Category: Writing

Freedom and Emptiness

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For the last two days, I sat with His Holiness (“HH”) the Dalai Lama to receive his teachings.  I have been receiving teachings from him since 1980.  This year, the quality of his teachings seemed to take on more urgency—certainly he always sees the need to urge us on to deeper meditation, contemplation, reflection and action. Yet, I was struck by the immediacy of his pleas that we practice with spiritual urgency, study to realize more deeply “true nature” and reflect and contemplate in such a way that our practice and study are not superficial but more deeply investigative of the nature of this precious human birth and its world.  Accordingly, even though it is difficult to summarize in this slim column two days of teachings, it seems beneficial to pause our reflection on the five spiritual faculties to glimpse them.  Essentially, he said that if we stay on the superficial level of knowing the nature of persons and phenomena, without realizing deeply their empty and selfless nature, freedom will not be ours.   Clinging to and grasping at self leads inexorably to suffering.  Thus, he taught, without developing our understanding of emptiness and living accordingly, liberation is not available.  You may be more familiar with the phrase “not self” in the Theravada teachings than HH’s “emptiness.”

How have you received those teachings?  Have you developed and deepened understanding?  If not, why not?  Reflect on the depth of your desire to be free and see how you can find the resolve and patience to do what it takes.   The time is now.

Arouse Energy Now

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Once faith in the Path is established, “heroic effort,” the second of the Five Spiritual Faculties, is an indispensible ingredient in our quest for freedom and happiness.

On the night of the Buddha’s awakening, he vowed: “I shall not give up my efforts until I have attained liberation by perseverance, energy and endeavor.”  He was singly focused on liberation, with the wherewithal to apply wholehearted energy.

In modern times, increased demands for time and attention from varied corners of our lives leave dispersed and depleted the energy needed for what is most important.  Pressure to respond to external stimuli, technological and otherwise, leaves little energy to establish priorities and work toward  attaining our most important internal goals and even less energy for furthering communal goals of justice and equity. Many students and colleagues report burnout and consequent inability to establish appropriate boundaries and wise plans for use of energy.  Despite knowing the uncertainty of life and the preciousness of the present opportunity for practice, we find ourselves drained from lesser habitual activities, unable to find the time or energy for our most important endeavor—freedom.

Exerting courageous effort is not striving and pushing with ambition and tension to make something happen.  It is relaxed, confident diligence in consistently cultivating the qualities of heart that set us free.  Energy applied in this way may test our limits, but is not dispersed or depleted.  It grows.  Although this may appear to be a paradox, the results of courageous effort will happily surprise you.

Open Heart, Faithful Life

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Faith, an essential ingredient in our spiritual journey, is the first of the five spiritual faculties the Buddha taught as necessary for awakening. Faith is first because it is the ground on which awakening unfolds. When we have faith in the practice, we are willing to put energy and effort into it. Our determined effort to be present leads to deepening mindfulness. Mindfulness leads to concentration. And when the mind is concentrated, focused and clear, wisdom and compassion, necessary ingredients of awakening, arise.

The Pali word saddha, which we translate as “faith,” is a verb meaning “to place the heart upon.” It signifies the work of an open heart. This does not mean believing that things will always work out as we wish, or an unquestioning devoted belief in doctrine or a teacher that overrides or ignores our own experience. Rather, faith is a deep inner connecting to the myriad possibilities of being alive that assures us we can meet life openheartedly. We trust our own deep awareness of the amazing potential in the heart-mind qualities of generosity, wisdom and love imbedded in the inexorable changing and unfolding of life. We might be inspired by our teachers or words we read, but it is the practice itself that deepens our willingness to carry on, establishing trust in our capacity and giving us the courage and faith to meet every moment with wise loving attention, to be awake to our life.

What have you learned from your practice that you can trust to  lead you onward? Got faith?

 

Powerful Faculties

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As we enter the Autumn season, we contemplate landscapes that remind us that we, as part of nature are shedding the Summer season to make room for Winter, inevitably giving way to renewal and light.  We reflect together on what can empower the mind in its journey toward illumination, “enlightenment.”  One group of factors given prominence in the Buddha’s discourses on the thirty-seven requisites of enlightenment is the Five Spiritual Faculties: faith, energy, mindfulness, concentration and wisdom.

These faculties can be activated to coordinate and channel our natural energies toward achievement of inner harmony and balance essential to true freedom. Without training, the mind is prey to greed, aversion and ignorance that lock us into projecting past into present and rehearsing for the future.  Although these forces promise fulfillment when satiated, they consistently fail to deliver.  Developing the faculties, we train the mind into the power to at least, minimize, and at best, uproot these tendencies.

The pre-existent natural capacities that exercise the functions of these faculties may seem ordinary as they are found in our everyday lives: trusting confidence in higher values (faith), vigorous effort toward the good (energy), attentive awareness (mindfulness), focused concentration (concentration), and intelligent understanding (wisdom). Yet, in the Buddha’s teaching, they can, appropriately developed, transcendentally propel our practice toward realization, manifesting maturity in the contemplative development of insight, the direct road to awakening.

In the coming weeks, we will discuss each of the faculties and their roles in our process. Interested?  Reflect on which of the faculties needs strengthening and how to gently weaken unbeneficial tendencies, making room for growth into the new.

Look Deeply, Be Free

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This waking life is like a dream.   If we know we’re dreaming, will we hold on to the people in the dream?  get upset about how we feel or that we lost something in that dream?   Son to Mom:  “Pretend you are surrounded by monsters and they are all coming at you.  You’re really frightened.  You think they’re going to attack you.  What would you do?”  Mom:  “I don’t know—What would you do?”  Son:  “Stop pretending!”

Examining the aggregates of existence in the past few weeks, we see that we live in a constructed reality.  Consciousness storing received sense impressions in memory and projecting them into the future, we create a solid, personal, view of an abiding self.  But consciousness is only here and now—the present moment is all there is.  The texture of thoughts, mental states, perceptions, body sensations is ephemeral, empty. Appearances are insubstantial, fleeting, generated by a nervous system pulsing on and off thousands of times every second.  What feels solid is just hardness conveyed by the sense of touch, another fleeting sense impression. We may never know what underlying reality truly is.

The wisdom of the teaching of the five aggregates is to see “emptiness” or “selflessness,” which does not denote nothingness, a state of desolation—it points to the transparency and spaciousness of experience.  The potentially deeply liberating effect of meditation is that it gives a steady basis from which emptiness—the impermanent and insubstantial nature of sense experiences that arise and dissolve, appear and fade—is revealed.

Buddha:  “Empty phenomena roll on.  This view alone is true.”  Look deeply, be free.

Who Thought That Thought?

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The Buddha said “In whatever way [we] conceive, the truth is ever other than that.”  Does that shake you up?  Remember that more often than not, we’re in a state of delusion.  We don’t see things as they truly are, but through the lens of habits acquired over a lifetime.  In response to painful reaction, we form views of ourselves and others as a way to steady ourselves through uncontrollable change.  Those views are the function of the aggregate of Volition and Mental Formation—conditioned response to sense experience, turning impersonal awareness into personal experience. Volitionresponds here and now.  It has a moral dimension, just as Perception has a conceptual dimension and Feeling, an emotive dimension.

The mind generates thoughts often based on habit impressions created by past perceptions and previous actions—mental states or factors such as the hindrances,  enlightenment factors, calm, joy, greed, aversion, images, fabrications of the mind, etc. For example, your eyes come into contact with a visible object. Consciousness becomes aware of seeing something, as yet indeterminate. YourPerception identifies that visible object as a dog. The Feeling of pleasure or displeasure arises and then Volition and Mental Formation—perhaps delight, or the intent to run or thinking about harming the dog—conditioned on your past experience with dogs.

Mental Formation and Volition work together to determine our responses to experience, and these responses have moral consequences of wholesome, unwholesome, or neutral effects.  Can you catch the fact of the mental formation and volition right after consciousness, perception and feeling?

What Experiences Experience?

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We have been reflecting on the teaching of not-self, exploring personal experience through the five aggregates—Form, Feeling, Perception, Mental Formations and Consciousness.

Form corresponds to material, or physical, factors of experience, including not only our bodies but all material objects—earth, trees, buildings, etc. and includes the five physical sense organs and their corresponding material objects: the eyes and visible objects, the ears and audible objects, etc.

Consciousness arises when a sense object comes into contact with a sense organ.  For example, when an audible object comes into contact with the ears, hearing consciousness arises. This is bare awareness, not yet personal experience. Personal experience is produced through the functioning of the other three mental factors of experience: Feeling, Perception, and Mental Formations (akaVolition).

Perception is the activity of recognition, or identification, usually based on previous experience or memory.  It is attaching a name or label to an object of experience. The function of Perception is to turn an indefinite experience into an identifiable, recognizable one—the formulation of a conception, or a definite idea, about the object. As with Feeling (pleasure, displeasure, or indifference which we spoke about last week), Perception arises subsequent to Consciousness of the object–“That’s the bell…”  then Feeling—“what a beautiful sound…”

This week, can you know Feeling, Consciousness and Perception arising and passing, ephemeral and ever changing…dynamic, not static?

Next week, we will reflect on why it is important to analyze experience in this way, guiding us on the Path to freedom.

A Most Unusual Teaching: The Five Aggregates

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Continuing our conversation from last week, the notion of the insubstantiality of what we call self is unique to the Buddha’s teaching.  Under investigation, the components of what we call “self” are distinct and constantly changing.  It is impossible to point to a solid unchanging entity.  It’s not to believe that you don’t exist—rather, to understand the constant flux of existence.  It is this possibility of change that we entertain every time we meditate.

The Buddha said that the 5 Aggregates are like a magic show.  We’re entranced by the show put on by them as long as we don’t understand the “trick” of the show.  Wisdom depends on coming out of that entrancement.

To separate the aspects of the magic show, the Buddha discussed 2 categories within these 5 aggregates:  nama and  rupa.  Nama literally means name (or mind) and rupa means form or body.  The 4 components to nama or mind are feeling, perception, mental formations and consciousness.

RUPA: interactions of matter—e.g., a bell (matter) produces sound—when sound strikes the ear (also matter), CONSCIOUSNESS receives the sound and hearing arises.  Consciousness is sentient brightness knowing experience that holds, receives or gathers matter at the sense doors. Once consciousness receives, FEELING (interpreted as pleasant, unpleasant or neutral) arises—so quickly, we fail to register consciousness and feeling separately, believing them to be unitary. PERCEPTION co-arises, recognizing and interpreting the sound, identifies it based on memory and concepts, not bare sense experience. MENTAL FORMATIONS follow generated by mind—mental states and factors arise—thoughts, images, joy, sadness, opinions.

This week, can you see how the Aggregates are present in moments of experience?

What is this thing called “Self”?

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Importantly, development of the Wisdom aspect of the Noble Eightfold Path is grounded in seeing the ephemeral nature of what we call “self.”  The Enlightenment Factor of Investigation helps us in this endeavor.  When we actually investigate the components of self, what we find instead are 5 Aggregates—(“aggregate” is translated from an everyday term in Pali—kandha.  The closest literal translation for kandha is “heap” or “bundle)—5  “heaps” or components of being—form, feeling, perception, mental formations and consciousness.

Through investigation of these 5 Aggregates, we see the insubstantial nature of sense experience more and more clearly and that nothing in experience falls outside them.  Sounds, smells, tastes come and go lightly; emotions are ephemeral, largely ungovernable; thoughts are fleeting—unceasingly coming and going.  At first we see the body as dense and solid.  Later on, paying close attention, we see its vibratory nature—how vibrations in the body endlessly pulse on and off.  Solidity breaks into particles, waves and vibration.  Physics confirms this.  And we don’t need machines to measure it.  All we need is attention to know it.  Looking deeply, we see nothing solid—just change.

Can you explore whether your deep attention to each of these five aggregates offers wisdom?  In the next weeks, we will investigate each aggregate to see if we can begin to let go of the idea that these aggregates, taken together, form a solid unchanging self and realize our deep potential for liberation, beginning with realization of the true nature of “self.”