Ch. 18 - From Vipassanā to the Experience of Suffering in Self and Self in Suffering

The Investigation of States is only to Start to Spot the Cause of Your Suffering, to see your Idea of Self Within Your Experience

Understanding the Concept of No-Self will not Free You From Suffering

There is a Point When have to Go Beyond Conditioned States

Willingness to Surmount Self Opens the Door to Nibbana

[This discourse was given on a five month retreat and looks at the contemplation on suffering and how sense of self is always present when we experience suffering.]

The Investigation of States is only to Start to Spot the Cause of Your Suffering, to see your Idea of Self Within Your Experience

This is actually really important. I don’t want you to think that you are going to spend the rest of your life seeing everything that happens to you in terms of the four elements of materiality and the five aggregates. That would be an extremely tedious way of living life.

The reason that you are breaking your experience down into so much detail is to spot what is the cause of your suffering, to spot what it is that makes your experience unsatisfactory, to see your idea of self in it. Once self has been known to you, once you have done enough investigation of states, it can be said that you know what is meant by self and no-self. You will understand these five aggregates of clinging. You will understand the process of your experience. Then we have to seek to engage in the experience in an enlightened way. That’s really what the fruition of all our practice is.

Whether you are doing samatha or doing vipassanā, your vipassanā practice now has become a very intricate process of investigation and it is bringing a lot of insight. Some of you are getting to very profound states of understanding your predicament. That has come about through the investigation of states and without the investigation of states you would not have spotted what your predicament was so clearly.

The actual experience of enlightenment is to go beyond the affliction of those experiences to the cessation of suffering. It is usually the case that that experience will be introduced to you directly by the teacher at a point. I would say, eighty percent of the time, that would be the way in which yogis like you or like me would first start to recognise it. It comes directly from the mindstream of the teacher. This is the value of working with the teacher, because you are exposed to that experience which is not known to you. Once we have had the experience it becomes a reference point which we can refer back to.

The role of the teacher giving transmission is to expose your mind to that state which is beyond your previous experience. Your capacity to receive that transmission depends upon your openness, or your readiness. All the investigation that you have done is to make you ready to let go attachment to self. How deeply you receive that transmission and how profound is its effect upon you is dependent upon how much of yourself is willing to get out of the way, so that you can spot the essence of whatever you are being shown – whether that is your own experience of Nibbāna or your own experience of the basic state of awareness or the awakened mind.

Your capacity to recognise what the teacher is showing you depends upon your openness. And your openness to the Dhamma matures with all this work that you are doing.

There comes a point when you are ready. It is always the same. There will be a point when you get a click, some transmission or some meditation or some very brief pointing out instruction from the teacher. The mind is ripe and it gets it. It’s heard it a thousand times before. It just shifts your mind now into a perspective beyond the one that you had previously. Even to spot Nibbāna. The Buddha was the only one who spotted it for himself. It’s because of our fixation that even though it may be right in front of us, we probably wouldn’t spot it. It’s just to have it pointed out and then, when we are ready and able to be less fixated in what we are fixated upon, then we can spot it.

All of you, I think, have at least had the introduction to the experience of the fundamental awakened state of your mind. Your capacity to abide in that or to know that as the basis of your experience depends upon how able or willing you were to enter into it at the point that it was pointed out. Through your meditation you may drop into this state spontaneously as a by-product of all your work. But even that is a point of a switch in perspective. Prior to that everything that you have ever meditated upon and everything that you have ever experienced in your experience is not that, it is all just a projection of the egoic mind, and it will always have your sense of self wrapped up within it.

Understanding the Concept of No-Self will not Free You From Suffering

This is why most people are meditating on the idea of no-self. I am constantly amazed at how poor people’s understanding of the teaching of no-self is. I hear them churning out the formulaic idea that because no permanent self can be found in each of the five aggregates, then there is no permanent self. Self is an illusion and no-self is the truth. But this is just not good enough. While you are churning out your recitation of this formula or repeating it in your mind you are still only lost in concept. While you are doing this, self is your truth and no-self is only a concept that eludes you. Please look at it. There you are, diligently subscribing to the view of no-self when it is far from the truth as you see it to be.

In fact perception of self is the most definitive and reliable aspect of all of your experience, even when you are contemplating the idea of no-self. So please, as the Buddha said, do not meditate as blind sheep on concepts alone. Until you reach the definitive experience of no-self you are subscribing to views.

The point that I want to make today is that all the vipassanā work that you have done so far is really only for the purposes of coming to see the truth of impermanence, the truth of suffering or instability or unsatisfactoriness and the truth of no-self. But you are still left experiencing these things in their arising and passing, trying to break off your attachment to them. It still remains to surmount them or to transcend them, and go beyond them into that awakened experience where they come to cessation. So there comes a point where one has to stop that detailed analysis because that detailed analysis keeps you fixated on the very thing that you are required to transcend or go beyond.

When you have seen everything to be impermanent you know that everything is impermanent. When you see that there is no self in the five aggregates, you know that there is no self in the five aggregates. Whether you are one hundred percent convinced or ninety percent convinced, remains to be seen. You may be convinced but have you experienced no-self yet? Maybe not!

But if you stay forever fixated on the investigation of these states, this minutiae of your experience, you would be left with the unawakened, clung-to, ego-based state that is the cause of affliction, that is unsatisfactory. But there is a point when the compactness of that experience has been broken down enough to open a window of opportunity to go beyond it. Then all you have to do is to go beyond it.

There is a Point When have to Go Beyond Conditioned States

So yesterday someone asked me about fear and I said to them, “Why don’t you just experience your fear as suffering.” I had a similar discussion with somebody else and they came back to me and said, “I am just experiencing this is me and this is suffering. I see myself as sick and this is my suffering. I see my death at the end of this life, this is just my suffering.” But even in their experiencing it only as their suffering they are seeing it still as their idea of self and it is still at the front of their experience. There is still too much self in the experience. It doesn’t go beyond self.

The point is, if you see all these things as just suffering, you experience your jealousy as suffering, you experience your pride as suffering, you experience your greed and lust as suffering. You don’t need to get too lost any more in what it is that you are greedy about, what it is that your pride is attached to, what it is that you are lustful about, what it is that you are jealous about, what it is that you are angry about. That you have done plenty of. You have gone down the causal chain and spotted what is the cause for this jealousy, lust, this anger, this aversion.

Now you just need to experience that it is unsatisfactory. Its nature is suffering. If you can start to do that you will start to spot that any impingement upon that basic state of awareness is affliction. Remember that phrase that I use so often – “All friction is ego.” Start to experience that. Begin to prepare yourself to stop contemplating it and start to experience that all friction is ego. That all of these things that you are looking to surmount are just suffering. Because it is that realisation that will cause in you a sure willingness and desire to relinquish them.

Now at various stages in your meditation you will come to abide in a deep and peaceful state. By now, all of you will have access to profoundly peaceful and satisfying states. They are not always available to you in your meditation but you all will have experienced them. The next time they start to come, start to notice what is satisfying about them and start to notice the arising of what afflicts that state and you will see that your suffering is your fear, is your aversion, is your greed, is your lust, and in all of this there is self. Start to experience this directly, not this contemplation that you have had to do. But you are now at a stage when you can experience it so simply – it’s suffering.

That cup of tea in my hand just now was just an experience but because it was just an experience it had a capacity to be satisfying. The moment that I compare it to anything else, it has the capacity to be unsatisfactory. The truth is there is only this and there will never be anything other than this. Experiencing it just as such, or in its suchness, leaves it with the capacity to be satisfying. Right up to the point that you add something to it with the mind, with self, with the ego.

So whatever is in your experience is just an experience within this basic space or this basic state of awareness. When it is accepted, as it is, without any trace of attachment to it or aversion to it, and with no inclination to cling to it or reject it, it has a capacity to be satisfying, it has a capacity even to be appreciated.

I have explained to you how saṁsāra and Nibbāna both appear within the basic space of your awareness. Now most of you have already experienced that basic state of awareness. And even without knowing Nibbāna, you have experienced it as satisfactory, not lacking.

Why do we need then to go to Nibbāna? Why do we need to see cessation? Because, due to residual attachment to self, there remains the possibility that one falls into clung-to mental states that are the cause of the fruiting of past kamma, the producing of new kamma and suffering. So while we know this state of awareness, we must go beyond the arising and passing of the things that appear within it, to their cessation. Because seeing their cessation cuts off your clinging to them. It also cuts off that kamma, in stages, that remains the potential to be your suffering in the future. It also cuts off in you the potential for these experiences, here and now, to be the basis for the production of new kamma.

Whether you are ready depends on how close you have come to experiencing no-self. There comes a point where you need to simplify your experience of meditation to just that which is suffering and that which isn’t. So that you can start to look for, with real determination, a willingness to cross over beyond, to the cessation of that which is suffering. Whatever is going on in you, if it is not satisfying, snapshot it – this is my lust , this is my suffering, this is my restlessness, this is my suffering, this is my doubt, this is my suffering. And you will see that every mental state is unsatisfactory. Every contrived, conditioned mental state is unsatisfactory, because it is self impinging upon that satisfying state of pure awareness which is beyond self.

I was thinking that, maybe in another two weeks, we would take up this practice and we would have some transmission of that and we would go back to the looking for cessation again in our vipassanā practice. But I think that some of you are close already to letting go and you just need the sure experience that this is my suffering, in this subtlest of ways. And when you are in your deep and settled state (and it’s not a remote, transcendent state that is way beyond), when you are with the moment and utterly present within it and it is satisfying and you understand that it is because the mind is empty and present and just is with what is, then we can see that that which arises within that emptiness, when clung to, is suffering. That is the experience that you need to get, that will show you that there is no point, there is no reward, there is no satisfaction in clinging to those things. It is that willingness to surmount self that opens the door to Nibbāna.

Willingness to Surmount Self Opens the Door to Nibbana

So your striving is something that you only have to do because your mind is clouded with confusion or despair or depression or suffering or lust or whatever. And you have to put forth that striving effort to break a very, very ingrained habit in you. But as that ingrained habit starts to be broken, the striving itself has to be gradually relinquished so that that awakening is something that you just come to. It’s a blissful letting go. It’s not a, “I have to let go.” And that blissful letting go comes with the recognition that holding on is suffering and that letting go is peace.

In order to make that step you need to experience that suffering in subtle ways. In your experience when it is really fully present, fully concentrated and mindful, full of insight, watch those things that pull you away. If you are ready, then you can start following it down the line of Dependent Origination looking for its cause. You can stop breaking it down into, “These are the five aggregates and this is their arising and passing,” and you can just experience it as suffering. It is just in some subtle way vexing and it is less satisfactory than if I left it alone. And gradually you will leave it alone and then you come to true equanimity and gradually you will start to incline your mind towards that non-arising, or in that space, in the gap that I talk about between the flesh and the bone, between the arising and passing, between the passing and the arising.

Take heed of those peaceful states that you are getting into and watch what vexes them or watch what crowds them out or watch what pulls you out of it and just see that that is my suffering, that is my clinging that is the suffering. And always it is the arising of your sense of self that causes this suffering, the fact that you would think that it would be more interesting to get carried away with this than to rest within it as it is. That’s where your dispassion, disinterest in the things that have obsessed you for so long will come from. And it is that disinterest that makes for a blissful letting go rather than a vexing sense of, “I have to conquer this ego, I have to conquer this self.” That will not work.

And when you have that willingness to let go, then even sitting quietly in the meditation room, with some very brief instructions or one of the mantras or something like that, you might find yourself understanding what it means and making reflection, “Yes, beyond this...I am going there.”

This is why I haven’t pointed out this need to simplify it too early. Obviously you have already heard me give such a teaching as this when you are on a one week retreat, but that is to help you get as far as you can with it then, because it is only a one week retreat.

But now you have been through the exhaustive process of investigation, you know what this field of conditioned experience is. So the next time it is pointed out you should be ready to surmount it.

I have heard it said sometimes that the Arahant, or the enlightened sage or yogi or whatever, experiences everything as this frightful arising and passing away and all of these things are nothing but five aggregates. No. Once you have known it to be that you rest effortlessly within it and leave it as it is and are not vexed by it.

I think that it is important that you understand that, so that you don’t think that you are going to be spending the rest of your lives seeing Dependent Origination in everything that happens before you. Because once it is known, you know it is known, and there is a sense of ease when you abide in it in the way that you should abide in it.

You don’t honestly think that that awakened experience is also suffering? No. Experiencing things as Dependent Origination and arising and passing is suffering while it is clung to. So you go back into your experience, wide open, spacious, not terrified, not vexed, not stressed, not dissatisfied, not wanting. Then your cup of tea is quite satisfying as it is.