Chapter Two: The Ground of Extraordinary Results

Written By Burgs
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The Ground of Extraordinary Results

So I’d like to give you a discourse that might give you a bit of motivation, or some understanding of why it might be worth working really hard to improve the quality of your mind. Tonight I’m going to talk about aspects of what the mind is capable of doing when it becomes unified, as opposed to what it’s able to do in its normal, mundane state. And I’m going to start with quite a sad story.

As a healer I’m teaching this meditation to many people who are working to overcome various sicknesses. And for many of those sicknesses there doesn’t appear to be a solution. You know without something special coming about, they might not recover.

Well, eight months ago I was contacted by a young girl who has lymphoma. I had a long email exchange with her and even gave her the email of someone that I had previously treated with lymphoma who had been successful. (I mean effectively she had treated herself, through meditation combined with the support the doctors gave her and she did what was necessary to make tremendous progress).

At that time I got a reply saying “Thank you very much, I wasn’t really sure why I was getting in touch with you. I think it was because my father really wanted me to. I just wanted to find out what it was about but I think I’ll put it on file for later.”

Anyway she went on and had chemo, and then had salvage chemo and then had stem cell therapy, and none of them worked and a month ago she called me and asked if we could meet. So we did meet. I met with her father, who was a very sweet man who clearly would do anything to help his daughter, and I met the daughter who was really lovely. She was thirty years old and she was very ill. And I knew when I was talking to her that there wasn’t enough compliance in her mind to do what was necessary to get the recovery that she sort of wanted, but didn’t. So we set up the procedure and I gave her the medicine that she needed, looked at her blood and explained to her what she had to do and told her that she really must try and come on this meditation retreat because at this late stage she was going to have to play a major part in her recovery.

Sadly she was due to be here today but she wasn’t able to make it on account of being too ill. And she’s having salvage chemo at the moment.

Now it is without a doubt that the people who get success in those situations are the people who access something that is way beyond what one can normally expect from one’s own mind. I said this to this girl when we were talking.

You have to understand, she came from her oncologist to see me and her oncologist had said that maybe she had four weeks to live. She said, “Have you ever treated someone in this late stage before,” and I said, “Yes.” She asked, “And did you get any success?” and I replied, “Yes we did, but it was really hard work. We had to go to the edge of the envelope to get that result. You have got to be completely committed and you have to believe, because you can’t understand at this stage how what you need to come about, can come about. If you wait till you understand it, it will be too late. You just have to acknowledge that it’s a possibility and commit yourself to that possibility. Because when you sit with the mind operating at the level that it is normally operating at, it is impossible to even perceive the field of endeavour within which such extraordinary healing comes about, because our mind can’t go into that place where it happens, it can’t see there.”

This is the nub of it. It’s the nub of all spiritual practice and it is the nub with anything that is of real value. If you knew how you were going to get it and there was a guarantee, obviously it would be easy, wouldn’t it? And everyone would have it.

But the fact that it is achieved by a handful of people is on account of the fact that most people won’t commit themselves until they absolutely know what it is that they are going to get. The kind of healing which people like this girl are seeking is going to happen in a realm which they don’t yet know, and they don’t yet understand. It is way beyond the world that they live in, or occupy in their normal mind.

So we have to acknowledge the fact that there is a latent capacity within us that is capable of infinitely more than what we are currently capable of perceiving. That there might be an intelligence that is currently beyond our understanding that is capable of bringing things about that we can’t yet grasp, but which we have seen happen in others – we’ve heard about it, we’ve read about it, but we can’t fully understand it.

I mean, any of you that have been on these retreats a few times before will have sat next to people with serious conditions and will have seen people over time being successful with their healing. And you can see the people who did dig deep enough to get that. And you understand that when they started they did not have the tools that were necessary, and through hard work they acquired them, and they opened the mind up into an arena which was not known to them before, and something started to happen which they came to understand which was not understood before. That’s the case with healing, but it’s also the case with all of the fruits of spiritual practice. The truth is that you don’t know the truth yet.

And you’ve got to apply yourself diligently to come to it, even though you don’t know what it is. You don’t know what it is going to taste like, you don’t know what it’s going to feel like, you don’t know what it is going to reward you with. And that’s why so few people make the effort that is necessary, because we are the type of beings that always like to know what we are going to get before we put our money on the table.

So, doubt is one of the hindrances that is in the way and stops us making progress with spiritual practice, stops us realising our potential because it opposes confidence and faith. If there is doubt, there is vexation in the mind and there is wavering and there is a lack of commitment. If there is faith or belief in the possibility of something extraordinary happening, then at least there is a chance of the necessary commitment. You have to believe that what you seek is achievable. If you seek healing you have to be able to see yourself healed. Because if you can’t see yourself healed you won’t be. But equally we have to understand that faith alone is not enough, because there is a path that has to be walked that leads to healing or freedom or whatever is our goal, and to get there takes commitment.

Of all the fields of endeavour that man embarks upon, freedom from suffering is the most rarely attained, so we could say that it’s the highest of all endeavours.

Watching people healing and getting results, seeing the results around you, should give you the inspiration that there is something to sitting still and being with yourself in meditation; it’s not an act of futility. There must be a reason that for twenty five centuries, for countless ages, people have done it. And we also have to accept that it is hard to grasp why, when we start. You don’t know until you know and when you know it’s alright, and everything makes sense. Faith is the belief that what has been known or done by others can in time be known or done by me. It is trusting the process even before we have fully fathomed it for ourselves.

Your body has in it an innate intelligence that keeps you alive and yet we have no real understanding of how it does what it does. Every night you go to sleep and trust that you will wake up in the morning. So the act of simply being alive requires us to have a certain amount of faith. But have we learned to trust this deepest intelligence yet? Well whether or not you get to the end of your life with full health and just drop of your perch at a ripe old age, or whether you suffer varying degrees of degeneration prior to that, is basically the result of how much interference there is with that intelligence that has a far better understanding of how to organise our lives than we do.

Our Mind is the Greatest Interference with the Natural Intelligence of Life

One of the first things I teach you when you come on your first retreat, is how your mind is by far the greatest interference there is with the way that this higher intelligence functions. When you look outside and you look at all the life going on around you and you see the trees and you see nature at work, there isn’t an active intelligence at work there. There isn’t an active intelligence there going, “It’s coming into springtime, I wonder if we should grow some leaves, and what if we made them this colour today? No I don’t like that any more, let’s change it.” Nature is a pure response. It’s perfect. It’s pure intelligence.

It’s on cue every time and the response to what is going on around it is always perfect. Now, that intelligence supports life

perfectly and it would support your life perfectly as well if you would let it. But we are, as humans, blessed and cursed at the same time with this ability to be aware of ourselves as a discrete entity, a separate self conscious expression of life. And that basic principle, i.e. to be self-aware mutates over time from the basic sense of just being self-aware to creating an idea of ourselves, which over time becomes ever more complex.

And our life is basically an effort put forth, to uphold and project our idea of the person that we think we are to the world. And we formulate the idea of the kind of person that we would like to be, and this is how I’d like the world to see me and this is how I see myself. Our actions, our behaviour, our thoughts, our ideas, our views, all hinge around that idea of who I think I am. And clinging to this idea, we behave in any way that will continue to allow us to uphold it. So I will use the word ego, just for simplicity. We live a wilful life, driven by our ego in an attempt to get the response or reaction that we think we want, need or deserve. This is what I call our pantomime, and large parts of our lives are spent playing out our pantomime. Take me, for example. If I get too carried away with the idea that I am a meditation teacher, I would get lost in my pantomime, which in truth has little bearing on the essence of who and what we really are. It is clinging to these ideas of ourselves that is one of the fundamental causes of our suffering...of all our suffering as a group of beings.

Now, that energy invested in living this pantomime is what I mean by the interference in the system. And almost everything that we cling to or react to relates back to our experience of this personal perspective.

We never get to find out what life really is, what this extraordinary process of being human really is, when we are blinkered by the lens that we look through because we are so wrapped up in our own world view, that we would never come to a direct experience of how things really are.

So, as we work to break down these ideas of ourselves and relinquish this dogged attachment to these ideas of ourselves, we open our mind and so our lens widens and we start to get a broader and broader perspective. And as we start to reflect wisely on our life and the nature of life, then our insistence on hanging onto the pantomime may gradually be diluted or worn away.

It is like this:

If you take a crystal. And you shine sunlight through it onto the wall. What do you get?

You will get a rainbow.

And what will determine whether that is a beautiful rainbow or not?

The clarity of the crystal, and of course how smooth is the wall.

Now this rainbow is our pantomime. It is the projection of ourselves to the world and we spend our lives trying to polish it so that it looks just right. “That’s how I want it to look.” “That’s how I want the world to see me,” etc. And this is actually pride, which is comparing ourselves to others and to our own ideas, as better or worse.

And we might polish the wall hoping that the rainbow is going to improve. And we might even realise that if we polish the crystal, which is the filter that the light shines through, that we might refine our pantomime. “Ah, look at my rainbow. Now it’s just how I like it. Now everyone’s going to like me just the way that I want them to.”

But has it got any real relevance? What’s this crystal anyway? It is, after all, only a filter.

If you were to take the crystal out of the way, then what would you be left with?

The very source of the rainbow. The real source of the rainbow. The clear light from which it appears. The rainbow is in truth an illusion, a mirage.

Now that source of the rainbow is the essence of what you are, and this crystal is what you put in the way. Now there is nothing wrong with having it in the way. This is our living experience, and it may well be valid, but we doggedly identify ourselves with it rather than realising it’s just a dance of light and energy. It’s not inherently relevant, but it may certainly be worth engaging in. Then we lose ourselves to it and we lose ourselves in this rainbow. If you are able to remove the crystal for a moment then you may be able to start to see the clear light that is the source of what you think you are. Now that clear light is everywhere. It’s not just something that is behind you shining through your crystal producing your rainbow, it is behind everything shining through every crystal, producing every rainbow. And it’s effortlessly supporting everything in nature as it comes into being.

Now the creative power to bring things into being out of this clear, basic space is so overwhelmingly powerful that everywhere something can grow on this planet, it will grow. Even in the most barren places on the side of a rock you will find some kind of moss growing. Everywhere you look there is something coming into being, there is life. And the power of that life is inexorable. You can’t cut it off as an act of will. And it’s the same power that is supporting your life.

How much of that energy you get as the active support for your life or not depends upon how much you are attuned to it, and how much you are in the way, trying to provide that support for your life yourself as an act of personal will. Now when we are doggedly attached to this personality view, then our life is a wilful effort to express just that; our pantomime. It is a personal effort to sustain our life, and to continue to project this idea of ourselves. But if you can dilute your attachment to this idea and start to trust the principle of your life itself, then that resistance is removed and you will find that everything starts to reorganise itself for you.

The intelligence is there and the only reason that it’s not working perfectly is that you are in the way. You don’t know how to metabolise fat in your liver, or how hard your heart should be beating, or how to focus the lens of your eye when you are looking near or far. But you have the ability to do these things perfectly. This life support has intelligence far greater than anything you would ever comprehend.

But we just don’t trust it.

So when I ask you to tune into the stillness around you in the room as you meditate, I am asking you to take the sense of stillness in the room as something to come to resonate with because it’s calming to feel something that’s calm. But there’s more than just stillness there. If you were able one day to really get your samādhi and feel this room you would feel that clear light that’s everywhere. And the power in that clear light is the power that supports all life. And what is it?

When I say to you while we are meditating, “Out of emptiness, all things appear dependent upon conditions,” I am basically explaining Dependent Origination. This symbol that I use, that you see on the cover of my books, is really an expression of this fundamental creative principle that governs all life and all things.

The Three Kayas

These are the three aspects of reality.

Dharmakāya is the basic space, the emptiness that is not empty; the field of pure potentiality from which things arise.

Sambhogakāya is the causal field, which is volition, the condition for the coming into being, that in turn governs and determines the way the third aspect Nirmānakāya, expresses itself.

Nirmānakāya is manifest reality.

So these three aspects symbolise the creative principle itself.

Now when we look at the universe as scientists we have only the third aspect as our reference point. Not recognising the causal chain or the basic ground, both of which it depends upon for its existence, we begin the job of trying to figure out how it is that everything comes to be the way it is. It has taken the greatest minds all of history to figure this out. And we are still trying to do it.

Well, science is now beginning to recognise that this vast field of emptiness that sits in the background may not actually be empty. And you may have heard me say, “He who perceives emptiness as empty, will not complete the path.” It is not until we see that things aren’t magically appearing out of nothingness, but that the emptiness itself is actually a field of pure potentiality with the capacity to manifest anything and everything, that we can begin to understand how this universe is even here. Science has now established that all the energy in the universe is nothing compared to what is hidden in the space between it. The empty space is what contains the energy. Some scientists have calculated that there may be as much as 1040 times more energy in the empty space than there is in all the matter that appears within the universe. As the physicist Richard P. Feynman once described in attempting to give some idea of the magnitude, “The energy in a single cubic meter of space is enough to boil all the oceans of the world.” I’m not making this up. This is where science has finally got to. What they don’t know is how to tap it. They simply know the energy is there.

This is the energy that we tap when we seek these extraordinary healings. And it is beyond your mind and your understanding. If you wait until you can grasp this and satisfy your mind’s need to feel in control, you will miss it. Those who heal themselves of cancer do not kill cancer cells, they merely remove the misinformation from the body that causes the cancer cells to arise. Remember all sickness is just misinformation. When that misinformation is removed there is no more ground for the sickness to appear from. This is Dependent Origination and it is the basis of all healing. This is the stillness that I am asking you to enter into and in that stillness is everything and nothing. So when I talked earlier about the pantomime, the rainbow, this idea of ourselves that we are obsessed with, okay, dance with it, but don’t get carried away with it because it isn’t anything really.

There’s something infinitely greater hidden just behind the veil. All you’ve got to learn to do is to still your mind enough to turn away from that with which it is obsessed, and in the moment of turning away from it that which is hidden is revealed. It’s always, always, always there.

This planet could be fuelled effortlessly by that energy if we could tap it. It is that energy that we can tap when our mind finally stops clinging to all these conditioned states around us and enters the unconditioned. And we won’t tap it until our mind stops and that means stopping trying to understand everything. You either know or you don’t know, and it won’t be your rational mind that comes to know the truth. It will be a higher faculty that does have the capacity to know these things, to experience them directly and be moved or transformed by them. It is an act of vanity to try to walk the path with the lower, rational mind as the reference point. It is only this aspect of us that separates us from the truth. The whole path is in the end nothing but an invitation to let go of grasping reality with the mind so we can enter directly into it. How much you think you know has nothing to do with how awake you are. How close you are to touching and abiding within that field of pure potential, which many would be inclined to call God – that is how close you are to awakening.

As I say, you either know or you don’t know. And it isn’t revealed to you through understanding, it is revealed to you as an experience when you let go your mental grasping and enter deeply enough into it to see what it reveals.

Now finally science has come to identify and recognise and even to quantify it. And it is always, always there, sitting in the background. So science wants to know how to harness this energy. They know about the energy, they know it’s there, they just can’t access it. We have done everything we can to wilfully manipulate the appearance of things but we can’t yet touch the basic ground from which it is all arising. But a simple moment of complete one- pointed concentration is enough to access it, because you enter into it effortlessly when the mind really enters into samādhi, and in that moment all sickness can be healed.

As soon as you take the crystal out of the way there is only the clear light. So don’t get too lost in your rainbow, thinking that that’s the miracle. Your coming into being in the first place is the miracle. Think about it. Just take a look at what you live every day and how utterly unfathomable it is. And that you take it so completely for granted, without stopping to say, “How on earth did that happen?” There is so much intelligence inherent in that space that you are tuning into. And this is the power that can heal you.

There are people who come who are really sick and they have got very little left in them, and they need something extraordinary to happen, and they just haven’t got it in them to dig deep for themselves, so that no wilful act that is ego-driven is going to save their life. Of these people, those who get that healing are the people who find that stillness and what’s in it, and allow themselves to access it and get out of the way to let something truly extraordinary happen. It is not a miracle, there are no miracles. It is pure intelligence at work.

We are still talking about something that happened twenty centuries ago when Jesus healed a blind man and it’s called a miracle. You know, it’s going on all the time but we are so blasé these days that we don’t stop to think about how. So when someone came to see me with multiple sclerosis, as happened on the healing retreat here not so long ago, with paralysis in one arm, I said to her, “Just take a walk up there ten paces and come back,” and on coming back her arm is healed and the paralysis that the doctor said would never be healed is gone. And she is in tears saying “What am I going to tell my husband?” And all I’m doing is plugging them into that which is beyond them and in those few seconds that healing happens.

So why do I tell you this? Because all too often you are wrapped up in the madness of everything that’s coming up around you and it’s all so terribly important we sometimes can’t even begin to see beyond. But the moment that we start to see beyond is the moment that we start to begin to relinquish that dogged control, and

the moment we start to relinquish that dogged control is the moment that we start to open to something more. The more we relinquish our need for control, the more we open to it. And if you plug yourself in for one second, extraordinary things beyond your expectation will happen. And that’s happened time and time again.

Now this is not the field of your ordinary work. The field of the work that I’ve told you to do here or instructed you to do is to gradually refine this lower mind so that the interference it produces is less detrimental to you. This work is the refinement of character, letting go of negative habit patterns. In fact, the producing of positive habit patterns is all actually polishing the rainbow, but as you polish the rainbow the diffraction of light becomes less and less. As there is less interference, there is a convergence gradually over time.

So this lower intelligence or your ‘ego’ inclines itself gradually to the pure intelligence. This is the clear state that when your mind goes to sleep at night you drop into so that you are completely refreshed in the morning. I mean there it is right before you. Why do we have to sleep? Because we have to stop interfering for long enough to put ourselves back together again. And what do you actually do whilst you are asleep? Absolutely nothing. And what do you get? Everything you need. So how come we don’t get it? We are blessed with this consciousness and the ability to engage with awareness in this life. Why isn’t that enough? I mean in my reckoning it is such a miracle that just to look out through these eyes at the world and hear its sounds even for just one in and out breath, if you’d never done it before, would make nine months of being in the womb worthwhile. So why do we have to manipulate it, control it, make it mine, and get into the muddle that we do? Why is it not enough just to be engaged in this extraordinary process? Look at what it takes to satisfy us these days. Look at how unsatisfied you were to sit still and relax at the beginning of this retreat and just tune into the stillness.

When you do look out there at nature and see what is going 26

on, just to behold it is enough. But we don’t feel it enough for it to be enough. We don’t enter into it enough. We let it just go on around us. We let this extraordinary life just run its course and say, “Gosh, this life is getting on top of me!” Instead of reflecting, “Look at this!” I mean it is pretty awesome isn’t it, if you actually stop to think about it? And we are right there at the top of it all with the most refined faculties, the most highly evolved state of consciousness, the most extraordinary physical body. And look how easy we find it is to get miserable. Why? Because we cling so much, we want so much, we are never happy. Can you start to see why if you didn’t cling so much and you didn’t want so much, it would be so easy to be happy? It wouldn’t be boring, it would be extraordinary, because it is all extraordinary. So stop every now and again in your life, even in the madness, even in the madness of your meditation, and tune into what’s there behind the frantic pace of your lower mind.

The Stillness is Never Not There

That stillness is never not there. It is not because everybody is silent that it’s in this room now. It was there before you came in, it is there now whilst I’m chatting away. It is there whilst you are standing on the platform waiting for your train to take you to work. It’s just one step behind all that arising and passing, arising and passing, and it’s always perfect, and it’s never tainted. And in it is the pure potential to bring everything perfectly into being.

Try to get a little closer to it, to touch it in some way and to start to enter into it and let that start to support you. That’s the release of your heart, that is the heart’s deepest longing, not the acquisition of what you think you desire. What your heart longs for is to be left alone long enough to rest in that stillness and catch its breath. So that you can really be alive in that moment. It’s there now, in all its simplicity. It is in the gap, every moment. And every time that your thinking mind arises with a new idea, you have lost it. You are only partly alive. You are hardly alive at all. Every time you are thinking about what you are about to do next or what you’ve just done, you’ve lost it.

And the power of that pure awareness to reorganise you, to revive you, to resuscitate you, to rejuvenate you, is immense. So while you are putting forth great effort, as we should, because we have not yet got to the point of being out of the way, remember that’s not all that you should do. Yes, put forth effort to overcome the things that remove you from that extraordinary energy, that power, that intelligence, but remember in the end it is not the effort that’s going to get you there, but the effortlessness. When you stop striving, desiring, needing, you are already there. And everything else that you do out of that is a choice, is a bonus, and it’s a gift. Not something that you are enslaved by. Not something that you have to do, not something that your life would be incomplete without.

So there you go. There’s just an inkling of what is waiting, just in the background when you choose to stop obsessing about the things that you are fussed with at the moment. And also it puts it a little bit into perspective and shows that it is not that important. Making that reflection might help you let go a little bit.

So now I’m going to read you the story about what Brahma didn’t know, just because it’s been a hard day’s work, rather than talking all about the technical side of meditation. This comes from the Digha Nikaya which is the compendium of the longer discourses of the Buddha.

“Once Kevaddha in this order of monks the thought occurred to a certain monk, ‘I wonder where the four great elements, the earth element, the water element, the fire element and the air element cease without remainder?’ And that monk attained to such a state of mental concentration that the way to the Deva realms appeared before him, and then, coming to the realm of the Devas of the Four Great Kings he asked those gods, ‘Friends where do the four great elements, earth, water, fire, and air cease without remainder?’ At this question the Devas of the Four Great Kings said to him, ‘Monk we don’t know where the four great elements cease without remainder. But the Four Great Kings are loftier and wiser than we are, maybe they may know.’ And so that monk went t o the Four Great Kings and asked the same question but they replied, ‘We don’t know but the Thirty-three gods may know.’ So that monk went to the Thirty-three gods who said, ‘We don’t know but Sakka, Lord of the Gods may know.’ And Sakka Lord of the Gods said, ‘I don’t know but the Yama Devas may know.’ And the Yama Devas said, ‘We do not know, but the Tusita Devas may know.’”

It continues to describe how this monk searched each deva plane and enquired of the beings there if any of them knew where consciousness and matter come to cessation.

“And the Tusita Devas said, ‘We do not know, the Nimmanarati Devas may know. And the Nimmanarati Devas said, ‘We do not know but the Sunimmita Devas may know.’ And the Sunimmita Devas said, ‘The Parinimmita Devas may know.’ And the Parinimmita Devas said that Vasavatti, son of the Devas may know. Vasavatti said that the Devas of Brahma’s retinue may know. And that monk by the appropriate concentration made his way to the Brahma world and he made that world appear before him, and he went to the gods of Brahma’s retinue and asked them and they said, ‘We do not know but there is Brahma, Great Brahma the conqueror, the unconquered, the all seeing, the all powerful, the lord, the maker. The creator, the ruler, the appointer, and ordered, father of all that has been, and shall be, he is loftier and wiser than we are. He would know where the four great elements cease without remainder.’ ‘And where friends is this Great Brahma now?’ ‘Monk we do not know when, how and where Brahma will appear but when the signs are seen, when a light appears and a radiance shines forth the Brahma will surely appear. Such signs are an indication that he will come.’

Then it was not long before the Great Brahma appeared and the monk went up to him and said, ‘Lord, where do the four great elements, earth, water, fire and air cease without remainder?’ To which the Great Brahma replied. ‘Monk, I am Brahma, Great Brahma, the conqueror, the unconquered, the all conquering, all seeing, all powerful, the lord, the maker and the creator. The ruler, the appointer and orderer, father of all that have been seen and shall be seen.’ And the second time the monk asked the same question. ‘Lord. I did not ask if you were Brahma, Great Brahma. I asked where the four elements cease without remainder.’ And the second time Great Brahma replied as before. And a third time the monk said, ‘Friend I did not ask you that, I asked where the four great elements earth, water, fire and air cease without remainder?’ Then the Great Brahma took that monk by the arm and led him aside, and said ‘Monk, these Devas before me believe there is nothing that Brahma does not see. There is nothing that he does not know. There is nothing he is unaware of. That is why I did not speak in front of them. But monk, I do not know where the four elements, earth, water, fire and air cease without remainder. And therefore monk you have acted wrongly, you have acted incorrectly by going beyond the Blessed Lord Buddha and going in search of an answer to the question elsewhere. Now monk, you should go back to the Buddha and put this question to him and whatever answer he gives accept it.’ So that monk, as swiftly as a strong man might flex and unflex his arm, vanished from Brahma’s world and re-appeared before the Buddha.

He prostrated himself before me and then sat down to one side and said, ‘Lord where do the four great elements, earth, water, fire and air cease without remainder?” And I replied, “Monk once upon a time, seafaring merchants when they set sail on the ocean took in their ships a land sighting bird. When they could not see land themselves they released this bird. The bird flew to the east to the west to the south to the north. It flew in the zenith and in the intermediate points of the compass. If it saw land anywhere it flew there. But if it saw no land it returned to the ship. The same way monk you have been as far as Brahma’s world searching for an answer to your question and not finding it, now you come back to me.

But monk you should not have asked your question this way, ‘Where do the four great elements, the earth element, the water element, the fire element and the air element cease without remainder?’ Instead this is how the question should have been put, ‘Where do earth, water, fire and air have no footing, where are long, short, small, great, fair and foul, where are name and form, mind and matter wholly brought to cessation?’ And the answer is, ‘Where consciousness is signless, boundless, all luminous. That’s where earth, water, fire and air find no footing. Where both long, short, great, fair and foul, where name and form where mind and matter cease without remainder. With the cessation of this consciousness, this all comes to cessation.’ Thus the Lord spoke and the householder Kevaddha delighted, accepted his words and rejoiced.”

So what is the Buddha saying there? Where name and form, mind and matter come to cessation. Where does that happen? There are a lot of people confused about this. In Buddhism we talk about Nibbāna, which is the cessation of conditioned states. It’s to enter into what we call a deathless state. But there is also the knowledge of this state before the cessation of consciousness. That’s what the Buddha is talking about there. He says, “Where do the four elements find no footing, where does name and form, mind and matter come to cessation? Where consciousness, is signless, boundless, and all luminous.”

Now that is the field of pure awareness and the field of pure potentiality. That is where your mind goes when you fall asleep and when you pass away. Unfortunately, you don’t remain aware enough to know it. But that is where the mind goes when you have enough concentration and mindfulness. That is the space that you enter into where it is all luminous. It is that awareness which is just awareness, it does not cling to this, it does not cling to that, it does not identify with this, it does not see things as that. It is that which is purely aware. How can it be described except however still, whatever stillness you can perceive when your mind calms down, there is something so far beyond that stillness, something so much stiller, stiller than that. That which is not darkness, which is not the absence, which is not ignorance, which is not nothing, that which is just pure consciousness. Now that is not known in the mind. It is directly perceived by awareness itself and this is where your awareness would incline at death if you only recognised it. It is where your awareness inclines in sleep if you only recognised it. It is where your mind would incline in your meditation if you only recognised the gap between the flesh and the bone. But because we are so obsessed by the flesh and the bone we don’t notice the space that it is arising from. I’m saying, feel the breath arising from emptiness and passing into emptiness to give you the idea, to give you the clue, to give you the prompt – feel the sensations in your body arising from emptiness and passing away again into emptiness. You get the idea, you get the teaching about the crystal and taking the crystal away and all that is left is the light.

But your mind does not yet touch that emptiness from which all things arise, it only understands the principle. But in the moment that you do, your mind enters into that field of energy which is 1040 times greater than all the material that is present in this universe. That is the arena in which extraordinary things happen. That is the golden nugget. And that is that sweet fruit that is bitter right up until the point that it is sweet. You know it or you don’t. Please don’t search out that energy out of greed or vanity. Such is the cause for the mess this world gets into. Be sure of one thing – in order to attain what is most precious you have to give up all desire for it. Remember – only the ego is in the way.

But you practise, even though you don’t know it, because one day you will. And that is when the world opens up and those extraordinary things that are incomprehensible at the moment are nothing. It is nothing. Nothing to turn lead into gold. It isn’t anything. It just happens in the gap between the flesh and the bone so you can’t spot it. And the same thing goes for these sicknesses that we grapple with, that we battle with, that science is not yet able to fix. The healing happens in the gap between the flesh and the bone. The flesh and the bone are decaying. But why? Because the gap got closed out. Something shut off the life force that pulses through the space that keeps this body alive. When you die you are just the four elements, a corpse, and it will ferment and rot. Why is it not rotting now? Because some part of you, some part of your awareness knows and touches that, and produces the life force itself that keeps it going.

You know, you take this for granted. It is extraordinary that I can just wriggle my fingers. You need to grasp that. It is extraordinary that you can do that. Why? There’s something there behind the flesh and the bone and if you think this world is nothing more than the flesh and the bone you are missing the point. So when you meditate on the sensations in your body look for the gap. Look for where that space behind them is and gradually over time as your meditation matures, you’ll see more deeply into it, until one moment you are totally sunk into it and everything else is gone. Then there is only the gap.

Normally when mind and matter cease you don’t know it. But there is a moment where mind and matter cease, and you know it.

And that is the emptiness that is the source of all energy. So don’t worry too much about the pain in your knee, the discomfort in your shoulder. It’s just popping in and out, in and out, arising and passing, arising and passing. Try and observe it from one step behind and then quantum changes will start to happen.

Don’t let this precious human life pass you by, lost all the time in your own inner world. This is your invitation to turn up and spot what is actually going on here. To come to such a precious and fortunate birth is so unfathomable, is so unfathomably rare. Don’t waste it by not making your peace with it.

I think most of us have no idea how fortunate is this human life we have. Most of us are blessed with the fruiting of the most fortunate kamma that can support life. We are born of sound mind, we are born of sound body, we are not struggling to find food and shelter, and we are not born in a time of great strife. It is so rare. On the planet now only small groups of beings are blessed with such good fortune. Throughout history such good fortune is even harder to find.

The Buddha described it like this: Imagine there was a blind turtle swimming in the Great Ocean. And once every hundred years he raised his head up above the surface of the water. Imagine also that there was a hoop, thrown into the ocean and left to drift wherever it may. Greater is the chance of that blind turtle raising his head directly into that hoop, than is the chance of coming to such a fortunate human birth.

This life is just a few brief years. It is swiftly over. Let us not get to the end of it and regret that we did not come to understand it, that we did not find peace, that we did not wake up to what it really is to be here.

Burgs https://www.theartofmeditation.org
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Chapter One: The Dhamma is The Flavour of Liberation
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Chapter Three: Concentration – The First Pillar of the Harmonious Mind