, and consciousness, and knowing of experiences, and thoughts happening in time"? How do you feel? How does that make you feel?
Yogi: [inaudible] That can't be all.
Rob: It's what?
Yogi: That it cannot be all.
Rob: Okay. Yeah.
Yogi: It's devaluing something.
Rob: Yeah, okay. It's devaluing something. It also seems to me it's a little bit cold and mechanistic. Do you get that sense? It's a way of looking. It's a possible meditative experience, very valuable at a certain level. It's a way of looking. It's not the ultimate truth. Reductionism does not reveal ultimate reality. It's a reductionist sense of the self, at a certain level. It's not ultimate truth, but can be really important. It's a way of looking.
So sometimes we're meditating, there's just the mindfulness, or through this impermanence thing that we've been talking about and outlining, and you start to get, what starts to come organically in the experience -- and some people have had this experience -- is a different relationship, organically, with that which we usually identify with. So we feel the body, but it doesn't feel, as it usually does, to be me or mine, because that's how we usually sense the body. I feel it intuitively as me or mine. Or the thoughts: me or mine. Or the emotions, or the intentions, or the awareness: me, mine. Something happens through meditation, either through mindfulness or through this impermanence or by itself, that actually there's a disidentification that's happening. And the body sense feels like not me, not mine, just happening. It's just happening by itself, if you like. Or there's a sense of space that's come in there. The thoughts, the moods, the intentions -- can be a whole wide range, or just one particular thing. There is this disidentification that feels very liberating when it happens. It might be scary at first. It might be unusual, unfamiliar, but actually extremely liberating. The tightness of the self-view that identifies all this stuff, these aggregates, as me or mine is being loosened in that moment -- relief, release, freedom, beauty, openness, lightness, dissolution, something very lovely. And experience opens.
But I would say, even that is not the end. We can still deconstruct further. And what happens then if we start taking that more deliberately? So I've got a few tastes of this sense of feeling things as not me and not mine. What happens if I just start to encourage that as a way of looking, and I start to deliberately sense the body, the sensations, the thoughts, the consciousness -- including consciousness, including awareness -- as not me, not mine?
Some of you will have heard teachings that say, "You're not the body. You're not the thoughts. You're not your personality or emotions. You are awareness. You are consciousness. You are the witness." Have you heard something like that? [affirmative noises from yogis]
Again, the Buddha is saying: "Definitely not. Definitely not. You're not even awareness." So going down to that level, where there's a kind of disidentification with all this stuff, but the subtle, either deliberate or implicit identification with awareness -- that's a level of deconstruction, a level of freedom. Very beautiful, very helpful. And then, when you're ready, a step further: not even the awareness. Even more liberating, even more radical.
So what we have here, saying something I said earlier, is different ways of looking that we can cultivate, opposite to our usual ways of looking, which tend to solidify, fabricate, construct, compound suffering, self, and world. And we have ways of looking that do the opposite: deconstruct, open out, dissolve to different degrees. That last one -- this seeing things as not me or mine -- is incredibly powerful. A meditator learns how to develop. It's a real skill. It takes time to develop it and develop its range. Extraordinarily powerful in what it can open up.
So they differ in their strengths. The impermanence one, as I said, is actually quite limited. It tends to reinforce time. And I think the very notion of impermanence involves time. Right at the beginning, if you remember, we said time is actually empty as well. There's no time. Impermanence is not an ultimate truth either. You can go even beyond, deeper than impermanence. That's not to say that things are permanent. Going right back to the beginning, some radical mystery is being pointed to here that has the power to open up our sense of existence, way beyond what we might imagine is possible, bring a quite extraordinary degree of freedom into the being.
Let's come back to this impermanence, because that's what we're touching on today as a vehicle, impermanence as a vehicle. Whether it's through mindfulness, or whether it's through contemplating impermanence, we start to see the gaps, the holes in things. So like when we talked about the self-definition, you see that this thing that seems solid, I start to see: there are absences in it. I start to see the change. It's not so fixed and solid, the self-definition.
But you can also, when you start using this impermanence practice, it also starts to reveal the holes, the gaps, in objects as well. So for example, one day, I wake up, and I feel this heaviness in my chest. I feel down with sadness, or depression, or whatever it is. Right away, my sense of that sadness or depression is of something solid. And that very solidity makes me, "Ugh, it's too much. I can't go there. It's just, I feel overwhelmed. I feel scared a bit. I don't want to go towards it."
If I can bring this impermanence practice to bear on the actual, for example, the physical experience of sadness, that heaviness in the chest, or the physical experience of depression, that weight in the chest, that lockedness, and really look at that, and see the change: "Oh, it's got much more change in it than it seemed at first," and really tune into that changing, changing. What do I see? A moment of sadness, another moment of sadness. The next moment is kind of just peaceful. That's funny -- no sadness. Sadness comes back for a moment. The next moment, joy comes. Where did that come from? The next moment, sadness again. The next moment, nothing much. It's got all kinds of holes in it. You're puncturing this solid thing at a much more minute level. You get the picture?
And there's a sense that this thing that seems so solid, and therefore so heavy to carry, so burdensome, is actually much lighter, much more spacious, really, when I look at it this way. I start to reveal a lightness that's much more handleable. Or with, you know, the English weather, and it's raining, and it's windy. You think, "I don't want to go outside. This terrible weather," and it's a solidified thing. But what if one went out and started, same thing, practising impermanence? What's, actually, moment to moment, the change? And maybe there's some cold wind that brushes the cheek, and then feels okay. Feel the warmth of the rest of the body, and then a moment where a raindrop falls down the back of your neck, and it's uncomfortable for a few moments. But even within that raindrop trickling down, there'll be all kinds of change, all kinds of gaps in the unpleasantness of it. Do you get what I'm saying? It starts to dissolve the solidity that we project onto things. [45:06]
But again, I would really say that's a deconstructed view, and a reductionist view. So it's not that the reality is these micro-moments, either. It's just a helpful way of looking -- but important, because if we tie this in with the theme today, what we want to understand is: what is fabricated? What is constructed by the mind? And how is it constructed? And this impermanence practice is one of the ways that we can begin to do that.
When I was a kid, I remember those drawing books. Did you have these? They had numbers on a page, and dots, and you would join the dots, go from 1 to 2 to 3. They're called dot-to-dot drawing. Do you remember this? This is what the mind does. It's joining the dots, and creating the sense of a whole, and then falling for the solidity of a whole, whether it's an emotion, whether it's a self, whether it's weather, whatever it is. Do you understand? I have to see that. I have to see it firsthand. The mind is joining the dots. The joining is not inherent in the object -- really important to see. I need to practise to see it.
We can take this -- that bit, dot-to-dot, and take it just one level, little bit deeper. This individual dot -- let's say, this moment of heaviness in the chest, this moment of sadness. Okay, so I see I'm joining the dots, and I create this whole that's, "Oh, the heaviness of sadness, or depression," or whatever it is. I've created this whole. That whole, we're saying, is a fabrication, is an illusion, okay? So the whole, we're saying, is empty, illusory. But then this individual dot that I'm feeling right now -- this moment of the weather, or this heaviness in the chest, this sadness -- is actually felt and interpreted with all the weight of the sense of being part of the whole. Do you understand? It's got the burden of being -- it's not just an isolated moment of something. It's got this sense of, it's part of this bigger whole.
I can see, I join the dots, I create a whole. And that whole is a kind of fabrication. So we say the whole is a bit illusory, yeah? But then this individual dot -- I'm not experiencing it independent of this sense of the whole. It's like I bring back that sense of the whole, and it's injected with all the weight of the whole. So it's not just that. So this dot, individual dot, has just got a lot heavier by virtue of the fact that I fabricated the whole. And then guess what? The whole that gets fabricated gets heavier still, because I've got heavier dots. And then the heavier whole flows back to the heavier dots. [laughter] Right? And it doesn't really happen in time, but something is getting built up. We build our experience in ways that we don't really recognize. So again, I can start to see that this is the case. And then start to actually deliberately contemplate this in a way that deconstructs, lightens, dissolves.
Wrapping up now. But I'll say something for the third time, at least, which I've said today. Typically, we could say, what delusion is, what it does is, we have a habit of ways of looking -- meaning ways of relating, conceiving, viewing, perceiving -- self, things, others, environment. We have habitual ways of looking that solidify dis-ease or exacerbate it, solidify selves, build, construct selves and objects. That's the habitual -- we don't realize that's the habitual -- we walk around. This is what we call existence, what we call life. That's what life is. It's a construction. We don't think of life that way. It's a construction. And what's possible is actually learning powerful ways of looking that start to deconstruct, start to dissolve, start to open. They're skills. They're practices, easing the dukkha, relieving, opening, dissolving. So this 'not me, not mine' is one of them. The impermanence is one of them. Mindfulness, we said, is one of them. Mettā is also one of them, loving-kindness. Some of you may know this big awareness practice. Sometimes it's called Big Mind. That's also a way of looking that deconstructs. It's not an ultimate truth.
Let's take the mettā. How many of you are familiar with the loving-kindness practice? Quite a lot, great. If you really do it a lot -- I don't know whether some of you have noticed this -- when it's really going well, you're really in the groove of it, and it's kind of humming along, how different the self feels then, how much softer, or more open, or lighter, how much more beautiful this self and the selves of others -- and the world too. Have you noticed this? Different self, different world perceived at that point.
Compare that with that other end of the spectrum we talked about earlier this morning: the vortex of papañca, the solidity, the obsession. Very different self, very different world, very different others perceived. And in the middle is our normal, what we call normal, everyday. So you've got mettā, normal, papañca in this spectrum, each shaping, constructing, and revealing a different self and a different world. Which is the real one? Which is the one that reveals the real reality of things and self? What's the answer?
Yogi: [inaudible]
Rob: Okay. That's nice. Wasn't quite what I was looking for ... [laughter] Why are you shaking your head? Yeah.
Yogi 2: I'd say none of them. It just moves.
Rob: Yeah. None of them. It just moves. There is no position on that spectrum that reveals an objective reality -- going right back to the general points I was making earlier. But I have to see that. Again, it's not just intellectual. I have to see that move along that spectrum. That's what a meditator does: moves along the spectrum. And you start to see, what I see is coloured, is shaped, but is dependent on the way I look. That's the ultimate truth of things. It's not independent. What I see is dependent on the way I look. And we can construct and deconstruct and construct differently. And then I say, "Well, what do I want to construct, given that I've got that spectrum? Where do I want to hang out? What do I want to construct, then?" [laughs] But there is no point of reality.
Some people say, "Mindfulness will be. Mindfulness reveals reality." But it doesn't. If you follow, if you do pick up these practices that I'm suggesting, you start to notice at a certain point, or recognize, that actually, even what we call mindfulness, basic mindfulness has subtle grasping involved in it, and subtle identification. There's still a sense of I am aware, or I am being mindful, or some subtle tussling with experience. And that's all fabricated. Mindfulness is not some neutral, objective stance on things -- absolutely not. Despite all the language that we tend to use as teachers, it's completely not.
Yogi 3: We're still cultivating some ...
Rob: We're still cultivating something. We're still constructing something. Yeah. It's still a construction. It's a very helpful construction, but only to a certain extent. We start to develop these other ways of looking, these more powerful ways of looking -- something much more amazing starts to happen. Everything starts dissolving: self and world start dissolving through the way of looking -- fading, opening, disappearing. What on earth is going on? What is going on?
And I know that some of you have had this experience. What does it mean? It means that my very way of looking constructs the world of self and experience. As the Buddha said: it's all a mirage, it's all a magician's illusion. I have to see that in practice, over and over, very deeply. It's utterly revolutionary, topsy-turvy, radical understanding. Nothing is independent of the way of looking, of the mind that looks. But that mind, too, is also empty. It's constructed in the process, even more magical and radical.
The Buddha said, "Whatever is considered as 'true' by the world with its deities, its meditators and priests, its royalty and common people, is rightly seen as it actually is with right discernment by those with some awakening [what he calls Noble Ones, by those with some awakening] as 'false.'" Whatever everyone agrees, "This is true. It's obvious," with some awakening, he said, "That's false." And then he says, "Whatever is considered as 'false' by the world and its contemplatives and priests, its royalty and common people, is rightly seen as it actually is with right discernment by the Noble Ones as 'true.'"[1] Opposite. Something completely counterintuitive is being communicated through these teachings, completely surprising, radical -- as I said, revolutionary -- magical, actually, magical. And that's an interesting choice of words the Buddha used there. Actually, in the end, all we can say, not even empty, just magic, magic. There's something in seeing that that frees, frees profoundly.
Last point, very, very brief: emptiness is also empty. There's nowhere to land. There's nowhere to land. All the Buddha cares about is freedom. That's the point of all this. It's not some dogma, or some, "Oh, now I'm attached to emptiness, or awareness, or whatever it is." It's all empty. Emptiness is also empty. It's only a tool, like we said earlier. You can pick up the views, the ways of looking of emptiness, and then put them down. And pick up non-empty views, other views. There's this flexibility, this freedom -- freedom to see differently, and to see in ways that free.
Certainly, emptiness is the most powerful, powerfully freeing way of looking. But it's only one way of looking. That's it. And then there's just freedom. There's just freedom. That's what the Dharma is all about: freedom and compassion, not about dogma or attaching to this or that.
Let's take just a few moments of silence together.
Sn 3:12. ↩︎
