Ch.32 - Anatta and the Causal Cessation of the Five Aggregates of Clinging

The Causal Cessation of the Five Aggregates

Stop Looking for Self in What you are Doing

It’s a Spontaneous Arising, Work to Remove Yourself from Your Path

[This discourse, given on a five month retreat, points out that Nibbāna is not a refuge for self and eventually it leads to the total freedom from self.]

The Causal Cessation of the Five Aggregates

Alright, I want to give a bit of an explanation that can be a foundation for your practice. In order for your vipassanā to mature beyond where you have been meditating, you need a deeper perspective on the path. Up until now I’ve tried to teach you to perceive the momentary cessation of the currently arising five aggregates of clinging. You also need, in time, to learn to see the causal cessation of the five aggregates. So, your experience of Nibbāna really needs to see these two things within your meditation. You need to see how currently arising five aggregates arise and pass without remainder. They come to cessation and don’t come again. But you also need to see that the cessation of their causes means that they stop re-arising. What you are observing currently is the fact that they come to cessation and re-arise. To complete the practice you need to see that they come to cessation and don’t re-arise. And that is to see the cessation of the causes of the five aggregates of clinging. This relates very specifically to all of your questioning yesterday.

It seems to me, and it is inevitable, that you are seeking refuge for self within Nibbāna. You are looking for somewhere that you can resolve your idea of yourself to a place of satisfaction. That is stopping short of the path. So you now need to start to develop a practice that is going to stop seeing your idea of yourself in what you are doing. For example ideas such as, “When I’ve become this kind of person with this kind of Path Knowledge, I’ll be happy.” “The ‘me’ that’s the Sotopan, who will be able to help people, serve people, teach Dhamma or have a family, raise children.”

This is all me, still with attachment to self. Your question, “So does awareness remain when the five aggregates pass away?” is a typical example of you looking for refuge for self in awareness. This looking for refuge for the self stops you short of complete awakening because there is no self in that experience of complete awakening. So I was just reviewing everybody’s practice and where they thought they’d got to, and the thing that is separating you, all of you, whoever you are, is your idea of what you think you are going to become if you become enlightened. And there’s so much self in that idea – what you think you are going to be, and what you think you want out of the experience. And so the experience is so conditioned by the ideas because you don’t have enough knowledge yet.

So you need to start develop two new threads. The second one I’ll have to teach you systematically, which is how to see the causal cessation of the five aggregates of clinging. And that will involve reviewing what remains of your clinging and seeing into its future effects and developing your willingness to relinquish until you can see the point at which there is no clinging remaining and no future effects. But currently, whilst looking for the momentary cessation of the aggregates, you need to stop seeing self in what you are doing.

So you need to stop seeing this body as ‘me’ and ‘my’ body; you need to stop seeing these feelings as ‘me’ and ‘my’ feelings; these perceptions as ‘me’ and and ‘my’ perception. You need to stop seeing volition as ‘my’ volition, consciousness as ‘my’ consciousness and you need to stop seeing awareness as ‘my’ awareness. The only thing that gives you the sense that it is your awareness is the five aggregates that cling to it.

Stop Looking for Self in What you are Doing

So just stop looking for self in what you are doing. Otherwise you will stop way short of that freedom from self. So this is what we will build up in our practice. I have to teach you Dependent Origination in enough detail so that you can start to perceive the cessation of the five aggregates and their causes. Hopefully you already know that the five causes for the arising of the five aggregates are ignorance, craving, clinging, volitional formations and kamma (that is to say past causes and their present effects).

So look at your craving, and look at your clinging to view of self in your practice. Look at your idea of the unconditioned experience. Look at your idea of how you think you would experience love once you are enlightened, or how you think you might experience compassion once you are enlightened. How you might experience appreciative joy once you are enlightened etc. This is ego clinging to view. The point is that awareness contains within it, love, compassion, etc.

It’s a Spontaneous Arising, Work to Remove Yourself from Your Path

And it is not personal, it is impersonal. You have to realise that the highest state of love is unconditional love. It’s not ‘my’ love, it’s a pure state of love. It is not my capacity to feel compassion for others, it is the spontaneous arising of compassion. It is not my capacity to appreciate my experience of life or the pleasurable fortunate experience of life, it is the spontaneously arising experience of appreciation, and similarly the spontaneous delight in the good fortune of others.

So you have to work to remove yourself from your path. That self-clinging as an experience within the experience is the separation from awakening. So even while you are trying to dismantle your ego you can still be clinging to self. You need to see that it is the perception, sense and clinging to sense of me that is what needs to be dismantled. All the elaborate ideas of what you think awakening is going to be and how you would respond. This conditioning you put on your idea of awakening and the sort of awakening you think you want is so ‘self’ rooted. Awakening is awakening. It is an impersonal experience that everyone experiences in the same way. If you are violated by the idea that it’s not your awakening, that it’s not you, then you are not ready for awakening. You are not ready for that experience yet.

And that is why you make reflection, “Am I ready for that experience? Can I perceive that experience? Am I ready to do the work that leads to that experience?” The work that leads you to that experience is the systematic removal of self, of self view – the idea that it is me. So just maybe start to reflect on where you’ve looked for refuge for yourself within what you’ve perceived that path to be. See if you are willing to go beyond that and look for no-self and see your experience as not containing self.

The Buddha, when he says, “In the feeling there is only the feeling. In the perception there is only perception. In volition there is only volition”, means there is no-self there. It just is what it is. In the seeing there is only the seen – it is a pure experience. In the feeling there is only the felt – there is a pure experience of the object with no ‘me’ there. Pride convinces us that ‘me’ being part of that experience is a requisite to make it meaningful. Pride doesn’t recognise that ‘me’ being part of the experience is what causes it to be unsatisfactory.

So this is the area that your wisdom has to mature into. Because if your pride or conceit, or clinging to self is convincing you that you need to be there to make it a meaningful experience, this is clinging to self. So this is the kind of maturity that you need to have if you want to get to that complete experience. And in truth most people wouldn’t say that this is what they are looking for when they start out. Most people start out looking for a personal resolution to everything. Only maturing insight would point us towards the impersonal experience as the complete experience. If our insight is still immature we would reject this as a resolution, we simply would not be able to see it.

When you can perceive the five aggregates and their causes come to cessation, you are perceiving Parinibbāna. Parinibbāna is the non-arising of the five aggregates of clinging and their causes. Until you can see that as the complete cessation of suffering then you are clinging to view, ego view, sense of self. The reason for not seeing the causal cessation of the five aggregates as the cessation of suffering is because the wisdom is not yet mature enough to see that any self-view stops short of the experience of complete awakening.

Prior to that, our experience contains the view that believes it is necessary for me to be there to make the experience meaningful. That is, in fact, the cause of suffering, because it is the cause of selfish, self-centred view, rather than selfless, ego-less view. The moment to moment experience of awakening, and with it the experience of the cessation of suffering, is the removal in stages of all sense of self within our experience. This leaves behind the bare experience of the suchness of things.

As the Buddha said, “In the seeing there is only the seen, etc.” I feel this is not made clear in many of the explanatory texts. And as a result people incline towards a view of awakening or enlightenment rather than an experience of it. The idea is that it is the cessation of suffering, the cessation of the five aggregates of clinging and their causes.

This is what the Arahant experiences at Parinibbāna, but what he is experiencing before that also constitutes his lived awakening. It is this very absence of any sense of self within the experience, leaving only the suchness of it to be entered into. Thereafter there is no more boredom or oppression, only great joy, compassion and love. Only self experiences suffering. Awakened awareness does not.

This is a key point. So carry on with your meditation. I’ll give you instruction in the next one on how to incorporate this into your practice. I just wanted to give you this to reflect on when you are defining what it is that you think you are doing. Realise it is only yourself that you are defining, and with it your ego.

You need to be more unconditioned in your approach than that to reach your goal, otherwise you will always hold back... Aha, very good....