Transcription
We mentioned in the first part of this talk that even a little sort of attentive listening and curiosity into different teachers' positions or teachings on what awakening is, and what stream-entry is -- just even within, say, Theravādan-based teachings, or Pali Canon-based teachings, and even within the Insight Meditation tradition -- just a little kind of attentive listening, reading, etc., over a range of voices (of both teachers and fellow practitioners), it will quickly become obvious that, despite a lot of obviously similar vocabulary that's taken from the tradition (dukkha, end of dukkha, Four Noble Truths, etc.), despite the sort of similarity of vocabulary, there's actually quite a wide range of interpretations of what awakening and the different stages of awakening (such as stream-entry, the first stage, what the Buddha outlined as the first stage), quite a range of interpretations of what these words mean. There are many takes on that.
And I think that's good. I'm pleased that there are many. I think that different takes, or different visions of awakening, and different ideas about it, and different kind of notions of what it encompasses will suit different people. And that's important. So I really actually think that the diversity in the modern Theravādan tradition, the modern Pali Canon tradition, the Insight Meditation tradition, the plurality there, the divergence there, the lack of agreement there, I think that's important, and healthy, and actually necessary these days.
And more and more, for myself, kind of engaging in, or even just hearing other people kind of argue about etymology of certain words, and quibble over texts in the Pali Canon, trying to insist on just one interpretation of a certain word or a passage, as if it's the only true possible interpretation or the correct interpretation, narrow it down, narrow down the hermeneutic possibilities that way, seems to me, where I am right now, at this point in my practice and life -- which is different than what it was before -- but it seems a little bit silly now, to me. So something that I would have kind of engaged in myself a fair amount, and put quite a lot of stock by, seems a little bit silly to me now -- this kind of arguing about etymology and words, and picking over texts, and that kind of thing in that way. That's just my personal feeling, at this point in my development, life, practice.
And I'll return to that, perhaps, why I feel that way. And related to what I said in the first talk, I feel there are other ways to orient to this question of "What is awakening?", rather than going back to the texts and quibbling about word meanings. There are other ways which I feel, for some people, or some people at certain points in their path, trajectory of practice, are perhaps more fruitful, more interesting, and actually more helpful. So there are other ways to orient, which we'll return to. And also, as I mentioned in the first talk, I feel it's important to realize, to be aware of: "Why am I adopting any view?" I have a view: "This is awakening," or "This is what this word means." It's like, why? What's going on for me that I lean towards this view, or grasp at that view, or insist on this view, or adopt that view, whatever it is? [5:23]
So, for example, stream-enterers, sotāpannā. As I said, the Buddha in the Pali Canon talked about different stages of awakening: stream-enterer being the first stage, the beginning stage; once-returner, non-returner, second and third stages; arahant, the fully enlightened, the final stage. And someone told me that they were speaking to a fellow retreatant after a retreat, and that retreatant said that he thought he was a stream-enterer, or considered himself a stream-enterer because he could "go with the flow." And I'm not sure where he heard that idea (not important), but that he could "go with the flow" in life, and that made him what the Buddha called a stream-enterer, because streams flow, and if you're in the stream, you're going with the flow perhaps.
So we could get into a whole argument with that, and say, "Well, the Buddha did not teach 'going with the flow.'" It's very hard -- you could trawl through the Pali Canon, and there's very little kind of language about "going with the flow," or even that kind of trope or tenor of things. "Going with the flow" is quite a kind of modern Western notion. The Buddha did talk about 'flow' in the word saṃsāra. So, saṃsāra -- one meaning of it is the 'flow,' the 'flowing-on.' Sāra is from the root su in Pali and Sanskrit, and that actually means 'to flow.' And it was exactly this flow that the Buddha was interested in stopping -- stopping that flowing on, ending it, ending saṃsāra. We could get into a whole argument, but there's very little textual support in the Pali Canon for teachings about going with the flow. Or we could say, there was a teaching of flow, which is saṃsāra, which is really problematic. And then there's the teaching of stream-entry, where with a lot of effort, and with a lot of striving and diligence -- and these are the Buddha's words -- one attains to a stage which, one has seen something, or understood something, or something has opened or changed in the being that forms a kind of platform for further realization, and a kind of, if you like, platform which one cannot fall from. So one cannot go back. One progresses inevitably from this. One has entered a stream that will take one inevitably -- it's a different kind of stream, one could say. So there's the stream of saṃsāra, the sāra of saṃsāra, and there's another kind of stream that leads towards awakening.
So rather than argue all that -- which, as I said, to me, it just seems a bit silly now, for different reasons that I'll mention as we go on -- I'm more interested in what's going on that someone would adopt such a view, and believe, "I feel that I'm a stream-enterer now because I go with the flow, and that's my understanding of it." I mean, that's what I'm more interested in. What's the motivation? What's going on that's kind of directing, propelling, inclining the adoption of such a view and such a self-view? Don't know. It's, as I said, quite a contemporary Western idea, this idea of "going with the flow." You could trace it to certain Taoist ideas and stuff like that. It's a very simple idea, and simple ideas, and certainly ideas that are popular in the culture, can be attractive. They're attractive because they make sense to us, and they sound simple to us because we're familiar with them. It's also a relatively kind of low bar for what the first stage of awakening is. So it's quite easy to understand what it means -- or at least it seems easy.
But actually, if you probe in, what does it mean to "go with the flow"? So if neo-Nazis come to power, I just "go with the flow"? It's actually deceptively simple. It's not really a simple idea, but it seems simple, and it also seems like relatively easy to attain. And so it might be -- not saying it is for this person, or was for this person -- but it might be that what's going on is that, because it's a popular, relatively simple-sounding idea, because it sounds like it's relatively easy to attain such a thing as "going with the flow," or pretty much going with the flow in one's life as a kind of -- what, lifestyle? I don't know -- then it might be attractive. Again, I'm not insisting or claiming that that is what was going on for this person. I don't know, because as I said, it was secondhand. But I'm more interested in what's actually going on. What's the motivation? What's propelling me to adopt this or that idea of what awakening is, and what it looks like, a vision of it, an image of it, and also a self-view in relationship to it?
So actually, if we do go back to the texts just a little bit, having said all that, when the Buddha kind of outlined the different stages of awakening, and what was involved in each, he didn't say that much about it actually. In relation to all the stages of awakening, he describes ten fetters. And the different stages of awakening sort of remove or severely attenuate different of those fetters. So an arahant has destroyed, eradicated once and for all, and for good, all of the ten fetters. A stream-enterer, the first stage, has uprooted three fetters. And those fetters are doubt; 'attachment to rites and rituals' is the way it's usually translated as a second; and a third, sakkāyadiṭṭhi, is usually translated as something like 'personality-view' or the 'theory of individuality' or something like that.
But again, it's not an easy proposition in terms of what actually, exactly is meant by each of those three fetters. So even that one -- 'attachment to rites and rituals,' one has disregarded that. I've heard many different interpretations of that. Some say it's not being attached to believing rituals will have a magical effect in one's life. Some people say it's not being attached to practice, meditation, or certain styles of meditation over others, and insisting, "This is the right way. That's the right way. You have to meditate like this. No, you have to meditate like that."
And especially when we get to this one about this sakkāyadiṭṭhi, this is a really interesting word. What does that mean? So I don't know the history of that term, but just a little kind of rummaging around makes me wonder whether it was a term -- sakkāya was a term that already pre-existed the Buddha. It was something he picked up. And it might have been a positive term, and he said, "No, you need to get rid of that. It's not an experience or a view you want to attain. You want to get rid of it." So the renunciation, the letting go, the seeing through of -- diṭṭhi means 'views,' or some people translate it as 'theory'; I'll come back to that -- but the letting go of this sakkāyadiṭṭhi. When we look (just to dwell on this for a little bit), when we ask, "Well, what does this mean, this sakkāyadiṭṭhi?", I know the translation, or the most common translations, put it that way: 'personality-view' or 'individuality-theory,' or something like that, the 'theory of the individual,' sakkāyadiṭṭhi.
In Pali, sakkāya is actually what's called a compound word, which means it's two words jammed together, like they have in German and some other languages. So we spell it s-a-k-k-ā-y-a, and that compound is actually made up of two words: sat and kāya. So sat [is] one word, and the other word is kāya. What happens when you jam the words together in a compound is, the t kind of elides with the k, and you just make it a double k. So sakkāyadiṭṭhi is actually short for sat-kāya-diṭṭhi. So you've got two words there, sat and kāya.
Kāya, the second word, is quite an interesting word. It means 'body,' but just as in English, that word, 'body,' has different meanings. So it means 'body' as certainly this physical body. But even then, it carries a second meaning, often, of, like we have in English, 'body' as a sort of group or collection, or a mass of things, or a totality of things -- so we talk about in English a 'body of work,' or a 'body of people,' or a 'body of water,' for example. It also, in Pali, carries this kind of double meaning. Sometimes the physical body was also regarded as a collection, a heap, a kind of bag of stuff. Of what? Of the four great elements: earth, air, fire, and water. So kāya has this kind of double meaning. It also can mean the term for kind of the organ of touch. I mean, you touch with your kāya. You experience touch with your kāya. So like the eye is the organ of vision, the mind is the organ of thought, the kāya is the organ of touch. It can also be just the locus or the seat of sensation or awareness. It can also be regarded as 'that which we act through.' So it has an ethical component, because we're responsible for our actions. We're judged on our actions. This is what acts in the world: the kāya.
Then you've got this word sat. And sat is an interesting word. And it can mean -- as some of you will know from the Hindu traditions -- 'being' or 'existing' or 'being present.' That's one of the meanings. So then you would have the 'existing' or the 'existent body.' The belief, the theory, and the view of the existent body: this is what we're giving up. Or the view that this collection of elements exists in some real way. Sat can also mean 'real' or 'actual' -- like, you know, sacca is the word for 'truth' in the Four Noble Truths. So, what, the belief that this group of elements is somehow real? What's real, the group or the individual elements? It can also mean -- this word sat -- 'that which is real.' So this (quote) 'really existent' or the 'true body,' if you like. So I'm giving up, with stream-entry, a belief in a true body. It can also mean, sometimes, in a compound -- this word sakkāya -- 'that which is possessed of' -- what? A kāya, possessed of this body or this heap or collection of elements. So I'm not believing in something that possesses all this. And it can also mean 'living.' Sat is 'to live, to be, to exist.' So I'm not, what, believing in a theory of the living body?
So you can see, actually, a word like sakkāya is quite open to slightly different interpretations there. Often, as I said, it's translated as 'personality-view,' sakkāyadiṭṭhi, or 'identification with the aggregates.' The second word, diṭṭhi, is usually translated as 'view,' sometimes 'opinion.' But some translations say 'theory.' And to me, that translation doesn't actually really work that well, because you know, if I speak to my mum about what her theory of personality is, what her theory of self is, she would say, "What the hell are you talking about?" And if I just say, "Well, can you explain how you conceive of the self?", I don't think she ... [laughs] I think she would just cut short the conversation. She has no theory of self as something, kind of an intellectual position to articulate. So sometimes people say this giving up of sakkāyadiṭṭhi, this fetter there at stream-entry, is a kind of giving up of any intellectual position, or holding this intellectual view or that, or positing this or that about the self. But for me, it has to be something much more fundamental than a theory. There are plenty of people in the world who have no theory of self at all, and I think one would be hard-pushed to call them awakened or stream-enterers or whatever. [21:02]
Sometimes this sakkāyadiṭṭhi, I've heard some people interpret it as meaning just the ending or the radical quietening, or the quietening a lot of the inner critic. It's quite interesting that that view arises. You know, again, historically, it's a particularly sort of modern and, I'd say, modern Western view, because there's so much pain around the inner critic. And so much of the kind of suffering people have once they've got the basic prerequisites -- they might be really quite affluent, and have a lot of material wealth and ease and comfort in their life, and all of that, but they're really suffering with the inner critic. So it kind of makes sense to sort of fit the framework of the inner critic to the Buddha's teachings, to fit the framework of the Buddha's teachings to the inner critic, and that's what's predominant in one's life. And so the freedom from that (either completely or to a large extent), a few people I've heard, not very many, regard it as stream-entry, or certainly the ending of this fetter which is the kind of most significant fetter with stream-entry, this ending of sakkāyadiṭṭhi, letting go of sakkāyadiṭṭhi.
And other people, this sakkāyadiṭṭhi, or personality-view, or view of the individual, or self-view, whatever -- the realization of the letting go or the cutting of that fetter, the removal of that fetter, is to realize that what this self is is a process, and that realization: "I've realized what self is. It's a process. It's a process of the psychophysical aggregates in time. It's a process of the bodily processes, and the processes of vedanā, and perception, and mental formations, and consciousness, moment to moment, in time." And to realize that that is the true nature of the self is to realize, in that view, the emptiness of self, or to let go of personality-view and let go of this third fetter. So that view is around as well, and quite a lot in certain circles.
[23:55] The Buddha also talks about, often -- it's a slightly enigmatic, puzzling phrase, because, to my knowledge, it's never in the Pali Canon really explained, exactly what it means. But you often hear stories of such-and-such a person attaining stream-entry, and a kind of epithet for that is "his or her 'Dharma Eye' was opened." There was the 'opening of the Dharma Eye' at that point, and it's a kind of epithet for stream-entry. You think, "Opening of the Dharma Eye? What does that mean?" I'm not aware of any place where it's actually explained, exactly what that means, 'the opening of the Dharma Eye.'
I wonder, might it be -- any of these that we've mentioned, any of these kind of takes or interpretations of what's involved in stream-entry, and particularly what's involved in the letting go of that fetter of sakkāyadiṭṭhi -- might it also be, within the Dharma, it's like, what's central in the Dharma? When the Buddha talks about, after awakening, "This Dharma is hard to see, hard to fathom, discernible only by the wise," etc., it's slightly ambiguous what he's talking about at that point, what he means by "this Dharma" that's "hard to see, hard to attain," etc. in that quote.[1] And "I'm not sure if I should bother teaching it, because I don't think people will understand." But at least part of it, in that quote, says, "This Dharma (something-something), namely, paṭiccasamuppāda, the dependent co-arising, dependent origination." So 'opening the Dharma Eye' might be just because of that sort of centrality of that notion of dependent origination, when the Buddha talked about the Dharma: "This is the Dharma." It's like the nutshell kind of thing of his sense of what the Dharma is. And perhaps 'opening the Dharma Eye,' I don't know what it might mean, but might it mean this understanding of dependent origination? Might it mean that? Understanding experientially for oneself, not just intellectually.
Then we just have another problem: what does it mean to understand dependent origination? Because again, if you've listened to enough teachings, if you've read enough books, if you've asked enough questions, etc., you'll see that, again, the range of interpretations of what dependent origination means, or points to, or is getting at, or even the kind of level of existence at which it applies, and what understanding of it not just involves, but also delivers -- all of that is up for grabs. And some of you know my version, or my preferred take, would be quite different from some others. So we've still got that question.
Other times, or other instances -- and again, some of you will have heard me stress this and point it out in various talks in the past -- the Buddha says several times, not just once, something like: "That dimension should be known, monks, nuns. That dimension should be known where there is no seeing, there is no hearing, there is no smelling, tasting, touching, no thinking, imagining, or mental perception. That sphere should be known."[2] And other times, he talks about it being beyond perception, the cessation of perception, no form, no mental factors, no sun, no moon, no coming, no going, no stopping, no starting, no long, no short, no coarse, no fine.[3] [28:10]
And there are many kinds of passages in the texts pointing to this kind of dimension beyond perception, beyond the fabrication of perception. And it's clear that what the Buddha is talking about then -- he said, "This dimension, that dimension should be known," and he's talking about what we call the 'Unfabricated.' There is not, at that point -- in the descriptions that he gives -- there's not the fabrication of perception. And "that dimension should be known." In the "should be known," he's not saying, it's just, "There's this kind of cool experience that some of you may want to check out." It "should be known." "That dimension should be known" is the grammatical construction there. And "should be known" -- the implication is "for awakening, for or by an awakened person," or "to be called an awakened person," or whatever, "that dimension should be known."
And again, having said I'm not that interested in making cases for this or that, I just want to sort of lay a few things out. It's like, if you go to the Pali Canon, these are the kind of things you find, and sort of spill them on the table, and say, "Well, how does all this fit together? Does it fit together?" But in a way, that's secondary to the main point that I'm interested in. With regard to the Unfabricated, that "dimension that should be known" that the Buddha talks about quite a few times in the Pali Canon, we're really at the edge, if not actually beyond, what language can articulate, in the description, or the pointing to, the indication of that dimension that should be known, the Unfabricated.
So sometimes the Buddha talks about it as a kind of awareness, a kind of consciousness: "consciousness without limit, without feature," or "consciousness without an object," "awareness without an object." Sometimes the Buddha articulates this Unfabricated that way. At other times, he makes it very clear that it is not the same as consciousness or awareness. And the opening to it only arises with, he actually says, with the cessation, with the complete cessation of all six consciousnesses (in other words, the consciousness of seeing, sight, smell, taste, touch, sound, and mental consciousness, thought, imagery, etc.). With the cessation of those consciousnesses, there is this opening to this other thing. And he talks about it more in the negative. So sometimes it's kind of put in the positive, [31:25] either as consciousness or as some other kind of positive. And sometimes -- more often than not -- it's put in the negative.
We're at the point in, as I said, trying to articulate or even point to that dimension that should be known, the Unfabricated -- the Buddha was at the point, anyone who tries to articulate or describe that is at the point that language cannot do justice. And so you get contradictory statements, paradoxical statements, completely cryptic statements -- all that. Just in what I've said so far, in terms of, "Is it awareness? Is it not awareness?", etc., it's clear that, in a way, we could say, this is not simple. What's being pointed to here is not simple. Or at least, let's say, it's not simple for us to understand. What does that mean? The cessation of all consciousnesses -- what does that mean? We can't conceive of that. Most people wouldn't be able to conceive of that, other than being either completely dead, in the modernist sense of the word, or in a coma, or under anaesthetic, or something or other.
So in a way, there's something here that's really not simple for us to grasp, not simple for a consciousness that hasn't opened it (or hasn't, at least, moved significantly in that direction) to grasp. You could say it's not simple. You could say it's so utterly simple, it's beyond the kind of level of simplicity that the mind can get to, or that the usual mind can get to -- put it that way: the conditioned mind can get to. It's simpler than awareness. It's simpler than oneness. It's simpler, even, than nothingness.
So just to point to difficulties with language, which are the part of the inheritance of, I think, particularly this area around awakening, and particularly the area, or the constellation of texts around, that describe or point to or teach the Unfabricated. You get similar problems with language around emptiness, starting in the Pali Canon, for sure, but picked up even more and exacerbated over a couple of thousand years, really, of Mahāyāna teachings. And then what you get -- and I include myself in this at times -- is teachers being, at times, very precise in their use of language with the concept of emptiness, and at times, quite sloppy, and the concept being used in different ways at different times, and in quite a slippery way. And then on top of that, different traditions using the same words, like 'emptiness,' and meaning very, very -- different Buddhist traditions, same word, meaning very, very different things; almost diametrically opposed meanings of what that word means. And all this gives rise to a lot of confusion for the modern practitioner, in "What does this word 'emptiness' mean? What's it pointing to? What is involved in a realization of emptiness, etc.?"
Just briefly on this: what's my response, what's your response to hearing all that? It can be quite frustrating, as a student, as a practitioner, you know, to kind of be in the thicket of a bewildering and very, as I said, slippery kind of range and use of a single concept. So what does it do to you? Does it make you want to kind of jack the whole thing in and give up? Do you hear it and think, "Ugh, that's all just intellectual and fussy, and I don't want to fuss like that. I don't want to be involved in that kind of fussing"? Or is it important? For some people, it's like, "I really want to find out what are these two (you know, actually, way more than two), all these different strands of tradition, and these different teachers -- what are they saying? What exactly is the difference? And where do I stand in all this? And what do I gravitate to? And what can I see in my practice?"
Is it over-fussiness, or is it important fussiness? What is at stake here in this profusion and confusion of, and difficulties with, language and terms? And again, why do I have the response that I have, that it feels really important to me, or it just feels like a bunch of silly intellectuals arguing over how many angels fit on the head of a pin, or whatever the phrase is? Why? What's going on for me? [36:59]
Is it, or in what way is it or is it not, a soul-question? For me, if I was going to, as I said, spill out the pieces of the Pali Canon, different references, etc., put them on the table and see how does that jigsaw, how do those pieces of the jigsaw kind of fit together, and also what makes sense for my practice, I guess I would say, what does this 'Dharma Eye' mean? It means knowing the Unfabricated experientially. But that knowing of the Unfabricated, pursuing this meditative exploration into less and less fabrication (as I've described in a lot of detail elsewhere) also means understanding dependent origination. In other words, in pursuing this question of fabrication, how does the self-sense, how does the sense of various objects in my perception, how does the world-sense get fabricated, in what ways, and with what conditions? How does it get built, fabricated, constructed, *saṅkhata'*d? And how not? And how much less? And understanding that everything is a dependent arising, that everything -- everything -- is a fabrication, and how it is fabricated.
So these two: the experience of the Unfabricated should be intimately tied in with understanding the fabrication of all phenomena, that they are fabricated, and how they are fabricated. In other words, understanding dependent origination, not just intellectually, but in one's experience, through one's experience, includes the intellectual understanding -- and actually, I would say, to a certain level where it goes beyond intellectual understanding, because there is the dissolving of the concepts and the elements involved. Those two go together: the knowing of the Unfabricated, and the thorough, deep understanding of dependent origination. And that means the same thing as the knowing of the emptiness of things. Or it's involved in that trajectory. To understand that something is a dependent arising, that it's fabricated, means to know it's empty. [39:42]
Sometimes a practitioner, again, in the broad range of practitioners of different sub-traditions of modern Theravādan or Pali Canon-inspired Dharma, sometimes people report, and they report it to me and other teachers, etc., a cessation experience, what's called a 'cessation experience,' the cessation of perception -- in other words, the non-fabrication of perception, so an experience of what we could call 'non-fabricating' or the 'Unfabricated.' Now, when someone reports an experience like that, it can be quite tricky -- again, based on the language, it's really a struggle to articulate what that experience is, or how it is. So someone can report an experience and, "Hmm, could be, could not be."
And this is where the wisdom of -- I will dwell on this for a second -- the wisdom of the Buddha comes in in focusing more on the fetters: "Well, what's gone now? What's changed now?" Not so much, "What was that experience?" Partly because the difficulty in describing it is actually enormous. So people could be describing ... I've heard someone, I remember being a student on a retreat, and in a group interview, and someone described what sounded very much to me like just his first experience of the first jhāna, and what he said was, "Everything disappeared." And it wasn't until he was asked a few more questions, it was very clear that everything did not disappear. This is quite common as one goes through the jhānas. One hasn't quite ascertained or discerned. Some stuff has disappeared there. So in the first jhāna, hindrances have for sure disappeared. And in a lot of cases, the solidity of the body-perception has disappeared. But a lot of stuff is remaining -- for instance, perception, and subject and object, and time, and pīti as the main experience. All that remains -- sukha, you know. So when people say, "Everything disappeared," (A) there's a language difficulty, and (B) there's a discernment, a question there as well. It's like: "Really? Did everything disappear, or was there other stuff remaining?"
So for instance, all perception of form can disappear in the fifth jhāna, does disappear in the fifth jhāna. And a person can say, "Everything disappeared." Or in the seventh jhāna, in the realm of nothingness, and actually there is still something there. What's the something? It's the 'nothing' in the seventh jhāna. A 'nothing,' a perception of nothingness, still remains. So you see how subtle this gets, how deep it gets. To say, "There was a cessation. Everything disappeared. There was a cessation of all perception" -- it goes very, very deep in terms of the more refined perceptions that remain and that can then be transcended. [43:03]
But even if one thinks, "Well, maybe this person did have a cessation experience," my experience as a teacher is that that cessation experience, cessation of perception, may or may not bring a freedom with it. And in some instances, unfortunately, it just seems to give rise, over time, to clinging -- clinging to that experience, or clinging to the memory of it. And the person looks at their life, and sometimes, you know, an authority, a sayadaw or someone has said, "No, no, that's stream-entry," and the person says, "But I don't feel any different." And the Sayadaw says, "No, you're a stream-enterer now."
Sometimes what happens is, a person has an experience, and actually there's not much freedom coming out of it. Or even worse, the effect of it is to cause a little bit of clinging, and sometimes a kind of devaluing of the world of perception, or a dualism: "There's that fantastic thing, and all this around me is just rubbish." In other words, their experience of the Unfabricated, they have arrived at it, it has opened up, in a way, through intense non-clinging in a moment. So there's not the fabricating, and then there's the opening to the Unfabricated. But because they haven't been exploring in a way that prioritizes the exploration of fabrication (fabricating more, fabricating less, the dependent arising of perception), that hasn't been a theme -- they've just been, for instance, contemplating impermanence really fast or something -- then what you get is this kind of amazing opening to an experience, and it's so different from ordinary worldly experience, so different from the realm of perception which is all this, and it seems to have nothing to do -- those two realms of perception and the transcending of perception, the fabricated and the Unfabricated, seem to have nothing to do with each other. There's a radical, dualistic split.
And the function of that split sometimes can be helpful in one's life. There's something beyond, and that kind of shines through on this life, or implies something about this life that's very helpful. And there can be a freedom. For someone else, it might be that that dualism between the fabricated and the Unfabricated just kind of creates a dismissal and a disconnect from this life of perception, from the fabricated world, in a way that isn't that helpful. Then one's got just this thing that I kind of want to get back to, this Unfabricated. And what about this world of fabrication? [46:20]
Now, another person, another practitioner, another student coming in may be really getting interested in this question of dependent origination and fabrication, and how self/other/world get fabricated through different forms of clinging, and to what degree, and kind of watching this movement up and down the spectrum of fabrication. And they've never had a full cessation experience. There's never been, for them, that "everything completely disappears." But they see this movement of the fading, relative fading of perception to different degrees, maybe really deep. And then fabricating up and down, up and down on this spectrum. They see its dependency on the way of looking. They see the dependency on clinging. Because they see it, they understand dependent origination more and more. And even without experiencing a complete cessation of all perception, a complete unfabricating of perception, of all perception, the understanding is moving up and down, and at some point, the intuition, the intuitive wisdom just [snaps fingers] gets it. I don't even need that experience. I just grasp it -- in science, they say, 'inductively.' I just understand something.
They haven't had a cessation experience, but it brings a liberation that is greater than the other person that I alluded to, who's had the cessation experience, got the certificate from the sayadaw or whatever, but hasn't understood dependent arising, hasn't understood the relationship of the fabricated to the Unfabricated, and how fabricating works, dependent on way of looking, dependent on clinging, and different degrees and kinds of clinging.
So that's something, I know some of you, it will be important for some of you to know. It also seems to be more and more, as I hear from more students, etc., that one can have, of course, what we might call a full cessation experience: a fully vivid and immediate (in the sense of unmediated) opening to the sense/experience of the Unfabricated. In other words, there's nothing else going on. All other perception has stopped. Or at different times (I remember saying this in a Q & A on some retreat in the last few years in response to a question; I think I remember), one can have a kind of, I don't know, a sense of it, an intimation of this dimension that should be known, kind of 'shining through,' if you like, the experience of this world.
Now, certainly, one will get that sense, or some people get that sense of the shining through of the Unfabricated, after they've had a sort of complete cessation experience. But I think it's also possible for some people to kind of get it before they've really fully opened up to it, and something of the genuine Unfabricated shining through. We have to be a little careful here, because -- and again, some of you who will know, let's say, the different jhānas, especially as it gets into the formless realms, etc., will know that in what I call the 'after-effects on perception' of a different jhāna, it's quite common for that perception to kind of shine through the world of the fabricated, this world of experience and perception. And so what we can get is, all kinds of onenesses can shine through: the oneness of cosmic love, the oneness of cosmic consciousness, the oneness of awareness, the oneness of nothingness, etc., can be sensed as shining through as we are moving about in the world with our senses open. There's this mystical shining through, and the blessedness of that. There are actually many different versions.
So how do we discern the, so to speak, 'genuine Unfabricated'? I think it's difficult. I would say, though, that the Unfabricated is characterized, if we can say that, by being timeless. It's beyond time. It's somehow not even a 'now,' not even a 'present.' And so if there's that quality of -- we could say 'eternity,' but let's say 'timelessness' -- not just beyond past and future, but beyond present as well, that quality shining through is particularly characteristic of the Unfabricated, this dimension that the Buddha said should be known. And also, secondly, and connected with what I mentioned earlier about how the Buddha talked about this realm, it's kind of got this, "Is it or is it not aware?" It doesn't quite feel right to say, "It is aware," in the usual sense of awareness, (A) because it's not in time, and (B) it has no object. And it doesn't quite feel right to say, "It's not aware." So those two elements -- the timeless, and this kind of Middle Way of whether it is or isn't aware -- perhaps can help in kind of discerning whether it's that Unfabricated coming through, shining through.
So one version. I hope you can hear, I'm actually really not interested in selling you any particular version of all this. But one way of thinking about it -- and I can't remember if I shared this in talks before, or just individually with certain students -- but one way of thinking about awakening, or a sort of metaphor I had was of, let's say, a ball bearing in a U-tube. When the tube is shaken, the ball bearing can kind of zip up the sides of the tube. And 'up the sides of the tube' indicates kind of away from the bottom point of the U. I hope you can picture this, like at the bottom of the U. That's the point of knowing the emptiness of everything, knowing the dependent origination of everything. 'Everything' means self, any phenomena, awareness, time, the now, you name it. So this is one view. And so the ball bearing can be right there in the knowing of that emptiness. And then out of that comes the freedom from suffering, because we know that things are empty, and there isn't the clinging.
With a stream-enterer, the knock of, you know, the eight winds -- and they're just the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune and all that -- knock the tube, and the ball bearing can go up the tube, climbing the walls. And as it goes up the tube, it's away from the rootedness in that view of emptiness. So there is the kind of relative forgetting of that emptiness. I might know it somewhere in my being, but right at that point, I've lost access to it, and I'm caught up in reification and clinging, and then dukkha. In that moment, the ball bearing is up. But because of gravity, at some point, the ball bearing falls back. It falls back down the sides of the tube, and reconnects with that place at the bottom, of knowing complete emptiness. So you can fill out this analogy if you like. It might be quite interesting.
An arahant, someone who's fully awakened, perhaps is someone who doesn't move from that point at the bottom. This, though, I have problems with, as you can maybe guess. If I completely know emptiness thoroughly, utterly, and deeply, all the time -- or rather, in the moment that I completely, thoroughly, and deeply know the emptiness of all things, there will be a cessation of fabrication of perception. I won't perceive anything except the Unfabricated. So if an arahant is someone staying just exactly at the bottom, it doesn't quite work with this understanding. There's some conundrum there. Historically -- and I can't remember if I've explained this, again, either just individually to people, or on other retreats; I can't remember -- but actually, out of that conundrum was one of the philosophical conundra that the Mahāyāna had to deal with. They had to come up with an answer: how does a Buddha get reborn into the world of perception so that he can save other beings, and help them, and be there, with the world of form and all that, when a Buddha knows all the time, 100 per cent thoroughly, the utter emptiness of all things? Because if a Buddha is in that knowledge, and with that knowledge in the mind, then there isn't the fabrication of perception. So how can he be in the world? How is there a world then? We could play with that analogy, whatever, but I'm just pointing that out.
And then the other stages of awakening might be that, just as for the stream-enterer, the ball bearing gets knocked out of that kind of centre, centre point of stasis, lowest gravity, whatever, and gets knocked out, up the sides of the U-tube, and then falls back down due to gravity, due to the stream of wisdom being in that momentum. A once- and non-returner would be someone who, it gets knocked up, but perhaps less often, or the ball bearing rises less high. So it comes back more quickly to that sense of emptiness, and thus less clinging, less reification, and so more freedom, less suffering, less dukkha. So that's one way of -- you know, I don't know if it's helpful -- but one kind of analogy or metaphor of the stages of awakening that may be useful to some people. It's seemed useful to some people in the past.
If we dwell again, just a little bit, on the ten fetters that the Buddha outlined -- we touched on three of them for the stream-enterer. For a once-returner, there are two other fetters. A once-returner makes a major dent in greed and aversion, sense desire and aversion. And a non-returner has eradicated those two fetters. And then an arahant has five other fetters that they eradicate. So from non-returner to arahant, there are five more fetters.
The point I want to make, though -- and again, I really can't remember if I've said this before in a talk -- but notice that for the stream-enterer, according to that theoretical scaffolding that the Buddha outlines with those ten fetters, the stream-enterer has not made any impact on sense desire and aversion, and it's only at the stage of a once-returner. So I'm saying this because sometimes what happens is, practitioners get really hung up on their relationship with sense desire, their relationship with food, or whatever it is. And in this theoretical scaffolding, if we take it strictly, what the Buddha's pointing at, it would seem that, actually, the first thing to address is the sakkāyadiṭṭhi and the other two fetters that go with stream-entry.
In other words, in the vision, in the outline that I gave, look at the fabrication. Explore fabrication, because through that, you will see the emptiness of any self-view -- you would see the emptiness of any and all self-views -- rather than worrying too much about your greed or apparent greed or whatever. So it might suggest something about the order of our practice, of what we kind of aim for and preoccupy ourselves with, what we focus on. And this question of fabrication may be the one to look at first, and probably for a while. And then out of that, building on that, the others may be easier.
Again, much of what I'm saying is really a response to the kinds of things that students bring, or the kind of places, it seems to me, that it's often that people get stuck, or people get stuck often. So for me it's important to point out that, when we talk about awakening, we're not talking about an experience. So for some people, certain experiences, like an experience of the Unfabricated, may be really significant. But awakening itself is not an experience. It's not an experience of no-self, for example. And some of you know, the way I tend to teach is that it's more that there is a spectrum of fabrication anyway. So when someone comes in, and they say, "I had an experience of no-self," in the way I would interpret things, really what they've had an experience of is usually a relative degree of less fabrication of the sense of self. The sense of self is on a spectrum, if you like. It can get fabricated more, higher on the spectrum, so to speak, or much less, or much less, or much less. So when people sort of say, "I had an experience of no-self," they might mean an experience of the temporary quietening of the more gross personality constructs or beliefs, or whatever. So there's really a spectrum of degree of fabrication of self. There's something I need to understand about that spectrum. [1:02:57]
But awakening is not an experience of no-self or an experience of whatever. If it's an experience, then often what you get is, someone says, "I had this experience, and it lasted for X amount of time." Sometimes it can be "I had this experience, and it seemed to last for months," sometimes people report. Again, one wonders about the closeness and level and subtlety of discernment involved in kind of scrutinizing what was actually involved in that experience. Was there really no self, etc.? And was it really without fluctuations in that, let's say, for several months, or days, or hours, or whatever it was? And then they say, "I had this experience, and it lasted X long, and then, now I've lost it. And so I was liberated, and now I've lost it. I was in awakening, or nibbāna, whatever, and now I've lost it."
To me, there's a problem in kind of clinging to any experience and calling that 'awakening,' for several reasons that I've just touched on very briefly. To me, I think -- well, again, I'm just hoping this is helpful; I'm really not trying to convince you of anything or insist on any point -- but I think there's another kind of freedom that comes from a kind of understanding: an understanding of that dependent origination, understanding of how fabrication of self and of phenomena works, with clinging, and understanding the implications of that. And when I say 'understanding,' I don't just mean intellectually. I mean in one's heart, in one's body almost. And that understanding allows us -- we understand, "Oh, the self is empty. The self-sense is a dependent arising. The self is a phenomenon. And it gets fabricated more or less at different times depending on certain conditions."
I know that it's empty. Because I know it's empty, I know it's a fabrication, that actually allows it to move up and down on that spectrum of fabrication. It can be more fabricated or less fabricated, appear less solid, appear very refined, appear in this way or that way, appear as a process, appear as an atomistic process of aggregates, or a mist, or a space, or you know, whatever, a vastness of awareness, or disappear completely at times in the cessation of everything. But I understand, "Oh, it's just the fabrication of self. It's fine. It's really fine." So I'm not kind of trying to cling, or believing that I should be in some kind of stasis of a certain experience of whatever it is (cosmic consciousness, or no-self, or this or that). Understanding, really understanding and digesting that certain understanding, allows fabrication to move up and down this spectrum, allows more or less fabrication of self. And we kind of understand: "Oh, self is not-self. Self is not-self. It's just this fabrication happening. It's not-self. It's okay." It's okay to move on the spectrum. It's okay to fabricate. It's okay that certain constructions arise.
So in all this, you know, you can hear that if I want to, or rather, when I kind of map the Pali Canon elements of the jigsaw, I construct the jigsaw like this, my solution to the jigsaw tends to be like this. And again, I don't want to convince anyone; doesn't really matter. But you can hear that in what I've said, and I've outlined that elsewhere, I think, a fair amount. [1:07:27] But again, we can step back from this, and kind of approach it with a whole different set of questions and ponderings and probings in our approach. How high is the bar for what we're calling 'awakening'? How high is a different teacher, or yourself, or you, or I, or anyone, setting the bar for, say, stream-entry?
So in what you've heard of what I alluded to, of my sort of solution to the jigsaw -- yes, stream-entry is, relatively speaking, a pretty high bar. In fact, it's a very high bar compared to some of the other possible ways or interpretations that one could have: seeing, really, the emptiness of all and any self-view, which involves seeing the emptiness of any and all phenomena. For instance, to see that there is a process in time, if I then decide that the self is a process in time of the psychophysical aggregates, of the five aggregates, or the eighteen sense-constituents, or whatever -- if I see that the self is that, or if I decide that's my self-view, to me that's still a self-view. It's still a self-view. I've decided that's what the self is, or I'm clinging to that position. And there are suttas where the Buddha kind of makes it clear that any self-view is a wrong view to be let go of.
But more importantly, I think, when one realizes that those elements of the process, the aggregates themselves are empty of inherent existence -- the body, the atoms, the vedanā, the moments of consciousness, time -- so the elements of the process and the time it happens in are also empty, and that's like dissolving any possibility for forming a self-view there. It can't form when anything -- you can't say, "The self is the process of these elements in time," because one has seen that time is empty and not a reality, doesn't form a basis for any kind of self-view. And the elements themselves that make up this process, are involved in this process, are also empty. So for me, I think, yeah, relatively speaking, it's quite high a bar, just so you know.
But again, more interesting questions, I would say, or questions that interest me more now, are, for instance: how much, as I alluded to in yesterday's talk, how much is the inclination to measure myself and want to measure up, or the pain of the inner critic, the dominance in our psyche of the inner critic -- how much is that influencing the decision or the view or the interpretation we adopt of where the bar is for, say, stream-entry? Why, again, am I adopting this or that view? Is it actually, in the background, the inner critic is running the show, and deciding what views I have, and what practices or what interpretations or views I'll turn away from? It's just too painful, because if I feel like I can't, or I fail, or the inner critic says, "You haven't yet," or "You can't," or this or that ... And so, does it pull the strings actually? Or does it say, "Just drop the whole thing with awakening. It's just way too painful"? So that's one question.
There are other questions. As I said, we could argue over Pali Canon etymology, and different texts that seem to contradict each other, or this or that, or this one emphasizes this, and another one emphasizes that. To me, that's, as I said, much less interesting, at this point, for me. What's more interesting is a whole other set of questions. So for example, in setting the bar, if you like, or the definition of, let's say, stream-entry at one level, or a more difficult level, let's say, what does that do? What's the result? So not so much, "What's the cause?": "I set it there because I read this in the Pali Canon, or this word means this," or whatever. But actually, what's the result? What kind of person is made when we set the bar here? And what kind of person is made when we include this in the bar? What's the result if I say just that stream-entry is a kind of really softening of the inner critic? What kind of person results from that kind of view? If I say stream-entry just means kind of going with the flow in one's life, what kind of person results there? If I say stream-entry means seeing the radical emptiness of all phenomena through dedicated exploration of the mysteries of dependent arising, what kind of person results? What kind of person do we want? What makes an interesting person? What are we after? [1:13:42]
So, as I alluded to at the beginning of yesterday's talk as well, do we dare to bring a kind of radical questioning into all this, and even a bold questioning of what has got set up in terms of the meaning of awakening, or stream-entry, or this or that, and different claims that people might have? Is that possible for us? Do we dare? What would make that possible even? What would justify that? And again, we could ask: what is the soul's relationship, your soul's relationship, with this question of awakening, and of your awakening, and your journey to that, or this question of stream-entry? What does it mean for this to be a soul-question? How does the soul hold that very question? How does it relate to awakening, or relate to the possibility that there are these potentially different interpretations there, and your movement towards that, or opening towards that? Is there even a soul-relationship with these questions and notions? Or is it, it just doesn't actually -- the soul doesn't get involved in those questions, in those notions? And then, if not, why not? And without any preconceived answers of "it should" or "it shouldn't," but just what's actually going on there on a soul-level, in relation to all these?
