Ch. 19 - On Becoming Stable in Vipassanā

The Practice is to Dismantle the Ego, we have to Become Stable in our Instability

It’s a Profound Process Letting Go What You Cling To

The Longest Night Always Ends with Sunrise

[This discourse was given on a five month retreat and explains how we need to become stable in our instability.]

The Practice is to Dismantle the Ego, we have to Become Stable in our Instability

The point is, it’s very hard to do what you’re doing really skilfully. You are definitely going to be working at the edge of the envelope of your capacity and so you will, at times, over the last week or so, have felt quite fragile. As I said, doing this practice is an extraordinary thing, not an ordinary thing, and those vipassanā states that you are getting into are quite extreme when you first penetrate them, and have an extreme effect upon you. So it’s important that you find stability.

Remember that analogy of walking up the stairs. If you are on one step towards the bottom of the stairs with both feet on that step, you are stable. As you lift your foot up, to go up, you become unstable for a while. You put one foot on the stair above and you are only half stable. When you bring the other foot back up you are still unstable, but when you put both feet up on the stair above you, you become stable at a higher level.

So you might feel quite unstable at the moment. And you might often feel quite unstable as each time we go up a step, but the real key is to see whether you can become stable at a higher level. So if we stopped doing vipassanā now and spent the rest of the retreat becoming stable at the level we are at, that would be a very high level. But we are not going to stop, we are going to do some more vipassanā.

But I want you to just get stable before we do any more. Stable – not slothful, not slack – stable, meditatively stable, concentrated again, calm again. So that we can go through our vipassanā session this next time and this will probably be the last time we practise like this, because afterwards I want to work on your meditative stability. Some of you haven’t been meditating that long and you’ve done a lot quickly, so it will be a while before you get to a stage of real meditative stability with the insight you now have. And a really big part of the practice is to achieve that stability.

So if you stopped your insight now and went back to just stabilising everything and spent the rest of the retreat doing this, you would have achieved a tremendous amount. So don’t put yourselves under too much pressure. It’s violence being done to your ego right now. This violates your ego, this is brutal, this part of the practice. It’s not the blissful stages when you’ve got weeks and weeks to practice samādhi and samatha. It’s that bit which can feel really raw on the outside and the inside.

So it might come to you to think, “What am I doing? Having done all this work, it is still full of suffering”, because this practice is really brutal to your ego. But it’s all part of what dismantles the ego. The ego becomes unstable, fantastic, and your higher mind becomes stable. So like I said, whatever happens to you, however you need to respond to it, that is okay. Just be with it. Not much longer now of that.

I do feel that the last few days have been at the limit of the insight. You kind of all understand now, you’ve got enough intellectual understanding. You all understand really, not theoretically, not in vague terms, but really well, you understand the mechanism that you are going through. You understand what translates from, and what it is the cause of the transition from, the mundane experience to the supramundane experience. You’ve got close enough that even though it’s now only conceptual you are not confused about the contemplation of Nibbāna, and you can see the concept with enough clarity that it doesn’t confuse you to contemplate it.

That means that you are close to the bank of the river, because if you are far from the bank of the river you would be so very confused by the contemplation of Nibbāna. So the preparatory work is done. Or you’ve done as much preparatory work as you have the capacity to do now. So you should be satisfied with that and know that when you practice vipassanā in the next round you’ll be working at using that capacity to get you as far as you can.

But you should be satisfied however far you get, because it’s a long way. And otherwise you would need to come back, sit for another period of time, get more concentration and go through the whole round again to get further. Really the rest is about whether or not you’ve dismantled your ego enough that you can perceive happiness as something that is beyond it, rather than happiness is something that is within the ego.

Now the other point to understand is, and this is testimony to the depth that you’ve been practising, that a lot of you are perceiving that Path Knowledge in terms of the end of your ego. You’ve contemplated it in terms of surmounting your ego and getting to a point of entering into no-self as an experience rather than just the contemplation that there is inherently no-self. That is actually a very bold move. And I’m quite content to see that. Because the fact that you’re willing to contemplate being without your ego completely is basically contemplating Arahant Path Knowledge.

Now I’m not suggesting for one moment that that is what you are going to do. Well, maybe. Who knows? Fingers crossed, hope for it, reach for the skies. But the point is that the first time you see Nibbāna it won’t necessarily completely eradicate your ego. It will eradicate that gross part of it that produces the most violent affliction. And it will overcome your doubt and it will overcome certain views and certain restlessness and certain gross clinging to things that are real bondage. But there will still be a remaining sense of you there. It won’t be as insidious or as pervasive as it has been before this point, but you won’t necessarily go all the way to the point of being completely over your self.

But you will know the supramundane, you will know the unconditioned state which means the grossest part of you won’t function any more. Thereafter there are two ways to relinquish what’s left of yourself: By taking more Path Knowledge, up until Arahant Path Knowledge, where Nibbāna and cessation itself will cause that residual ego clinging to be automatically cut off. Or you relinquish yourself because you chose to relinquish it, because your mind is purified. And you get over yourself that way. You can relinquish a tremendous amount of that ego which causes suffering without even taking any Path Knowledge.

Do you remember yesterday I said for some people ten percent of their suffering is kamma, ninety percent is the elaboration of their ego clinging to self. That ninety percent can all be relinquished if you choose to. And it can be done without taking Path Knowledge, if you choose not to be so cussedly obsessed with yourself, if you choose to get over yourself. And this also is enlightenment, this is to be enlightened, as in to be freed of the burden of self.

It’s a Profound Process Letting Go What You Cling To

So you can do it that way as well, just by seeing the dhukka that you’ve caused yourself by this imagining. What did the Buddha say? “Imaginings are a dart, imaginings are a conceit.” So this is the domain we’re in now and it’s a delicate part. Even though you’ve done violence to your ego in the last period, the next part is a delicate letting go. It’s a deeply profound process, letting go of what you’ve clung to for aeons and spent aeons accumulating, that has caused suffering at many levels. But when you are willing to let it go, it is painless.

So don’t try to be forcing it, don’t force yourself to let go, as you will create so much pain for yourselves. Give up gracefully what you no longer have any need of. That’s the way to practise. That’s the non-violent way to practise – by finding a bliss in a deeper part of yourself, by finding a peace in a simpler part of yourself, that realises it can gracefully give up what it doesn’t need any more.

All of your ego created itself, all of your idea of self created itself out of some sense of lacking. It thought it didn’t have enough of what it needed. It just didn’t understand what it needed. So it went off in search of what it thought it needed and created all that noise that I talk about. But when, because of meditative stability and mental stability you can start to find what you’re looking for in an ordinary moment, then you will be able to give up gracefully what is not needed by way of ego. Because your needs are met in each ordinary moment.

So this is another aspect of the final phase of our retreat which is about the embodying of the experience as it is, of making peace with the experience of being where we are. That’s a skilful practice too. There’s a lot that gets resolved in the next few weeks and I wanted to maybe say something tonight because I could feel how exposed to yourself you are at the moment. And I could feel how, whilst practising meditation, which is supposed to be an enjoyable and peaceful exercise, just how raw and utterly invasive that experience of being exposed to yourself is. But it is for the purpose of seeing the ego for what it is. I’ve always said this is not what you will always expect to be experiencing as a result of meditation, it’s an exercise that you go through.

The Buddha, after that extraordinary night and all the gnashing of teeth he went through prior to that, enjoyed his meditation every single day after that, and that’s how he was able to cope with his extremely arduous workload and survive on only three hours sleep at night. So there is an enjoyment phase of your meditation and it will be all the more enjoyable on account of the hard, brutal work that you’ve done in this session.

The Longest Night Always Ends with Sunrise

So it’s okay. Don’t worry if you are pulling your hair out and you are up all night and pacing up and down and huffing and puffing, up and down in your bed. It’s alright, you are going to get over it. The longest night always ends with the sunrise. So abandon yourself to the practice, don’t get over-exerted but just be deeply with what’s going on. Don’t look for comfort – you don’t need to. It is around the corner. Just don’t over-egg the pudding so you become too exhausted. You will have smiles on your faces in a couple of weeks time. Certainly when I go off to retreat shortly, you will all have huge grins on your faces, and certainly in a month from now you will have beaming, glowing, radiant auras and smiles and bright shining eyes, yes, and all that sort of stuff.

So hang on in there....