Ch. 13 - The Basic Ground of Our Being
Dismantling Our Pride is the Bullseye we are Aiming At
Your Mind is a Conditioned Process that Appears Within Awareness
The Clear Mind Element, The Basic Ground of Awareness
The Crystal and the Rainbow
[This discourse was given on an introductory retreat and looks at the basic state of awareness as the state that all experience appears within and which connects us all.]
Dismantling Our Pride is the Bullseye we are Aiming At
How are we doing? How are you getting on? Do you feel you are getting somewhere? Happy with your progress in meditation? Enthusiastic about what you are doing? I think it’s going well, I haven’t had to distract you very much, which is a good sign. I haven’t dragged you up there in the middle of the afternoon to do some chi kung because I felt you were all getting over-cooked. I haven’t given you many opportunities to let off steam. And that’s usually a sign that you are able to deal with what is coming up on the cushion, which is good. So that’s very encouraging.
So what I’ve done here so far is really to show you how to use your lower mind to purify itself. Your unawakened mind; you’re using your unawakened mind to investigate its nature. And hopefully in the process of investigating its nature, it refines its habit patterns, so that’s the way we are doing it. I haven’t yet given you very much introduction into the awakened state of mind and I think that has been good, because it has kept your eye on the ball. You haven’t looked for any short cuts, you’ve had no refuge from yourself and I think this is good, because one thing about recognising an innate state within us that is perhaps already free from suffering is that we might think, because we recognise that and because we know that it is innately part of us, we may mistakenly be inclined to think we don’t need to worry about purifying the rest of it.
That’s not the case. Because that awakened part of your mind didn’t get you into any trouble, did it? You probably don’t even know that it’s there yet. It certainly isn’t responsible for all the trouble you got into in your life. If you did get into trouble, it’s been your unawakened mind, with all its attachments to ideas of self, of me and all the behaviour that elicits, that is the cause of this tangled knot of complications that we find ourselves getting into.
Now dismantling our pride is the bullseye we are aiming at. It is the target that we shoot for when we’re practising the spiritual path or practising meditation. If you are practising any kind of spiritual practice like meditation and you aren’t aiming to dismantle your pride, then its an act of vanity. I don’t know any other reasons, but presumably there might be many other reasons why we might choose to practise without dismantling our pride. But the purpose for which these things are laid out is to bring us to a point beyond suffering. And the cause of our suffering is our attachment to our idea of our self.
Now we have spoken about this quite a bit so far. Your ideas, all your ideas, that appear in your mind are inevitable. So, you know, we have this extraordinary idea of this compactness of myself, this compactness of my problems and this inevitability of who I am. And it’s not until we start meditation that we start to realise, “Well, maybe it is actually far more fluid than I think,” and we actually start to recognise, “ There’s actually no grounds for this self at all.” But even as you realise this you are still experiencing ‘you’ right there in the forefront of your experience. The process of awakening is nothing other than the removal of that sense of self from the experience. That is what unifies you with what it is that you are experiencing. It is also what separates you from the very thing you are trying to understand or fathom – which is the very ground of being itself. In a way it’s a paradox.
The sense of yourself is what separates you. Your mind and all the ideas that arise in it are the very thing that separates you from that which you are experiencing. Now, that sounds a bit peculiar, doesn’t it. You may well be sitting there thinking, “Now hold on, how am I supposed to be able to experience things if it’s not through my mind?” Well, what I mean is this: your mind is a conditioned process that appears within awareness, the same as the image of that Buddha when you look upon it, or the sound of my voice when you hear it. It is nothing more than a conditioned process.
Your Mind is a Conditioned Process that Appears Within Awareness
I explained to you, by showing you how it is conditioned. It comes into being by contact at the sense door and a feeling that is generated. And all your ideas are conditioned, but where do they appear? Where do your ideas appear? The same way that the image of that Buddha appears in your awareness, your ideas appear within awareness, your mind appears in awareness. While you are identifying with that which you are thinking, you lose your awareness.
And when you stop thinking, you might for a moment wake up and realise that the basic fundamental state is awareness itself and not this diatribe of conditional mental formations, ideas and thoughts that appear within it. When you think, you lose your awareness. You are all thinking now about what I am saying and there is much thinking and perhaps only a little awareness.
But what if I was to just stop. Leave you hanging in the moment. While waiting to hear what I am going to say next, suddenly I don’t say anything and perhaps suddenly in that moment your mind stops...is empty…well…there’s just that: the suchness of the moment that you are in and your mind adding nothing to it. Can you spot how it is your mind appearing that separates you from that which you are experiencing by creating the illusion that you, the experiencer, are one thing and that which you are experiencing is another, when in fact everything you behold is just an array of awareness experiencing itself in myriad ways?
And in awareness there is no sense of self, there is just the suchness of what is being experienced. There are no questions to be asked in that moment because the knowing of it lies deeply within the experience itself when we enter completely into it.
And then the mind arises again and goes, “Wait a minute. What just happened?” And it starts its diatribe once again. And this is how it is, all the time, everywhere, nothing but this noise, this noise of the mind, this violation of the basic space, the fundamental ground of your being, crowded out by this idea of me and all the noise it makes. How exhausting!
How much you can get out of the way, is how much you awaken to the suchness of this moment and all the deep wisdom that it is expressing effortlessly. For a few seconds just now, there was no sense of you there and the spaciousness of the moment was complete. So you should watch for the moment that the idea of self or perception of self or sense of self encroaches upon the spaciousness, crowds it out and this proliferation of ideas in the mind occurs.
Your mind appears within awareness, it is merely a conditioned process appearing within awareness, the same as the sound of my voice and the visual impression of that Buddha. Awareness is a mirror, it doesn’t contain anything, it merely reflects its experience. That is the true nature of mind: awareness itself. And it can reflect anything that you put before it. But it is not impinged upon by that which it reflects.
The Clear Mind Element, The Basic Ground of Awareness
In your heart, beneath this bhavaṅga – this stream of consciousness that is receiving all these impressions and your reactions to what you are experiencing – is a more fundamental state that we call the clear mind element, which just rests effortlessly within itself and has never been impinged upon by anybody or anything that it has experienced. It has always just been a pure reflection of that which appears before it. And it’s never not there, it’s simply crowded out by the lower mind, by all this noise, by this idea of me, what I think I’m experiencing etc. And it is through that basic state of awareness that you are connected to all things. You are separated from everything by the arising of your mind.
So there comes a point where you have to drop all of this. Drop this Dhamma, drop all investigation of the Abhidhamma. It is only a route through your mind, a way of investigation that might prompt you to go beyond. But for as long as you try to fathom the truth of things in your mind you will remain lost in the illusion of things. You will not see the wood from the trees. Eventually you will see it’s all just smoke and mirrors, an illusion of things.
The truth is that the ordinary mind that we start out using to investigate things doesn’t and can’t fathom all this. It literally can’t see, it doesn’t have the capacity to see. It just thinks and tries to reason all this out. It is a far deeper aspect of us that eventually comes to see and know directly the truth and the way of things and this deeper aspect of us is lost to us for as long as we try to seek resolution in the mind. The mind is the veil that obscures the truth, beyond which we have to glimpse and eventually let go if the truth is ever going to reveal itself to us.
So we could say at one level that all that is needed is to recognise the basic ground of awareness, of pure awareness. Yes, to a degree that is true. But as I said, that higher state of awareness didn’t ever get you into any trouble. It’s when you fail to spot it, when your mind arises with all its elaborations and all its needs and all its wants and all its not-wants that it creates that muddle. So the argument that we do not need to purify this lower mind, all we need to do is to recognise the fundamental nature, falls down at this point.
Many of you may have recognised that state of spaciousness, of awareness where your mind stops for a moment. But this didn’t cut off at the root, your propensity to create suffering for yourself. So, we do need to do this work that you are doing now. Even if you have an extremely profound relationship with that awakened aspect of yourself, there will always be a tendency, that when enough buttons get pressed, your idea of self will start to smother your experience and thereafter that stock of reactions of what I need and what I don’t want and what I like and what I don’t, what it means to me, will come tumbling back.
Now sometimes you come on retreat and we spend a long time developing our relationship to that basic state of awareness so we learn to turn away from this mind more often, but you will still need to do the work, to dig out at the root the tendency of this idea of self to come tumbling back. It is no good thinking that you are enlightened just because you recognise a state that is undefiled within you. Everyone, from the Buddha to the most profane maniac has that pure, totally undefiled basic state as the fundamental ground of their being. But the Buddha and the maniac are not the same in the way they are experiencing the world. Because the Buddha dug out at the root all the tendencies to identify with any idea of himself. And the maniac most certainly hasn’t… Have you?
You need to continue to use your lower mind to purify itself until you are truly able to see it as nothing but smoke and mirrors and go beyond the veil. You are developing the higher qualities of your lower mind and removing the lower qualities of your lower mind. When your lower mind is purified it is the same as your higher mind. It is just an even stream of equanimity that rests effortlessly within itself, which is what your higher mind has always done. So these two things meet.
The recognition and the introduction to that basic ground of awareness can inform the way in which we practise. But it is not until your unwholesome states arise and you watch yourself identifying with them that, in that moment, you can purify them. If you sit behind and leave everything to be as it is you are only experiencing the momentary non-arising of the unwholesome states of your mind. You are not removing the possibility that they could continue to arise.
When your buttons are pressed and you get disturbed by something you experience, this is the point where you see how pure your mind really is. “When I’m good I’m very, very good. When I’m bad I’m horrid.” It’s like that, it’s not about the most noble you are capable of being, or what is the most enlightened experience you are capable of. It’s about the most ignoble, unenlightened experience that you are capable of. This is what you have to look towards and be sure that you are willing to relinquish. That is what separates you from real freedom and what continues to cause suffering.
The Crystal and the Rainbow
So let’s look a bit more at what this awakened state might be. Look at those crystals. What happens if the sunlight shone through that crystal on to that wall? What would happen? You’d get a rainbow. Now what would determine whether that was a beautiful rainbow or not? The wall? The purity of the crystal? So we might start out by thinking, “Oh, let’s see if we can polish the wall to make the rainbow brighter.” That’s a little bit like sprucing yourself up, giving yourself a jolly good groom and wearing your best clothes. But underneath you’re just the same. So you might think, “Well, maybe what I should do is polish the crystal.” You give the crystal a jolly good polish and then it starts to really be a very fine and wonderful and radiant rainbow.
But we are so carried away with the idea that we are the rainbow, that that’s all that we focus on, we are so identified with this idea of myself. But then what happens when you take the crystal out of the way? Just a clear light remains from which the rainbow was produced. Your mind is the crystal, the clear light is the basic ground of your being. You are not the rainbow, this is merely an illusion, a momentary arising phenomenon, an array, a display.
And a very wonderful and fine thing it is and absolutely we should be most interested in it. But don’t lose sight of the basic ground of your being. Do not get lost in your mind; there is no resolution in your mind. It is an illusion; our ideas are an illusion. This idea of self is vanity. Awareness itself is the basic ground of your being. And it is for the purposes of experiencing the suchness of your being that you are here: to awaken to it. Not to dance your dance until you’re satisfied that all the world has noticed that you are here.
The world is not here waiting for you, it’s waiting for you to turn up and recognise that you are actually part of it. So, yes, purify this crystal of yours, because it’s what creates this illusion in which we are lost. But learn to get out of the way completely so that you recognise the true nature of being. Your mind will never see that, it is blind to it. The truth does not lie in the Dhamma or the Abhidhamma, but what it points at.
In the seeing is only the seen, in the hearing is only the heard, that’s it and it’s complete and it’s enough and when you truly turn up it is enough, it is complete. It doesn’t need you to add anything to it to make it a complete experience. You could go to the Leonardo exhibition at the National Gallery and you could stand in front of the finest pieces and you could start trying to work out for yourself why they are masterpieces. Or you could just stand and behold them and that’s all there is to it.
This moment is complete and in the moment you utterly immerse yourself into the experience it needs nothing to be added and there is nothing to take away. The entire truth is revealed to us in that moment when we completely turn up to it. And because we can’t turn up and enter completely into the experience we will stand there thinking, “This is a wonderful piece of artwork,” and we’ll explain to ourselves and we’ll explain to our friends just why it’s such a wonderful piece of artwork. And we won’t have come close to completely imbibing the experience, because we crowded it out with self, with the mind.
The mind doesn’t experience anything directly, your mind is a compensation for that which you did not experience completely. Because we can’t quite get what the Mona Lisa’s about or Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto’s all about we will try and have a jolly good think about what it’s all about. And maybe we will say to ourselves, “Ah, well I think I know what it’s all about now,” and that’s the resolution we come to in our mind, “I think I understand.” But did we experience it completely? Hmm? Did we enter into our experience completely so that it could reveal its own innate wisdom?
The more you remove yourself from the experience, the more complete becomes the experience. The practices that you are practising are for the purposes of learning to gradually remove yourself from your experience. Not for the purposes of coming to a more pleasing idea of yourself. That’s just vanity, isn’t it?
Now, in the early stages it’s very important that we move from a dissatisfying idea of ourselves to a more content idea of ourselves, absolutely. Because, not being able to be with ourselves on all these things that we were talking about, like unworthiness and all kinds of stuff, that needs to be resolved so we are able to be with ourselves. But don’t get to the point that you are so pleased with yourself that it goes completely the other way. We’re not doing it so we can be pleased with ourselves; we are practising so that we can complete our experience and that complete experience comes from removing ourselves from it.
It sounds paradoxical, doesn’t it? It’s because it’s so personal to us at the moment. How we feel is so important. But the feeling, the depth of feeling, when you immerse yourself completely in your experience, is so profound that it has no trace of yourself within it and is impersonal. And yet it’s complete. Your sense of self is the veil that separates you from the truth. So, don’t lose the wood for the trees as they say.
