Transcription
Daniel Thorson and Rob Burbea
Posted September 3, 2018
Daniel: Hello and welcome to another episode of Emerge. This week we are postponing the third episode in the Bonnitta Roy season finale. There were some unfortunate problems in the recording and I have to send it away to an editor. But I will be releasing that hopefully next week. For now I'm going to be sharing with you a third conversation with Rob Burbea, which is actually the first conversation that he and I had, which I chose not to release first because there were connection issues during the call and it just didn't flow in the way that I wanted as far as the kind of initial presentation of his work on Emerge. So nevertheless, here it is, edited. Forgive the occasional audio glitches; I think it's still a lovely conversation that's well-worth listening to.
If you've enjoyed the other conversations with Rob, this is in a similar vein. And if you haven't yet heard the other conversations with Rob Burbea, I recommend going back and giving those a listen, or if you feel called to start with this one you can start here. And in any case, I'm just happy to bring more of Rob's work into the world -- I think every conversation with him is beautiful. And if you are enjoying the conversation with Rob Burbea, I recommend that you go and check out the Deconstructing Yourself podcast with Michael Taft. He just released a really wonderful conversation with Rob.[1] And so I'm really happy that Rob is kind of getting out there in the podcast world. I think what he has to share is immeasurably valuable. So without further ado, here is Rob Burbea on Emerge.
Daniel: Okay, hello and welcome to another episode of Emerge. This time I'm very honoured, very excited, and honestly quite humbled to welcome meditation teacher and author Rob Burbea. Rob, welcome to Emerge.
Rob: Thanks, Daniel. Pleasure to be here. Thanks for inviting me.
Daniel: Yeah, yeah. You know, I've spent a lot of time thinking about and attempting to prepare for this conversation because honestly, Rob, your work has been quite meaningful to me. But it's also hard to know where to start, right? And part of the reason I wanted to have this conversation was to create a way in to your approach to meditation and spirituality and whatever we want to call it. And so partly because the approach you articulate is so radical, I think it's hard to find a way in. So I'm going to start out with I think what might seem like a very naïve and silly question, but from your perspective and according to the approach that you've been articulating, what is the point of spending time sitting in silence, practising in silence, observing our minds or the world? What are we doing when we're doing that? Why would we want to do that?
Rob: Right, yeah. So that's a big question. In a way, I mean, the first thing to say is that it's up to each person to decide what they're doing and why they're doing it. I think it's quite interesting -- sometimes it's not even that clearly articulated to a person themselves. They don't quite articulate clearly what they're doing, what the fullness of their motivation is, where they're headed. It's interesting. Obviously I talk to so many practitioners and meditators, and how rare it is for someone to have articulated to themselves a really clear vision of what they're doing and what they're trying to get to, or to realize what's going on for them. So that's quite interesting.
Daniel: Yes, yeah. What it brings to mind is this sense of the fantasies that we bring to meditation, and you talk about the kind of typical different fantasies that people often have in relationship to meditation. And actually, once you started unpacking these, I started seeing them all over the place, but before you had unpacked them, I don't know that I was aware of them. So I wonder -- maybe that might be a good place to kind of turn towards. What are the fantasies that you've identified that typically people are sort of operating on behalf of when it comes to meditation?
Rob: Yeah. I can't remember. [Rob and Daniel laugh] Let's see.
Daniel: For example, the kind of medical model, right? So I was listening to -- I think it was Sam Harris. I don't know if you know Sam Harris. I was listening to Sam Harris interview Richie Davidson and Dan Goleman, and they kind of completely -- in the period of the show -- expressed meditation as this practice of cultivating meta-awareness in order to create a healthier brain.
Rob: Yeah.
Daniel: And a happier life therefore.
Rob: Yeah, so that's really common, you know? It's really common across the board, really, even in a lot of Buddhist paradigms or teachings or certain interpretations and directions of that. And so, you know, you've got a lot wrapped up in such a conception, and a lot of it's unspoken and not necessarily questioned consciously. So for example, the primacy of brain functioning, and that's resting on a certain materialist view of the world, and a certain notion of reality: "The world is as it is. This brain is an organ or an instrument of taking in information from the real world, that information processing as real and efficient as possible, and the brain output as clear, as efficient, as sort of high-grade engine as possible, in order that this being can function better in the world." I mean, that would be one version of that. You can hear there are all kinds of assumptions -- reality assumptions about what the world is, about what the human organism is, about the primacy of brain and neuroscience, etc., and about what we're trying to achieve there.
So my background is primarily in Buddhist teachings, and there you have what the Buddha called the Four Noble Truths. So basically he's saying, look, there's suffering of different kinds, and you can practise, you can meditate, you can live a life that, let's say, reduces or even eliminates eventually the suffering of, the problem of existence. And so there you have -- that is actually a medical model. So whether you frame it, however you say what that end of suffering looks like or that direction, whether you conceive of it as purely in this kind of brain efficiency model or whatever, or some other model, it's basically what I would call the medical model. You're taking pain, dis-ease, suffering, and the point of the path is to eradicate or at least reduce as much as possible that suffering. And of course that's really wise and really helpful. And for a lot of people, that encapsulates either everything, the whole reason about why they're practising, or some good portion of why they're practising.
So that would be probably the most common. We could articulate many, many different versions of that. But just as a sort of, as you say, meta-picture of a direction, an avenue, a conception of the path, that would be one. But then it's also possible that if you ask someone why they're practising, and really help them to open up that question and that introspection for themselves, that often that's not the primary reason why people are practising. It's what they might first articulate out loud. It's what they're taught. That's what they receive: "We're doing this to end suffering," whether it's packaged in a traditional Buddhist context or, as you say, in this -- I don't know what you'd call that, those people that you were referring to, whatever. It's basically packaged as the reduction of suffering, the reduction of dis-ease, etc., the increase of happiness. But I think if you, as I said, talk to people and kind of get them to open up this question and this introspection, you'll get quite a lot of -- you'll realize that people are practising for different reasons. Sometimes people are practising for a sense of sacredness, for example, or for a sense of beauty. Sometimes the, as you said, fantasy or the vision of the self that's practising is also involved, especially when we're getting into practice, when we really love this, something's really engaging us. Some people will just do it as a technique to reduce suffering, but as you get into it and love it more, you realize, "Oh, there are different motivations. There are different kind of fantasies or visions of my self on this path and of what it's opening out to, of the goal."
And sometimes a person has, for instance, what I call the artistic fantasy. It's actually seeing and imagining the whole practice as a kind of art, and art for art's sake, art for the sake of beauty, art for opening up the sense of mystery, and profundity, and colour, and vibrancy, and endless creativity, and endless discovery. And a person actually may have that fantasy operating either as the dominant one or woven into the medical model fantasy. Or another one might be, you might say, the research scientist fantasy -- I'm remembering what they are now! -- where a person's actually kind of sitting down with a self-image or fantasy that they can discover things for themselves about consciousness, about the nature of perception, about reality, about the possibilities of human being and human consciousness. And the implicit fantasy there is, "I'm on this journey of exciting experiment and research and discovery," and that, some of it, decreases suffering. It's great. But actually that may not be the primary motivation. Now, of course, all these can coexist, and some different impulses or motivations kind of take precedence at different times, but those would be three fantasies, for example, that we could contrast.
Daniel: Yeah. And I think what I hear from your talks that you've given that I've listened to, it's not at all that any of these fantasies are mistaken or wrong, but they are all fantasies, and to a degree, they become problematic when we take them too seriously and when they become kind of constricting. And I know for me, as somebody who has been meditating intensively for quite some time, you know, I started with a kind of version of the medical model, where I really wanted to end my own suffering, but eventually that, after a time, became quite sort of stale and almost, I think, like neutering or constricting. And you talk about in this context a sort of breaking of the vessel, and I wonder if you can just sort of talk a little bit about when we acknowledge that, say, the medical model is our fantasy, what does it mean to sort of become aware of the fantasies that are in operation in us?
Rob: Yeah, this is a really good question. I'm just aware that we're not approaching this quite the way we said, but that's okay with me. We're kind of diving in at the deep end with all this fantasy business, but that's okay. So I just picked up on a few words you said: neutering, constricting, and I think you said stagnant. This won't be the case for everyone. So some people happily employ the medical model for their whole life, and it's enough for them. So I really want to stress that I wouldn't want to push any model or conception of practice on anyone. You know, we are free in the sense that we can decide for ourselves, based on what we're open to, why we're doing anything. But as you described, some people will be practising with this idea of reducing suffering, and it works -- one practises with intelligence and finds the right tools and techniques, if you like, that work for oneself, brings one's integrity to that; one actually notices there's a reduction of suffering in my life -- usually gradually, sometimes with sort of sudden steps in it. And of course this is great. This is really healing. It's lovely. It's wonderful.
And it might come a point where there's been enough reduction in suffering, and the idea of further reduction in suffering, or even the end of suffering, kind of doesn't even seem that attractive any more. Why? Because, we could say, to use a certain language, the soul, the being, wants other things. It doesn't just want to be free of suffering. Something else in us is crying out or yearning or longing for other sensibilities, other openings, and also other ways of fantasizing or, let's say, of seeing and conceiving of ourselves, and what the path is, and also of what existence is and what the possibilities are. So you used the word 'neutering,' and you're not the first person that I've heard use that expression. You know, one of the things in -- again, not all, but in a lot of, let's say, spiritual paradigms or meditation paradigms is they kind of leave out the erotic. Not just the sexual, but even more broadly speaking, the erotic. And after a while -- this might be fine for a time, but after a while, one realizes there's a way here or ways of relating to myself through meditation that, beneficial as they are, end up kind of neutering me: I've lost my wildness. Or what does it say about sexuality? How is it opening up and kind of expanding in a really beautiful way these dimensions and aspects of our existence? They've kind of been implicitly judged as maybe unspiritual or unhelpful or just irrelevant.
So a person might feel that, and might feel something is kind of being atrophied or dying in me, and it wants to come alive; I need some other paradigm, or some other vision, or some other fantasy of what I'm doing that brings that into the path, allows it, and really allows it to unfold, to become more rich, more deep, more beautiful, more sacred, more mysterious -- all of that. Does this ...? Yeah? I think you used two other words, constricting and stagnant. Now, constricting to me can happen in all kinds of ways, and I'm not sure how it happened for you or in what ways you felt constricted, but one of the ways might be -- going back to something I said earlier -- that a lot of especially kind of modern interpretations or versions of spiritual practices or meditation practices, they tend to conceive of the world as it seems. There's a kind of given there. The reality of things is obvious. It forms a kind of prison, really -- a brick structure of unquestionable reality. And the job of meditation is, "Okay, how can I be okay with this reality? How can I train my mind or brain to relate to the limitations, the hard, basic, undeniable, 'as-it-is'-ness reality of this world that I find myself in, and this body, and the situations that I find myself in?"
So already there's a kind of implicit constriction in the existential view. Some people are happy with that, and some people actually, I would say, want that. It's part of just how they want to see the world, let's say. If we're going back to this question, "Why meditate? Why does someone practise?", it's also possible to conceive -- either within a Buddhist framework or another spiritual paradigm -- that actually I'm practising, I'm meditating, I'm training my awareness, training my perception, training my inquiry and my consciousness to actually begin to question the nature of this reality, and is everything just how it seems to be -- much in the same way a physicist might inquire along those lines in their own domain. And I think that there are ways of training the perception, training the kinds of attention and the kinds of questioning we give to our experience, the whole range of our experience -- bodily, physical, mental, emotional, all of it, perceptual -- there are ways of training [audio cuts out] and inquiry there, and a range of ways of looking and perceiving, that actually begin to seriously question and open up and undermine the constricted kind of notion and actual sense -- it's not just intellectual; the actual physical perception of reality that we have -- and open that up, and open up the range of what we can actually perceive.
So it might be -- and this may not be the case for you, it may not have been the case for you, but it might be that there is a kind of constriction in practice because it's always taking place within the rigid, constricted parameters of an unquestioned reality view. Does that make sense?
Daniel: Mm-hmm, absolutely. And that is, I now know, what was true for me. Like, there was a certain conceptual paradigm that I was moving from in my meditation practice and in my life, and it no longer had any juice for me, essentially. It no longer was a source of ongoing meaning. There was no pathos there, as you say, or eros, and that had to break. And I think maybe it would be appropriate now, though -- we've kind of, as you said, dipped into the deep end, which I think was good because that's why this conversation is so relevant, I think, is because there are assumptions embedded in the way meditation and contemplative practice is talked about in our world right now, and those assumptions have consequences. And I think I have seen, especially over the past year or so of working with your teachings, that there is a much wider and more interesting and sacred kind of possibility of meditation practice that is often occluded from the way that we tend to approach it. And so that's just kind of, I think, setting it up perhaps a little bit for us to then talk about what is a different way to approach meditation practice. You've already mentioned this term 'ways of seeing,' and so maybe we can kind of unpack that a little bit. What is a way of seeing, and why is this such an important sort of conceptual model or tool?
Rob: Yeah, thank you. Okay, so, as you alluded to, what often happens -- we've both said this -- what often happens is I hear about meditation, and it's framed within a certain reality view, and then I take that whole reality view and that conceptual framework, conception of myself, conception of the path, conception of the world and of the mind, and I take that and it functions as the often implicit but sometimes explicit kind of backdrop of my whole directionality in practice and my whole journey in practice. So I like to kind of -- can we kind of step back, realize that this goes on? We move in the world, we act in the world, and we meditate always with some kind of view going on, always with some kind of conception and relationship and perspective on reality. There's always one there. So if we at least introduce that as a possibility, that it's possible there's always one there, what do we have in our experience? We have appearances, okay? Phenomena. I like to think this is a way of framing it in a kind of what I call a phenomenological approach, meaning I just go from the basis of appearance or experience or perception (I use those three words interchangeably). Appearance -- that's what 'phenomena' actually means in Greek -- perception, interchangeably, experience. This is what I have in life. Anything else is a kind of assumption on top of that. I assume, "No, no, no. I have atoms. I have subatomic particles," and I'm probably assuming they're like this or they're like that. All that's been questioned by modern physics in terms of is there a kind of independent reality to the way those subatomic particles are.
So if I just come back and adopt a phenomenological approach, all I have is appearances. What can I discover through meditation about appearances? So right there, we could say that's one level. Why meditate? It's for the purpose of exploring this question: what can I discover about this world of experience? This is something I know: there is experience. Everything else is some kind of concept or interpretation put on top of that. Now, as I said, I came into all of this through Buddhism, which is very explicit about okay, the path is for the erasing, eradicating, or at least diminishing of suffering. So then we have -- let's apply that phenomenological approach to that either Buddhist Four Noble Truths or the medical model. I want to know -- here's this world of appearances, and I know I suffer -- and that's also an appearance; the appearance, the experience of suffering -- and what can I do? How can I investigate that world of appearances with this medical model in mind? I'm interested in lessening suffering. As I meditate, and if we just, for example, take mindfulness -- mindfulness is a practice, we could say, just to make it simple right now, mindfulness is a mode of attention to experience which simplifies to a certain level. It cuts out all the story -- or rather, it cuts out a lot of the story, a lot of the kind of veils and complications we tend to introduce on top of our experience, you could say, in that model.
So what's happening there is in the mode of attention or the way of looking that we call mindfulness, we are creating less. We are not throwing in and elaborating and creating all these stories and complexities in relation to my experience. So, you know, something can happen in an interpersonal moment -- someone looks at you or something, and they look displeased with me, and then I start spinning stories about myself and about them and about all the problem. Mindfulness is kind of just saying, "Just see that look that they gave me, and notice if there's some bodily experience with that or some emotion, but try to disengage from the complication, from what we're adding to it." Now, a lot of people will explain this by saying, "Okay, what you're doing there is you're being with reality. You're being with the basic reality. You're being with things as they are. You're being with what is. You're being with the bare actuality of experience when you're being mindful, because you're taking away all the kind of creation, all the fabrication, and you're with what is."
I think, for me, that's already too much assumption. Because what I notice as I develop different ways of looking in meditation -- I use the phrase 'ways of looking' slightly preferentially to 'ways of seeing,' because 'looking' implies a slightly more active role. So I can view meditation, this phenomenological approach, I have appearances, and what I'm going to do in my meditation is play with different ways of looking at experience, at appearance, at perception. By 'ways of looking,' I mean different relationships. What happens, for example, when I reject experience? I don't like it; I want to push it away; I want to get rid of it -- what Buddhists call aversion, or there is aversion in the way of looking. What happens when I'm chasing experience? What happens when I kind of relax that pushing away or pulling towards or hanging on, relax it more and more and more and more? All that gradation, that kind of spectrum of how much (what Buddhists call) clinging or craving, how much grasping there is to experience or in relation to experience -- I can see what happens to my experience, to my experience of self, to my experience of the world, to my experience of time as I let go of more and more of that kind of tussle with experience.
And this is something we can develop in meditation. We really develop this skill with a kind of openness: "Let's see what happens when I do that." I can also play with -- when I say 'ways of looking,' I mean the whole relationship, the whole conceptual framework, the whole perspective involved at any time -- not just 'looking' as a kind of ocular language, but also sensing, ways of sensing, ways of perceiving. So basically, meditation becomes, or the vision of meditation becomes: there is a playground of potentially infinite ways of looking at experience, meaning ways of conceiving, ways of relating, approaches, perspectives; an infinite playground that we can explore. We can jump in and get skilful at really different ways of looking.
And what we see, as I said, or what we find for ourselves, impacted, is some ways of looking create more difficulty. They create more dis-ease, more suffering, etc., and some open up more ease, less dis-ease, less suffering, more ease. And we also notice that the whole sense of self changes dependent on ways of looking. So for example, I feel really alienated, or really separate, or really self-conscious, or really like hard-edged, or I feel myself as this really solid entity, separate from nature or whatever it is. That's all dependent on the way of looking. When I look at the world with certain concepts, with a certain, if you like, energetic relationship, that's what issues. That perception is what comes. That's the sense of the self, and the world correspondingly will seem a certain way.
You can develop this whole kind of really open-ended, deep and wide-ranging vision or sense of, conception of what the meditative path is. I'm playing with ways of looking, and I'm experimenting and seeing what the effect of those different ways of looking is on my sense of self and my sense of the world and my dis-ease.
Daniel: Yeah. And I'll say this: that way of looking at what meditation is and is for is so both simplifying and liberating. Like, it feels so much clearer as a kind of container for what it is that we do when we learn to meditate. It's kind of like we're learning the skills of how to perceive differently, in different ways, and in particular what I really appreciate about this model is that it accounts for, from my perspective, the entire thrust of the Buddhist path as well as an infinite amount more. It almost -- well, I'll leave it there for now; I would be excited to go in the direction I wanted to go, but for now I'll say: let's say we adopt this model of ways of looking. How then do we sort of understand the Buddhist path, the contemplative path like that?
Rob: Yeah, okay. I also want to just mention that not everyone is so happy with such a conceptual framework for [audio garbled -- meditation?]. And one of the common objections would be -- and sometimes it's an almost intuitive objection that people have, so I'll try and answer your question in a second, Daniel; I just want to get this in.
Daniel: Yeah, yeah.
Rob: [The objection] is that "Oh, yeah, yeah, sure. We can look at things different ways. But after a while, I just want to come back to seeing things as they are," or "I just want to kind of be with reality. I don't want to make up these different ways of looking." So, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, ways of looking. Of course there are different ways of looking. Everyone knows that. But practice, meditative practice or Buddhist practice or mindfulness practice, is about being with things as they are, being with reality. It's not about playing with ways of looking." It's almost like everyone, or very commonly, people would agree that a human being can look at things in different ways, miracle of being human. But the radicality is missed because somewhere, often silently in the belief system, there's a sense, "Yeah, but there is a reality. You can look at that reality in different ways, but there is a reality."
Buddhists have this word 'emptiness,' and what it really means is all things -- or at least my interpretation of that teaching is all things, all things without exception -- not just selves, not just material things, but space and time and awareness and mind, everything, everything, everything without exception, subatomic particles, everything, is empty of existing in a way that's independent of the way we look at it. I'll say that again. So emptiness means things are empty, things don't exist in some kind of objectively independent fashion. So my sense of that's where the Buddhist path is going -- it's going to a realization of this non-inherent reality of anything at all, okay?
Now, someone can start with -- let's just say out of faith, or I just have an intuition that that's true, and so I want to use my meditation to get to that. But someone might also just start with, "Hey, I don't know what reality is. Maybe there's an independent reality, maybe there isn't. I don't know." Again, I go back to the phenomenological approach -- I just have appearances. Let's play with different ways of looking and see what I can find out about those appearances, and see if I can come to one that somehow shows me, "Oh, this is an independent sense of reality. This view, this way of looking, reveals things as they are." So armed with -- we won't go into the sort of technical details, but you can train, as I said, in different ways of looking. And what one notices, "Oh, when I look this way," as I said earlier, "when I look this way, there tends to be more suffering. Things get more complicated. The self feels harder and more brittle and more vulnerable and more defensive, and the world seems alien and cold and hostile" or whatever it is, "and when I look in another way, that all softens. And when I look in a third way, it softens even more. And when I look in a fourth way, wow, it softens even more, so much so that the whole kind of hard distinction between self and the world and between things begins to kind of soften," for example. And I get interested in this: "What other ways of looking? I thought self and world were kind of real entities, and now my perception is -- or there are ways of looking that don't reveal so much separateness." One can extend this and extend this and just keep developing skill and exploring the range of ways of looking.
What one comes to -- I mean, very deep practice -- is that with a really thorough and deep training of the meditative sort of ways of looking, one actually sees experience doesn't arise. Things don't arise or appear without certain ways of looking. And the Buddhists call this the Unfabricated; it's sort of beyond perception or beyond the world, if you like. But one realizes how thoroughly dependent the world of things is on the way of looking, on the ways of looking. When I look this way, things appear this way; when I look that way, they appear that way. And with enough kind of depth and thoroughness and dipping in and out of all this, one realizes that I cannot privilege one of these ways of looking over another to reveal "this is the way things are." And that reveals the deep interconnectedness -- that's not even a good enough word -- the deep interconnectedness of the mind and the world through the ways of looking, and reveals, as I said before, that all things, without exception, including space, including even the most basic perceptions of time and a present moment and all that -- all that doesn't exist independently of the way of looking. And so one realizes, as I said, the emptiness of things.
You asked about the Buddhist path. When one realizes that, or to the degree that one realizes that, one doesn't suffer so much, basically, in relation to things, you know? So that's one way of putting it in the medical model. It's extending that medical model to a whole investigation of what we take to be real. Does that make sense?
Daniel: It makes a lot of sense. Yeah, so keep going with that, because I think where I was going to take it was I think where you're going to go, so please.
Rob: Well, so, again, we can look at all that from the medical model. In other words, if we go back to kind of basic principles, you can have this medical model -- I know I experience suffering, and I know I experience a world and self and physicality and all that, and let me take those phenomena -- world, self, things, etc., space, time, all the rest of it -- and adopt these ways of looking in the service of the medical model, all under the kind of rubric of that medical model, and one of the things I'll come to is that realization of emptiness to some degree, and I can keep going, can get deeper and deeper and more and more thorough, but it's all in the paradigm of the medical model. And as I see the kind of non-inherent reality of things, there's a really profound liberation in relation to my self, the elements that make up my self, and the things of the world.
So the whole thing is kind of moving, as I said, on the train track of the medical model, under that paradigm. But a person doing that -- and going back to what we said before -- it's really unlikely, going in and out of all those different ways of looking and perceptions, some of the beauty and the sort of wondrousness of what opens up in that investigation of ways of looking and that investigation of experience and phenomena, some of it touches the being so deeply in the sense of beauty and sacredness and mystery, that that being touched by those elements comes to mean sometimes more than the freedom that comes out of the experience, of the insights. Does that make sense?
Daniel: Yes, yeah.
Rob: And again, sometimes it's articulated, and sometimes it's not, and we're not often supported by the kind of teachings that actually bring that up: "Do you realize that this is what's going on for you, that you're actually drawn to this beauty? That you love that sacredness? That you would die for mystery? If you had to choose between living a life free of suffering and living a life free of mystery and sacredness and beauty, that you would probably choose -- you wouldn't want to do without the beauty and the sacredness and the depth and the mystery and the dimensionality and all that." So one, in that exploration of ways of looking, yes, we can conceive, we can start with this very basic idea: "I'll take the medical model, because I know that I suffer and I'm fed up with it, and I've heard there are some other possibilities." And I take this phenomenological approach, meaning this exploration of the effects of different ways of looking on the appearance of everything, absolutely everything -- self, world, things, the whole show. And I might do that with the medical model, and it deepens and deepens and deepens, but in so doing, it also opens up, if you like, a whole different sense of reality, imbued, I think, with sacredness, depth, mystery, beauty, and all that. A whole range of different perceptions will be opened up for a meditator who's really exploring this with a lot of vigour and love and enthusiasm. All that will open up, and it touches the being, touches the soul really deeply. Then that fact might expand with a little reflection: "Okay, am I just doing this because I want to reduce suffering, or is there something else?" Does that ...?
Daniel: That makes sense. And my experience was a little bit different, and actually similar to people I've talked to, in that I wasn't having these experiences of the sacred until I had a fantasy or a model that allowed for them. I wonder if you could speak to that piece, too, around concepts and conceptual models.
Rob: Yeah. So that's interesting to me, and in a way, if I understand what you're saying, it just shows the power of what we're taught and the frameworks in which we're taught. We receive that with the teaching, and we receive then a range -- we receive a certain size playground, with a vision of where we're going, and if you've just simply not heard anyone talk about sacredness and not heard anyone singing the praises of the mystic and pointing to that beauty and that possibility, it's possible that something happens -- we just absorb that framework, and it becomes rigid in our own psyche, in our own mind, and determines the ways we look, and out of that limits what we actually sense and perceive and open to, absolutely. So I'm glad that turned around for you somehow! [Rob and Daniel laugh]
Daniel: Me, too!
Rob: It makes me [inaudible] how much -- I know that's certainly the case in respect to the imagination, which is something we'll get to, I'm sure. But that's really interesting to hear you say that in terms of sacredness. So I'm not at all surprised. And I remember going on a retreat -- I won't say quite where and which tradition it was in -- but I was a little bit flabbergasted. At the end of the retreat, and sort of sitting around having lunch with all the people on the retreat, some of whom had been meditating for years and years and years, and there was an utter, to me, absolutely baffling absence of any talk of the sacred or being touched. It was just like it was [audio cuts out]. I was really shocked. And of course, having sat that retreat and listened to the teachings, it wasn't in the teachings. There was actually quite a lot of -- I don't know what the word is -- kind of superstitious belief systems, but there was nothing about sacredness or beauty or the transcendent or divinity permeating the cosmos or anything like that, mystery, the mystic. Nothing whatsoever. For me, that's really missing the point -- might as well pop a pill and ... You know? [Rob and Daniel laugh]
Daniel: Yeah. It's so interesting because I'm 30 years old, and I started meditating when I was about 19, really because I saw scientific studies about how meditation actually was good for the brain. I was like -- my way in was this kind of scientific model of what meditation was for. But then I went really deep -- I spent years in monasteries; I've done lots of intensive silent retreats. I've really dedicated my life. But that as the sort of first model or doorway in I think really did constrain the range of my experiences for a long time. And looking back on it, I see it. I see that I just wasn't open to having certain types of experience, or certain ranges of my experience that were not accessible to me. And so, again, there's this way that you have of kind of talking about what practice is for in terms of extending the range of our perception -- like, are we able to experience things as sacred? Why not, if we're not?
Rob: Yeah, absolutely.
Daniel: I think that's such a beautiful question.
Rob: Yeah, and again, you're pointing to just the power of concepts and conceptual frameworks to shape and open or close or limit our perceptions. So again, to me, I would say one of the things we realize in that exploration of what I'm calling the phenomenological approach is that there's always a way of looking, and so there's always a conception. There's always some conception of what's real, what the world is, etc. I know it's very, very popular in spiritual circles to talk about non-conceptual awareness or even imagine that mindfulness is a kind of non-conceptual awareness because you're not thinking a lot, but I'm talking about a much more kind of insidious, if you like, conceptuality, wrapped up in any perception. That means in any experience is some conception or another -- usually a whole bundle of conceptions -- and, as I said, a lot of them are not being questioned. So really what we're talking about, when we open up this whole possibilities of perception, we also open up the possibilities of conception. And at a certain time, the whole thing gets freed up so we realize we can start actually playing with different conceptions. So I can see, "Oh, reality is not one way," in which case I can kind of take different conceptions and sort of take them for a ride or see where they take me, which means see where they take my experience, see where they take my sense of the world and self, and sacredness or not, or beauty or not, or love or wonder or whatever it is, or freedom or not. So at a certain point, the whole thing opens up to open to not just the possibility of ways of looking but the possibility of different conceptions as well. I think I didn't answer your question there!
Daniel: No, I think that's exactly right, and this sort of -- and then we open up into this infinite field of play, right?
Rob: Yeah.
Daniel: And that becomes the stage of our practice. And it's -- I mean, maybe you can talk a little bit about that, that kind of creativity and that kind of infinitude of ...
Rob: Gosh, I'm not sure. Maybe I'd have to ask you something a bit more specific.
Daniel: Yeah, okay. I guess what I'm moved by is -- so we are playing with ways of seeing. Or actually, here, let me take a step back. Let's take a step back and spend a little bit more time circling this, because I've spent so much time listening to your talks and it's hard to know what needs additional time defining.
Rob: Of course.
Daniel: So what I feel called to spend some time with is this kind of idea of concepts and conceptual models and non-conceptual experience. It is endemic in the kind of spiritual culture -- at least that I've been exposed to -- of a wariness of and a disengagement from concepts. The general tendency and kind of movement, the priority, is to say, "Oh, well, you know, let's go back to how things are. Let's be with the emotions. Let's be with what's real, and let's forget about the concepts. Those are a distraction." And I wonder if you could talk about -- there is a way in which that itself is a conceptual model that then, whether we like it or not, kind of constrains our experience, or determines our experience. Maybe you could talk about that.
Rob: Yeah. So there are at least two ways that it occurs to me that that constraining happens with such a model. And as you said, it's so prevalent. It's certainly through all the different Buddhist traditions you hear a lot. I don't know -- I wonder if it's just because Westerners are so kind of information overloaded and thinking overloaded, and we don't know how to let the thinking mind go quiet, generally speaking, in our culture. Of course we don't learn that in school. And so we're just tired of thinking, and there's this kind of allure of this possibility of not thinking, and then that gets tied in with basically a whole ontology and epistemology, and it's like, "Oh, when you don't think, that's real, or when there's no concept, that's real."
So there are two things there. One is what I would call, as I said, subtle conceptuality, that I alluded to before. So let's say -- I'll describe a kind of typical thing that could happen in a meditation as one goes deeper and deeper. So one sits or walks or stands or whatever it is, and I'm practising these ways of looking, and particularly these ways of looking that kind of, as I said, relax the pushing away of unpleasant experience and the trying to grasp on to pleasant experience. And just getting really skilful at the whole range of how much, more and more, I can relax that push and pull. And as I said earlier, one of the things that happens is, as I do that, the first thing I notice is, "Oh, there's less suffering here. I'm sitting here with this pain in my knee, or pain in my back, or pain in my belly," or whatever it is, and I can feel the rest of my body and my mind -- I can feel my mind screaming, "I hate it! Go away! Why me?", and then I learn to just relax that kind of aversion somewhat. Then I notice, "Oh, my body is tensing around it." And so I can relax that aversion. Then I get into really subtle levels of aversion, of this pushing away of what I don't like. And I keep finding ways; I develop this art; I relax more and more.
As I do that, the first thing I notice is that, "Oh, there's a lot less suffering. Here's an unpleasant sensation, but it's really not bothering me that much. It's really much more tolerable. As it goes deeper, this letting go of the aversion in this example, as that goes deeper, I start to notice something: the actual pain subsides. It kind of dissolves gradually. The, let's say, fabrication, the constellation of that experience, that appearance and that perception of that thing called pain begins to dissipate, to dissolve. I use the language it fades gradually. And as I go deeper and deeper into this, more and more letting go, actually the whole sense of the body begins to fade, and I go deeper and deeper, and following this thread -- this takes quite a while to develop -- the whole realm of appearances begins to fade. And maybe I get just a whole sense, for example, what could open up is in the place of a body that had pain in certain areas, there's just space, or maybe just awareness, or maybe just nothingness. The whole thing kind of fades more and more down this spectrum.
Now, thinking has stopped long ago, perhaps, but I would say even -- let's say the most extreme of just as far as I got: there's just a sense of there's nothing; there's just a vast nothingness. Or even it's not even vast -- the whole sense of space has kind of faded and there's just a kind of nothing. I would say at that level there's still conceptuality operating because there's still some kind of sense of a something. What is the something? Well, it's a nothing. It's a very, very subtle object for the mind, and there's some kind of sense of subject, mind, or consciousness, or awareness, or some really vague, really subtle, refined sense of a 'me,' a subject and an object, and the whole experience is happening in time -- even if it's just a sense of 'the now.' That's the most basic conceptual triad: subject, object, and time. And so, for me, there's still concept wrapped up in that very, very, very faded, attenuated, extremely refined, and actually wondrous and mystical and beautiful experience. It still involves conceptuality. Do you understand? It's wrapped up in the perception.
Daniel: Yeah, yeah. More and more, absolutely.
Rob: So then the question might be, "Well, is it possible to even let go of that whole really subtle concept of a subject and an object and time? What happens when I really go beyond that kind of conceptuality?" So there is a possibility of non-conceptual experience, but it's certainly not going to be -- that experience of non-conceptuality is going to be nothing like the experience of the world of subjects and objects and things and time; it's going to be something actually completely transcendent, what I call the Unfabricated. It's beyond space, beyond time, beyond any notion of subject and object. So if I've decided in advance and I'm wedded to some idea of the possibility of non-conceptual awareness just when things kind of look really bright and vivid and the mind isn't thinking, then I'm not kind of -- I may close for myself the possibility of going beyond, letting go of that subtle level of conceptuality that's involved in that very vivid, simple, so-called 'bare' experience. So I'm kind of truncating the path at a certain point. Does that make sense?
Daniel: Mm-hmm.
Rob: So that's one way, and then the second way that it can really limit things, what you were talking about, is that, you know, we have minds as human beings. We have emotions. We have an extraordinary sensitivity and beauty of our emotional life. We have extraordinary sensitivities possible through bodily life and this organism and the instrument that we call the body. Really beautiful things can be discovered there, much more extraordinary than most people would admit or know about. But the same is true of the intellect. It's like, if I just decide that conceptuality is bad -- "Boo. That doesn't show reality, and I want to go for this kind of non-conceptual state," whatever that means, "and non-conceptual experience of the world" -- then I'm also, in a way, dismissing the value and the beauty of the intellect, and of ideas, and of conceptual tussling and engaging, and the possible fertility for perception, for ways of looking, of different concepts, as we alluded to earlier. So that whole range, the kind of erotic relationship with intellect and idea, as well as with body, as well as with nature, as well as with everything else -- we're just shutting that off as well and deciding, "Oh, that's not spiritual. That can't show me anything." Why? We have it. It's truly remarkable. And there's beauty in the intellect, and sacredness, and divinity, and mystery in the flowering and functioning of our intellect, just as much as there is in anything else. So that would be a second reason -- it's like, why cut that off?
Daniel: Yes, yes. So I want to maybe change gears a little bit. The kind of purpose of this show is to explore the people and ideas that are creating the next paradigm, from my perspective, of the human experiment -- like what is it going to take to get us through what I see as this threshold of potential extinction, especially regarding the ecological crisis and the mental health crisis and all of these multiple, very complex different crises. And here you and I are talking about perception and ways of looking, and I want to, as we head towards the end of this conversation, start to allude a little bit to the implications of what you are talking about -- which might seem very esoteric to some people, which might seem very mystical. From my perspective, you have created this approach, to some degree, as a response to the ecological crisis and to the ineffectiveness of the current kind of contemplative culture's ability to respond to that. And so I wonder if you can just unpack a little bit -- I know we can't do it very much in the time we have, but a little bit the implications there.
Rob: Yeah. Thank you. I also feel very much that this approach, if that's what we can call it, or the kind of framework that's being created and discovered, I feel very much that that's in response, and a lot of it is in response to the ecological crises and the crises of lack of meaningfulness, and lack of enchantment is another possibility. So you had the question that you said earlier, which I didn't really respond to -- it's like, it's a really powerful question: why can't I perceive things as sacred, or why don't I? What's happened in our culture? We can trace it historically, and I think that's fascinating in terms of the history of ideas in particularly Western culture, which is now global culture, in terms of the Western Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution, all of which were wonderful and probably really necessary evolutions at the time, but they've created a kind of default view of what the world is, what nature is, what the earth is, what reality is, and also what human beings are. And this default view, it doesn't -- I think it's too much to say that modern human beings, all of them, are in that all the time; I think it's more just something that has such a great sort of weight and authority, it's like, at the back of the sort of individual and collective consciousness. It's just the air we breathe, it's what we've been educated, so that even when we have other kinds of experiences of sacredness, of connection, of whatever it is, of divinity, we kind of easily dismiss it and the default view of a kind of meaningless cosmos made up of the random movement of little billiard ball-like atoms, and a human being is just a really complex computer based on their neurological -- on the random evolution in time through survival of the fittest, of organic networks that evolved consciousness, etc. That whole view of what existence is, what the earth is, what nature is, what I myself am and what my fellow human beings are, that's what I think Max Weber called a disenchanted view. It came with the enlightenment. It emerged with the Western Enlightenment.
And it brought so many benefits in terms of scientific investigation, etc., but you could say that it has, as you said, really significant and important, problematic consequences for the way we treat each other, for the way we treat ourselves, for the way we think of what this existence is for, for the way that we see and touch and relate to the earth and to nature and to the other species that we share this planet with, and the rest of the cosmos. It's hard to really consistently engage the cosmos and one's humanity with a sense of sacredness, of unfathomable depth and dimensionality and possibility and all that, because of this dominant view. And that's based on -- this came with the Western Enlightenment -- there is one single take on what reality is: reality, nature, physicality, the world exist independently of the mind, independently of the way of looking, etc., and they're kind of flat. They're just flat and meaningless.
And I would really -- I would be very careful to say, and I think this is important: I don't view what's being developed in this conceptual framework that we're talking about, I don't view that as "this is the answer to all the world's problems and everyone should do this." I think the crises that we face are so complex -- politically complex, economically complex, sociologically complex, philosophically complex, and also psychologically complex -- and something like climate change or species extinction, I think it's not just one kind of universal paradigm shift that everyone's going to suddenly get. So I would say this is -- for some people, this may be the kind of broad conceptual framework, with depth and rigour, etc., that can kind of legitimize to themselves a whole different relationship with existence, with the world, with humanity, with oneself, and with the cosmos. So I think for some people it's one that can do that, and by bringing back this kind of enchantment, this mystical participation, and this sacredness into -- the possibility of bringing that sacredness, or discovering, let's say, creating and discovering that sense of sacredness with every possible dimension of existence, everything without exception, this framework can potentially, for some people, legitimize that. And for those people, it becomes very important. But I would insist that, you know, it's going to take lots of different approaches, and I certainly wouldn't want any hegemony or a monopoly on kind of ...
Daniel: Yes, totally. And the two terms that you've said it brings to mind is this -- I think you called it 'epistemic disobedience,' which I love. I don't know if you feel called to say a little bit more on that.
Rob: Yeah, I didn't coin that phrase, I don't think -- someone shared a paper; I can't remember where it originated. But there's some talk, if you google that sort of thing, there's some talk on the internet about these kinds of things.
Daniel: One way I think about this is there's been a kind of epistemological monoculturing of the human experience in the globalized world, and what I see is this conceptual model kind of allows for an infinite bifurcation, forkings to happen from that monoculture. We can't -- we don't have the time to really drop in, I think, totally to that, to unpack why and how that can happen, and I appreciate your nuance, and I did not want to imply, to those listening, that this is the best or the only or anything like that way of resolving or approaching the crisis. As Rob said, this crisis is defined by its complexity. But one of the components of the crisis is a crisis of world-view, and this, to me -- I've spent my entire life on the internet exploring these topics; this, what Rob has built or discovered or created, is one of the most potent technologies of transforming our world-views such that we become the kind of people who will stand up on behalf of this planet. And so we'll explore that in more detail, hopefully, in future shows, if Rob agrees to come back on. But for now, let's just kind of leave it there, and we'll unpack that as we go on. But Rob, thank you, thank you, thank you so much for coming on the show and being willing to have this, what I see as a very important conversation.
Rob: You're so welcome, Daniel, and thank you. It's really a pleasure to be here with you and to talk with you. Really a pleasure. Thank you.
Michael Taft, "Emptiness, Liberation, and Beauty -- with Rob Burbea," Deconstructing Yourself (27 Aug. 2018). Audio: https://deconstructingyourself.com/dy-025-emptiness-liberation-and-beauty-with-guest-rob-burbea.html. Transcript: https://deconstructingyourself.com/what-is-emptiness-an-interview-with-rob-burbea.html, accessed 23 April 2021. ↩︎
