Ch.31 - Transforming our Greatest Fear into Boundless Love
The Supreme State of Stillness and Clarity
The Clear Light is Always with You
Our Awakening is to Transform our Fear into Boundless Love, Appreciative Joy and Compassion
It Doesn’t Matter
[This discourse was given on an eight day Vipassanā retreat and explains how we can liberate ourselves during the death-process.]
The Supreme State of Stillness and Clarity
[Burgs and group emerge from meditation upon the clear light of awareness.]
So, how are we doing?
Q: I didn’t want to come out of my meditation, actually.
A: Good. When you did come out of it did you find yourself able to bring the essence of the practice back into your ordinary consciousness?
Q: No. I felt that I was leaving behind a more beautiful place.
A: More beautiful than this (gesturing to the space around him)? Well, in a way our challenge is to find the same beautiful place we reach in our meditation within our normal consciousness throughout the daily life. That state of supreme stillness and clarity that you were just experiencing isn’t something that only appears when we meditate. It’s actually always there, it’s just resting in the gap behind the noise of our ordinary mind. It’s in the gap between the arising and passing of things or the passing and then the re-arising. It’s always there.
So what is the beautiful place you arrived at in your meditation? It’s the point where you are able to abide in that gap, that space from which things arise and pass. That is the deep stillness I ask you all to connect to when we all tune in together at the beginning of our meditation. This is the state I am trying to introduce you to in that moment when I catch you off guard and your mind stops completely for a moment.
Once you begin to recognise it, you can begin to align your attention with it, and eventually enter completely into it within your meditation. As you become absorbed in that state behind the arising and passing of things, eventually what arises and passes fades away from your perception until eventually you are left with just that profound, spacious, deep state of stillness and peace. As you emerge out of your meditation, things arise and pass, but the gap, that basic space, remains there.
Do you bring your attention to that which is arising and passing or can you continue to abide in that space from which it is arising? That’s our challenge – to stay awake when we would normally fall back into ordinary consciousness, ordinary perception, where we are fixated upon the appearance of things and lose our connection to the ground from which they arise. In a way we go back to sleep as we emerge from our meditation. Ha, ha...
And what would make that experience that you just had more beautiful? The fact that we are able to engage completely with it, that we are completely with it, without distraction, that it has all our attention so that that pristine clarity, that spaciousness, the settled-ness of it, that peace, all of those things that are within it, are revealed to us more completely, because we are completely focused upon them. As we emerge, other things draw our attention, but the key is to keep some part of you connected to that.
It’s a stream which has run through your whole life and will continue to run through the rest of your life and when you die – this is the one thing that will be constant. It was there at the moment you were born, it will be there the moment you die, and if you spot it, it will be there after you die. What won’t be there after you die is all the noise and obsessing of your lower-mind. Well, in fact it will actually be there too, when we die as we go through the process of ‘reviewing’ the life. At that time, if you still choose to cling to those states of ordinary mind as ‘me’, then that attachment will be the cause for your renewed becoming.
But if you can spot this basic state of purity, this field of pure potentiality from which anything can arise, from which you and I have arisen, then if you can enter that which has always been there at the time of death, then there lies a precious opportunity to free yourself from all the clinging of your lower mind and the kamma it has accumulated. To die consciously is a very special thing, and a time to free yourself of all these things that you are trying so hard to free yourself now in the life.
But to do so you will have to have a close relationship to this state so that you will recognise it for what it is when you die. And you will have had to develop a genuine willingness to relinquish all the other things you have clung to in the life. If you still insist on clinging to them at the time of your death, then you will not liberate yourself. You will be drawn back by your kamma associated with all of this clinging.
The Clear Light is Always with You
And this clear light, this state of absolute peace and clarity, is there with you every night when you’re asleep, yet you don’t see it. And it’s there in the gap between every moment of arising of your mind and you don’t see it, and it’s there as you pass away. Most of you will see it then. Most people see it then for the first time and yet because we are so wrapped up with these illusionary impressions that we believe are ‘me’, with all our attachments to our ideas and our experiences and we believe what is appearing to us when we die is real, we become fixated upon all of that stuff and fail to enter into that space which can liberate us at the time of death.
During that time, just as during our life, at the time of this, ‘reviewing of all these ideas of me and all of my experiences’ we become fixated upon them and fail as a result to recognise that pristine ground that they are arising from. All those impressions that you’ve accumulated in your heart over this life will all arise out of your heart as you die, and you can either choose to grip one of them, battle with some of them, or you could recognise that they are arising from this basic state of awareness that has been with you always.
And when you see that that is the true nature of your mind, the Buddha-Nature, this fundamental square root of your being, then hopefully you will incline towards and stream with that as you pass away, and not pull this stock of attachment and clinging and aversion along with you. This is the only way to free yourself at death of the kamma you have accumulated in the life. Otherwise that kamma will then become the cause of renewed becoming.
Q: Can I ask a question please? It’s about holding onto those attachments that cause rebirth. Could they be things that are related to people that you love, that are difficult to leave behind? Those things would be quite a draw, wouldn’t they?
A: They would.
Q: And they would be the things that you would cling to...?
A: Yes. This is why we have to learn to transform our attachment into Appreciative Joy. Appreciative Joy is the highest state of love, because it just recognises that, “this is not mine but I can deeply appreciate it and deeply love it in the knowledge that it’s not to be clung to,” whereas the attachment to it as ‘mine’ smothers that higher aspect of love and shrinks it.
Our Awakening is to Transform our Fear into Boundless Love, Appreciative Joy and Compassion
So part of our awakening is to transform our understanding and experience of love – from the love of, “that which is mine” to the love of, “all things for what they are.” That’s true appreciative joy. So, your heart can still be filled with boundless love and compassion and appreciative joy for all beings, all those who are very dear to you but, at the point of passing, they are released painlessly. Suffering is the pain of clinging because we are all going to be separated from everything that is dear to us at some point in this life. Whether it is because they are taken from us first or whether we are separated from them through our own passing away.
Now yesterday I asked you, “What do you know to be the truth?” Well, this is one of the few things we absolutely know to be the truth, but we do struggle with that as an inevitable truth. It doesn’t mean that we should live in a morbid state of “Oh no, everything dear to me is going to be stripped away.” Rather, it means it should be the encouragement, the invitation to completely embrace what’s with you right now for what it is in the absolute knowledge that it won’t last forever, that it is a gift that appears in your life for a moment and will pass in time.
There is nothing in this universe that lasts indefinitely. One of the great causes of suffering is clinging to the hope that we might be the only one, or those around us might be the only ones that will last indefinitely. It is a cause of great pain to be separated from that which is dear to you, but that is the pain that is part of life and every time we go through that it’s a rite of passage.
However, it would be unbearable if we didn’t come to the knowledge in time that that was always going to happen, that the joy of life that we are blessed with is the opportunity to engage in it, but it brings with it the absolute knowledge that it doesn’t last forever. Now that reflection could be the cause of your terror, your misery, your suffering and your sense of woe. Or it could just lift you to say, “How extraordinary these few moments we have on this planet are! They’re not to be missed with regret and woe and worrying about what’s going to happen tomorrow. They’re to be completely entered into now, because they’re so precious.”
Now, it’s an extraordinary transformation and it may not happen suddenly. But out of that place of fear, where we try to pretend to ourselves that the inevitability of the passing of things might not be inevitable, out of that place we have to come to a place of complete faith and trust, and love, and willingness to love. And when you are willing to love everything in this world in the knowledge that you will at some point be separated from it, when you get to that point of fearlessness then you are not afraid to love completely.
I asked you, “What is the next thing that arises when you touch that pristine place of purity in your heart?” Well, what is it? When you come to know that place within you and you realise that it has never been disturbed and will never be disturbed, the next thing that arises is love. “It’s so beautiful! It’s ALL so beautiful!” That love arises from that place which does not favour one being over another, it just loves things for what they are now.
That boundless love does not suffer from the separation from what is dear or the misery of not getting what we want, it just loves things the way they are. That’s Unconditional Love, and it’s not born of a reflection, “Seven billion people on this planet, we’re all the same, I should love everyone the same way,” because this is merely view.
We haven’t got to the point of genuine, spontaneously arising love because we haven’t seen that ‘suchness’, that which unifies us all. Instead we’re leaning on our ideas, inference, reflecting on the fact we’re all human beings. But when you see that same basic state of pure awareness, the Buddha-Nature, is the nature of every single one of us, not just the Buddha, and you see that it is perfect and it’s the fundamental essence of every single one of us, the only response is love.
All our suffering and all the misery we bring to ourselves and others is only on account of our separation from that, from not knowing that. And yet it’s always there. That clear light of pure awareness that some would call God is there in the heart of every being that passes away, every single one. Even those who are passing away in abject misery or full of hatred, it’s there. They just can’t see it because they are clinging to their ideas of themselves and others. But it’s never not there.
So, if our practice becomes a practice of developing a deep relationship to that part of ourselves, and starting to see it in everyone around us, we will start to experience that ‘single taste’ which is the basis of true unconditional love, and a deep feeling of compassion and appreciative joy and gratitude will emerge. So, no matter how broken you feel or might have felt in your life, no matter what state of despair you’ve found yourself in, that despair was only ever caused because you were separated or felt separated from something. You didn’t quite yet know what it was, but you knew you were missing something, longing for something and the not being with that is the cause of this misery.
Jesus knew that anger and hatred were not innate in any being; he knew that the hatred and the anger was the result of people’s confusion. So if you are suffering with some form of regret or remorse or shame or guilt because of things you’ve done that were rooted in greed or selfishness or ill will or anger or hatred, you should forgive yourself because you didn’t know what you were doing, you didn’t know the true nature of what you are.
And if you can’t yet forgive yourself, then put yourself in front of Buddha or before Jesus, if you are Christian, and show Jesus or the Buddha your shame, all of it right down to the messiest part that you couldn’t bear to tell anyone, and see if you see any unwillingness to forgive in them. You will find none. None!
It Doesn’t Matter
Because they know that ignorance is the cause of all suffering, not the hatred, not the greed, not the selfishness, not the pride, not the jealousy. They are just symptoms of our confusion, and when we are not confused we do not feel these things. If Jesus can forgive his best friends for betraying him and those who were torturing and butchering him, there’s absolutely no doubt that he can forgive what we have done. So, find that part of you that has always been pure even as you got into confusion.
Meditate upon it until you see for yourselves that part of you that has never been tainted, even by all our jealousy and pride and all our greed and our anger and our intolerance and our impatience. None of these things even touched that pure part of us. They only damaged our pride, our confused idea of ourselves. In the end it is only pride that separates us, for as long as we continue to turn in all that confusion.
So we are not broken, we’re still whole. That highest part of us has never in any way been anything but perfect. You choose which part of you do you want to identify with - this idea of myself who needs to stamp it’s little foot and be heard by those who aren’t listening or that part that really knows it doesn’t matter? It doesn’t matter. These things that we’re hung up on, they don’t matter, let them go. Just let them go.
Alright. Very good.
