Ch. 16 - Abiding in Awareness as the Basis for Vipassanā

To Extract Ourselves from the Entanglement with our Mind is the Process of Awakening

Vipassana practice Seeks to Purify the Unawakened Mind

The Arising of the Sense of Self within Awareness Causes the Experience of Suffering

[This discourse was given on a ten day Vipassanā retreat and looks at the more direct approach to Vipassanā that abides in awareness and reviews the mind from this basic state. It was given to an audience who had mostly already attended long retreat on the investigation of nāma rūpa and the five aggregates.]

To Extract Ourselves from the Entanglement with our Mind is the Process of Awakening

If you can get this right at the forefront of your understanding of your mind at the beginning it is going to save you a lot of confusion.

The basic state of awareness is an innate state within us that doesn’t vary from you to me to Jesus to the Buddha. Awareness is awareness. And some people would even say that that is the awakened state of mind – that to recognise awareness as the basis of our experience is to wake up. And to extract ourselves from the entanglement with our mind is the process of awakening.

Mind is what appears when we are confused. It is quite interesting if you look at it in that way. In the Buddha’s teaching of Dependent Origination, ignorance is the first step in the process that causes the coming into being of conditioned states. Dependent upon ignorance there is saṅkhārā. Saṅkhārā is what we call volitional formations, volitional states or kamma which here we are going to call attachment and aversion.

So mind, which is the thought process or thinking, is what we do when we forget, in a way. We start to think because we stop paying enough attention. What I am calling mind here is the arising and passing of conditional mental states that elaborate our experience but aren’t our experience. And awareness is our basic experience. So everything, from a pure reaction of, “I don’t like…” or “I want...” to really elaborate ideas about what we like or don’t want, is in this category of mind. And awareness is in the category of direct, awake experience.

This is how I am going to separate these two. Some people would include awareness in the category of mind, and of course in a way it still is. Certainly it is in the category of consciousness which is simply the knowing of an object. But for our purposes I want to identify these two things as separate, because awareness as ‘such’ does not cause us to suffer or contain any suffering within it. But mind most certainly does.

So one thread of meditation is to connect to the state of awareness and to stay connected to it. And through remaining connected to our awareness and through developing and maturing our relationship with awareness we gradually undermine our tendency to fall into these conditioned mental processes that are rooted in ignorance.

Ignorance of what? Not knowing what? It is on account of not knowing or not noticing awareness, that mind arises. Through not paying enough attention that we get lost.

And the whole idea of I, or me, that separates us from the experience we are having, is rooted in not paying enough attention to awareness itself. Because awareness itself does not carry the sense of, “It’s me.” It just is the experience. So we can say on one side that bare awareness as such is the awakened state and the other side, mind, is the unawakened or sleeping state.

On some of the retreats that we do, our focus is entirely on developing and maturing our relationship and connection to this innate state of awareness within us. And some schools of meditation would take that path as the path. For example, Zen wouldn’t investigate what it is that you think about, it would just keep shooting arrows at awareness until it gets awareness. The Dzogchen teachings that I give you on the Heart Essence retreats, are also shooting the arrow directly at the basic state of awareness and are paying no attention to mind. This is a process called ‘turning the mind around’, so that awareness becomes our reference point, and ideas and active mental processes are merely something that is witnessed as arising in awareness.

The premise behind those teachings is that once you see this, once you have awakened to your innate state, then your tendency to keep referring back to this mind with its ideas and sense of self, should systematically be undermined. Because mind is an elaboration that is rooted in ignoring, once you stop ignoring the innate state, there should be less of a cause for the arising of these entangled mental states.

So that is the premise behind the direct approaches and these kind of teachings that aim directly at the awakened state – but they don’t necessarily give you a way there. You either get it or you don’t get it. Your mind either gets it or it doesn’t and the practice is trying to get it. So usually this is very much dependent on receiving a transmission from the teacher (which is the Dzogchen way) or in Zen it is to try to confuse the mind so that it gives up, it can’t cope any more. That is the idea behind the koan – you meditate on the idea of one hand clapping until your mind goes, “I can’t get that.” and something else happens. Obviously it isn’t quite as simple as that, but certainly these approaches would not engage in the kind of detailed analysis of mind that I am explaining here.

The point is that no matter how strong is your connection to this innate state, or this pure state that is within all of us, when you are not in that state, your mind, and its accumulated tendency of attachment, aversion and obsession with self etc. and the tendency of those states to produce kamma that produces suffering, re-arises. It doesn’t purify the latent tendencies of your mind just to recognise awareness.

While you are in a state of awareness your mind is kamma-free because there is no volition. But the moment that you fall back into ignorance, your previously accumulated mental tendencies will start banging out their old habits. So this is the argument for practising vipassanā.

Even though we may have been meditating for a very long time and have a very deep, well established connection to a pure state of mind, there will be within us, when that awareness gets shaken, a latent tendency towards selfishness or ego, attachment, aversion and all the other things which we investigate on our foundation retreat that are the basis of kamma, that are the things that actually produce suffering.

Vipassana practice Seeks to Purify the Unawakened Mind

In the field of vipassanā, we are actually turning away from this awareness. Even though we found a refuge in it, we are coming back to the mind and saying, “What remains of my latent tendencies? When I am not composed enough, when I don’t maintain my equanimity and balance, when my buttons get pushed enough and I become unreasonable all of a sudden, what are the remaining tendencies of my mind?” So it is not nearly as pleasant as abiding in this state of awareness or Rigpa or whatever you wish to call it, but it is necessary to get beyond the tendency to bring suffering to ourselves.

We may well believe that our life is stable enough, that we could probably get to the end of it, without our buttons being pushed enough that we would become unreasonable and act really selfishly or act out of anger, aversion, jealousy or pride or greed etc. We may well think that generally speaking we are a reasonable enough person, “I think that I am a reasonable, virtuous person. I’m not too worried. I think that I could probably handle myself well enough.” So there might be a tendency towards complacency, where we say, “Well, let me just enjoy the awakened state that I have already reached.”

But there isn’t any absolute stability and there is no telling what could happen that would push your buttons in life in a way that you might find within you an unreasonable tendency that you thought that you had let go of.

We are forever hearing stories about people whose lives were going swimmingly until suddenly everything fell apart. So this is not an investigation into the best that we can be. We are all reasonable people. I am sure that we all have a great innate capacity for love, affection, generosity etc. when we feel secure, stable and nourished. But what happens when we don’t feel those things?

This is really the point of vipassanā, because when it’s good it’s good but when it’s bad it can be horrid. Look at yourself. I bet you will all see times when you acted completely unreasonably. Even though it is against your character, something happens in the life and some sort of monster comes up in you and you start acting really selfishly. Now those are latent tendencies within us which are not relinquished just by recognising that we do have, also latent within us, a capacity for enlightenment or awakening.

Vipassanā is the investigation of those remaining tendencies that have a capacity to produce suffering for us and suffering for others. We don’t want to get bogged down in it, in a judgmental kind of way. You will find that everybody is unreasonable when they get pushed hard enough. At the end of the day, ignorance was really the cause of the arising of your greed, selfishness, aversion, anger etc.

So it’s not a question of pointing a finger at yourself, it’s a question of meeting the energy that you still hold on to, that has a capacity to cause these states in you. It is not a mental interrogation. It is a question of sitting and being with how you feel at various stages and watching the tendencies for the composure or the stillness of your mind to shake and thereafter to cause the arising of ignoble states. That’s how we practise vipassanā.

So the way I am going to do it here is subtly different from the conventional approach. Quite often you will find that it is taught in a mind-only way. You only use your mind to investigate your mind. Most of you have done enough work to already recognise this innate state so we can use this as a platform to investigate the mind, which is a skilful way of practising and a less painful way of practising.

But in a state of awareness where you rest effortlessly within things and leave them as they are, your mind is not inclined towards investigation. If you do that you won’t allow these latent states to arise. So we must meditate skilfully to allow unpurified tendencies to reveal themselves.

So we are going to work the delicate area between these two states and that’s how we are going to practise our vipassanā. You are going to find that it is very swift and penetrating and effective and less painful and there is less gnashing of teeth, but rather a really incisive way of coming to recognise those things that are still latent within you.

When I make that statement, “All friction is ego” it’s a very contentious sounding statement, but the deeper you go into your practice or into your investigation of body and mind and awareness, the more you see that this is absolutely how it is. That the moment that you put yourself in the way, clinging to self, your idea of self etc, is the cause for the contraction within you that grips the experience rather than allowing yourself to meet it.

The Arising of the Sense of Self within Awareness Causes the Experience of Suffering

In your state of awareness, the heart base or the hadayavatthu, rests like a mirror. The mirror of your mind. The basis of your mind is a mirror – it is a perfect reflector of your experience and there’s nothing in the way that is interfering with that. The moment the sense of ‘I’ arises, a perception or a tendency to want to grip the experience as mine arises. That arising of me within the experience causes a disturbance in the heart base, in the stream of awareness that produces friction somewhere. And, if you are delicate enough in your way of paying attention, you will spot the arising of friction simultaneously with the impinging of perception of me within the experience and the subsequent wanting to grip and cling.

Awareness doesn’t want to cling, it is quite willing to just meet this experience, let it flow through. But ‘I’ wants to make it mine and that is the cause of the clinging, the attachment and the friction that then adds a fear (which is the fact that the experience won’t necessarily always be mine), or an aversion or a desire to avoid suffering, or a fear of separation – all our suffering happens at the point of the arising of me in the experience. The experience itself is not innately suffering. It is what it is.

And this is where I think that generally you have all done the work here, some of you more than others and to a further degree – you have all been investigating this relationship between your awake state and your ego, and your idea of self. That’s really our investigation – that’s what meditation takes us towards, what it puts in front of us.

So the way we are going to practise is to watch the falling out of that blissful, complete, nothing lacking state of awareness into the state of something’s needed or something’s lacking or there’s a fear that it’s not enough or there’s a fear that it will go away. The clinging of self means that the experience is no longer satisfying, because that is the square root of our suffering.

When the Buddha talked about Sabbe Saṅkhārā Annicati, Sabbe Saṅkhārā Dukkhati (All conditioned formations are impermanent, all conditioned formations are suffering), he is not saying that it is because they are impermanent that they are suffering. The cause of suffering is not the fact that a beautiful day is going to end and that each of us at the end of our life is going to pass away. But he also teaches us; Sabbe Dhamma Anattati. It is because we do not see that this experience is not personal, that perception of self is an illusion. It’s the fact that we think that the experience is me or mine. It is the idea of me that is the cause of suffering because that ‘me’ remains separate and that separation is the cause of fear and suffering and longing etc. So the more we can surmount the ‘I’, the freer we are.

And what is the cause of suffering? It is ignorance, craving, clinging, the whole mass of volitional formations and the kamma they produce that are the causes of suffering. And these causes are so deeply embedded within our experience that it’s not something we can just choose to relinquish just by listening to Dhamma. Or even with making reflection, “Yeah, I can see what Burgs is saying”.

But with enough wise attention one can spot the transition from the completely satisfied, nothing lacking state of being within awareness as such, to one where there is some vexation or other. And one will see that the cause for the arising of that vexation is the fact that some aspect of me or a sense of self got in the way, and with it the mind began to proliferate.

That’s all very deep and profound for the first morning of our retreat but that’s the context, that’s actually what goes on in the background when you are practising. When you sit there and it’s a mass of steam and sparks, that friction is only ego. And when you sit there and it’s an effortless stream of crystal clarity it’s because for a while you got out of the way. If you see that it is only that, and how much friction is how much I am in the way, and how little friction is how much I am out of the way, it is much easier. There is less to think about.

You don’t actually need to keep breaking down the mind all the time, you just need to see awareness always lies, resting effortlessly and at peace behind your sense of self. Each moment our awareness is smothered, to a greater or lesser degree, with our sense of self. That smothering, that sense of self is that much ignorance that is present within us each moment; just that. And that ignorance is the start of the causal chain of Dependent Origination. There it is. The whole path and all of the Dhamma comes down to this point. When we see the Dhamma we see it points here. That’s the pith. So let us aim there.

That’s that. Can you all connect to what I am saying? If you have any questions in the break and if you feel that some of these issues that we are talking about here are shooting a little high at this stage then in the next session I’ll have a talk with anyone who wants me to fill in some of the background to this. But for most of you that should fit in with the practice that you have already done and your understanding. You are all mature enough in your practice by now to be able to integrate what I am saying at a level that is deeper than mere concept. So this is how I am going to steer you when you practice vipassanā this week.