Ch.36 - The Pride of the Sage and the Wisdom of the Fool
How do we Get to The Wisdom of the Fool?
Mindfulness is to Just Remain Present
The End Game is the Transition Out of Your Sense of Separation
There’s Only Love and Not Knowing It
[This discourse was given at the end of a month long retreat and discusses our relationship to something that is beyond us.]
How do we Get to The Wisdom of the Fool?
So... let’s look at our relationship to the experiences we are starting to get in our meditation...
Are we starting to realise that we know a lot less than we thought we knew? And does that realisation come as a relief or a vexation? Do we feel a lot better, rather than feeling fraught with disappointment and despair at the understanding that we know a lot less than we thought we did? So, what’s happening there? What’s happening when we find our self in that situation?
Q: What you thought you knew doesn’t matter anymore?
A: Yes. Which part of you have you let go, that turns this understanding into a relief?
Q: The need to make sense of it? The need to know?
A: And what is that? It’s our...pride! The need to know my place in it, or even to have the world know my place in it, rather than happily just be a part of it.
So, why do they talk about the wisdom of the fool as the highest wisdom? How do you get to the wisdom of the fool? You let go the pride of the sage. The pride of the sage – the sage who first started thinking he knew something, and then worked to get to the point of satisfying himself that he knew a lot of things, understood a lot of things and then became pleased with himself that he knew a lot of things. This is the wisdom of the sage, the sage who has to hold his mandala in place, who knows lots of things but has no spaciousness, but has his pride still intact, and he feels okay about that, “Ah, my pride’s intact.”
But the fool is wise because he has let his pride go, so he didn’t need to compare himself to the one next to him, there’s no one above him and there’s no one below him. And, there’s your spaciousness! When that comparison, and the need for it stops. You get it momentarily, and you momentarily enjoy the spaciousness, and then it’s crowded out by your relationship of yourself to others, your ‘pride’.
So when you lose your spaciousness, what is it that starts to creep back in?
Q: Pride.
A: Where have you been when it’s been going well for the last couple of days/weeks? Where have you been?
Q: Empty? Present?
A: Yes, present! You’ve been here!! You’ve been present. And where are you when it starts folding in?
Q: In the head?
A: Yes. So you start to project into the future again. The future will come sooner or later and you’ll find that relationship to that moment, but at the moment it’s just a fantasy that has this ability, because of doubt, to rob you of your spaciousness. So, this is our marker. Why do we allow these projections in? You don’t need to resolve anything, you just need to see how things are. You don’t need to answer the questions, “How’s it going to be about this? What about that?” You don’t. You only need to see that it’s my projecting into them that causes my contraction and the loss of my spaciousness.
Mindfulness is to Just Remain Present
This is what mindfulness is – to just remain present. So, here’s another way to stalk the ego – you don’t have to get to the point of having caught it, you just need to start to develop other ways of starting to recognize how it’s playing with you, or how it plays with you.
Somewhere along the line on this retreat, at various stages, you’ve developed a relationship with something that is beyond you, and made progress at various levels into that not being something fearful. Whereas before, we have no other reference point but this perspective of me, slowly this experience of no-self becomes something that we can befriend and embrace. Gradually it starts to dismantle this grip of the idea of me. And maybe things start to fit into place.
“Ah gosh, it’s so simple.” We start to see that the Dhamma is beyond ‘me’, it is beyond my ideas of self, it’s not within my idea of myself. At first this is a great challenge to us, with all our pride and our ego. At first we might seek to hold on to the Dhamma and make it ours, to see ourself in terms of how much of it we think we have understood, in our efforts to become the great sage that we can hold up to everyone else as special in some way.
Then hopefully we start to see what the real Dhamma is, maybe after a very long time of fooling ourselves about what we think it is. Eventually we really start to embrace the essence of what it actually is. And then finally comes the feeling of relief...it is okay to let go. I don’t have to turn myself into anything at all, especially not a sage!
One of the sayings I use is, “There’s no resolution in the mind.” Have you made progress towards that? It’s not that I’m trying to convince you of this, or asking you to believe me. Rather I am asking you, have you had an experience that has helped you to get closer to this understanding for yourself? These are the kind of reflections to make when we’re looking at our practice.
It’s not about how have the teachings served us. It’s not about whether you can keep your mind on ānāpāna nimitta for one hour or two hours, or whether you can feel or see your bones completely, or whether you can feel four elements and go through the body five times in half an hour. This has got nothing to do with anything!! It’s not even about whether you can see Dependent Origination and trace back your past lives. It’s not about any of these things!
So at what level are you asking yourself, “What have I gained from my practice here?” Watch it, you don’t need to answer it. The relationship that we develop to something that we eventually recognise as being beyond our ideas of ourself is a long and ever evolving, and deepening, relationship. If your heart is open and your mind spacious enough, at the point of that direct introduction to that state, you can enter into it completely. Maybe at some point, maybe in the pointing out of it, in the space that’s left when the mind finally gives up its effort to understand, suddenly you see /fathom/enter into, maybe during the tail end of that pointing out, you find yourself in that place where truly nothing is lacking, and you can enter completely into it, for a few moments, five minutes, ten minutes if you wish to stay there, an hour. These are the experiences that redefine our relationship to ourselves and everything around us, that cause us to start to wake up.
Thousands of books are written about this and so many teachings, and yet it’s so simple. And you see, really you see, “Gosh, I really see”, and you know that you see......or......not yet – some part of your mind was not willing to yield enough for it to be exposed in its nakedness to you. But somewhere, at some level, you all have developed the beginnings of the relationship to that which is beyond ‘me’, to that which is stable. And with it we also develop a relationship to the truth that that which I perceive to be ‘me’ is unstable. This is really how we mark our progress – arriving at the point of the complete end of your separation, where there is absolutely no need any longer to refer to your experience in some attempt to understand it, compare it, relate it, etc.
Arriving at this point now, is a deep journey. There’s all that fraught process of disentangling ourselves, which may be perceived to be the path; untangling the knots which we’ve tied up inside ourselves, this tangled knot of clinging that denies us the ability to be completely with what is and to be at peace with it. This is a long journey in its own right and it is a fraught journey. Where we are understanding, in stages, the mechanisms by which we’ve tied ourself in these knots, and taking on the chin the stark reality that we’ve been responsible for all of our difficulties. When we accept that, the door opens to something beyond us. But until we accept that, the door to our own freedom remains closed.
So, going back to this idea of the sage and the fool, the door to the deathless is closed to the sage, his pride keeps him separated from it. But the fool has completely entered into the deathless and experiences no separation from anything.
The pride of the sage arises in that moment that we become pleased with ourselves and think, “Do you know what? I think I’ve got it! Yes, I think I’ve finally understood!” And maybe for a moment the sage did see something that was beyond his mandala, and came out of his mandala to experience it. But then the next thing he did was to go back into his mandala and place it somewhere inside his mandala, alongside all his other ideas, saying, “Look what I’ve got! Look what I came back with! I came back with the understanding of emptiness, cessation, the oneness of all things! Brahma. I saw God. I see no-self.” And in this moment we do feel pleased that we’ve actually fathomed a deeper meaning to all these teachings than we had previously, “I’ve had an experience, I think I’ve seen it.” But then the, “I think I’ve seen it”, just gets added into the idea of self, and because of pride we don’t get any further. All we are left with is a new idea of ourselves!
The End Game is the Transition Out of Your Sense of Separation
Now the next part on the journey is the deep and profound end game of your final transition out of separation. To see it in a moment does not end finally your separation, so your meditative stability now starts to come back and be of use to you again. You work hard in the beginning to develop enough concentration to see, “This is nāma and this is rūpa, this is my body and this is my mind,” so you can break down the compactness and see it in its little bits, and at one level there you can see no-self.
And with that as the basis you investigated and gradually came closer to being receptive to the experience that no-self is actually a truth. And then somewhere later on you had a glimpse of being beyond, where you couldn’t see yourself in that moment and so that which was beyond you, is revealed to you. How much freedom you experience thereafter depends upon, not your ability to remember that and keep reminding yourself what it was – this is just work and more games in the mandala of your mind.
Instead it depends upon your ability to stay and abide in that state. And that, initially, will depend upon your meditative stability, because that state of consciousness that is sign-less is very rarefied and very subtle. If you are going to fathom it deeply, rather than just have a moment of exposure to it from time to time, your mind will need to be very subtle. And so now begins the journey of real meditative stability, if you wish.
No one should say who or what someone should be doing – it’s all entirely up to us. We are only here to arrive at the place where we are happy with where we are at. So it may well be that you are happy to be where you are, at any stage along the journey. And without telling yourself that there’s more I ought to be doing, you should be able to enjoy that stage for a while, because those moments don’t come that often. Perhaps take a moment to enjoy it and stop there, review, be with this new perspective that you come to at various stages. But be with it with the understanding that it’s likely to be a staging post from which you will move on with the sure knowledge that you haven’t yet arrived at your final destination.
So you can stop off anywhere along the way, and it would be wrong of any teacher or your friends or another practitioner, or yourself, to tell you that you are fooling yourself to stop there. You take a break when you have a moment of ease, wherever it is, because we need these moments of ease from time to time, when you have that moment of spaciousness and that feeling of being unburdened, wherever it is.
Maybe say, on the first few stages, the first few steps up the mountain path and someone’s selling coconut juice, and even before you’ve really worked up a sweat, there’s no reason that you shouldn’t stop there and enjoy that cool juice so that you can carry on. But don’t fall into complacency and fail to recognise when it’s time to move on, because that is a danger! Don’t, because of arrogance and pride and conceit, think you know more than you know, because you haven’t yet met that which is beyond you to the point where it will free you without remainder.
So, I call this ‘the end game’. There are many stages to it like there are many stages of putting the pieces together of a jigsaw puzzle. There are many stages of stalking this ego before you finally see that in fact the ego is the whole of your mind! And then there is the process of gradually disengaging out of that which you have always thought of as you and entering into that which is beyond.
That’s the end game. The opening game is to find out what pieces we’re playing with. The middle game, is stalking this ‘self’ with the tactics offered us by the Buddha, or other teachers. Vigilantly looking, “Where am I going to find this illusive self, this ego? What’s it made of?” And then later, “Ah, yes. I’ve stalked it! It is my pride. It is a conceit. It is just clinging. It is what the Buddha said it was.” And eventually we aim to go beyond doubt.
There are teachers who claim that to go beyond doubt is to enter the stream without even glimpsing the deathless. I don’t want to comment on whether this is right or wrong, but whatever the mechanism we get there by, the doubt that we must get beyond is the point where finally, “I absolutely know there is no resolution in the mind,” because only then will you stop looking for one there. This is your tactical play, you’re putting your pieces in place so you can see the end, and the end is in sight.
However you would like to symbolise it to yourself, crossing over and arriving on the shore that takes you beyond that which is suffering, is a very deep and very profound moment in this long journey. And it needs to be met, not as the last chapter in the Visuddhimagga, but as the most profound and moving experience, that you’ve ever engaged in! Because have no doubt about it...that’s what it is.
It is at this point that you enter into the end game, having played your opening, the middle game, with its tactical manoeuvring, getting your perspective right so that you might think, “Ah I see now.” But however you might have deluded yourself in the past, there comes a point where you know for yourself whether you are free or not.
And you may arrive at this point and you still may not be free, but you do now know where freedom lies. That is the point of being free of doubt. And it’s now that meditative stability, as well as insight, will carry you more deeply into that, because those rarefied states that you can occasionally glimpse need to become familiar.
And when they become familiar they need to become your reference point. You are turning your experience of life around, from that point where your mind has always been your reference point, to where you really can see the mind is merely a mandala that, “I’ve been lost in.” And yet still there, even this far down the line, this idea of ‘me’ is right there. This ‘me’ that you haven’t yet lost sight of still remains.
Gradually the insight will mature, and yet you still haven’t lost sight of ‘self’ and gone beyond, and this is where you may relate your experience back to yourself in any number of ways!
This is where the texts and the teachings and even the teachers may be separated. There are those who are describing the way, and there are those who are describing the destination and what it is they perceive themselves to be experiencing. Much of this we try to understand in our mind, we organise the teachings and our grasp of them in our mandala, in our own personal map of reality. And there still remains the very real danger of mistaking the map for reality itself.
But with deep meditative stability it is entered into, in stages, more completely, until you start to see at a level that doesn’t even need to be put into your mandala or explained to anyone else. You either know or you don’t know, and when we are honest with ourselves by now we can always see what we do and don’t know. We just have to be honest, not fool ourselves that convincing ourselves mentally is enough.
Your relationship to awakening will really take a long time to resolve and even here, you need to be willing to say, “I know a lot less than I thought.” But one thing is for sure – you will not keep going more deeply into it if you stop and think you already know.
‘That peace that passeth all understanding’ that you have been seeking, without actually knowing what it was, that great unfathomable ‘whatever’ which is alluded to in all the texts is still eluding you, however much you may have glimpsed it. Even the Visuddhimagga comes to an abrupt halt at this point. And you are left asking yourself if you truly are at peace yet.
There’s Only Love and Not Knowing It
So this is the end game – approaching a point where it has not and does not elude you, where it is not something to put in your mandala. Only through your own meditative stability, slowly you start to see, “This is mind and that which is beyond it. And now that which is beyond it is starting to experience that which I have thought myself to be.” And you watch it. “Was it me trying to work out what this was all about? Trying to get to a point where I could finally see that I am the same and one with all things? Where I meet God or where I meet that which is beyond, to become one with the universe?”
And you watch it until finally, you step beyond and you see that all the time it was the universe experiencing itself through you, that you were not the cause of, you were not the basis, you were not the centre of this experience but just a functional process that allowed it to come into focus, through which that infinite and vast and spacious and endless, utterly clear state of awakening comes to be known to itself.
Without you and your coming into being it was not known, but through you and your coming into being, it was. Yet it wasn’t you any more than it was the next person. It’s just a process coming into being for the purpose of knowing itself. And at that point, that for which any of us come into being has been done, and you know it’s been done, and you have experienced, completely, without any shadow of a doubt, and become one with that which was beyond you, so that finally you can let go.
And this is a deep, moving and profound experience that is not a series of ticking boxes in interviews with your teacher. This is something you gradually come to know for yourself, and develop a relationship with. “How far have I come to know?” and, “How much does it remain an idea that I’ve developed enough faith into place in my mandala?”
You don’t answer the question and no one asks you for an answer, you just get to a point of being willing to ask it, and you carry on till you know for yourself that you’ve arrived on the shore, beyond suffering. So take your time, because however far you’ve got now, it’s taken you infinitely more time to get there than it’s going to take you to get the rest of the way. So just be with it. Let your peace, your bliss, deepen. Let those moments of confusion lessen. Look at the unwillingness to let go your pride and stalk it until there is no unwillingness, because there is no resolution anywhere else.
It really isn’t about you. And when you get to that knowledge, and don’t resent it, it’s just a matter of time until you’re home. How close you may have got to unconditional love for yourself, how close you may have got to the love of others in their ‘suchness’ is for you to come to know in your own time. How close you may have come or how far you may have gone, to that being the same thing, is another way to stalk your pride.
And never judge yourself, or another being, even if you do still have the habit to compare, because if you are still comparing yourself to others, you still don’t know the truth yet, and by the time you get to the point where you do know, there will be nothing left to compare.The universe is experiencing itself through you, not the other way around. It’s not about you. You are just blessed with the opportunity to be a part of it.
There is only love and not knowing it - and you won’t find it in your mandala, so stop looking for it there.
May All Beings Come out of Suffering
May All Beings Find Real Peace.
May All Beings Be Happy.
