Ch.11 - Beyond the Veil of Self to a Unified Experience

Anatta - No-Self

The Creative Impulse is What the Buddha called Dependent Origination

Om, Ah, Hum

Rest Effortlessly Within Yourself

[This profound discourse looks at the nature of the awakened experience and investigates how the yogi comes to rest within and upon the creative process by which reality expresses itself.]

Anatta - No-Self

The Buddha dismantled the idea of ‘atman’, the idea of a permanent soul, and posited the idea of anatta, no-self. He is not saying that there is not an intelligent process behind life, but that it is not personal; rather it is a universal process that we are each having a unique experience of. What he is saying is that this idea of self is created only by the mind, and that this idea of me is groundless when we look deeply into it. Not only is it going to be torn asunder when we die but it is actually falling apart every second, only to be recreated by our dogged insistence and attachment to it.

But this idea of atman as an idea of a permanent soul, the idea of a little sparkle that sits somewhere within us that is indestructible, is born of trying to untangle the experiences we start to come to when we look behind the veil of appearances and first try to fathom what is going on.

What we actually come to experience when we consciously enter into that place where the mind has come to cessation is a basic ground, a fundamental ground to all of reality. It is an experience of total luminosity and clarity which, although appearing to be empty, is teeming with potential. This is the experience of an emptiness that contains all things. An alive living emptiness, if you like, or a unified field of pure potentiality. It is not vacuous and barren but fully conscious and luminous.

What this original notion of atman was pointing to was this universal breath of life, this limitless and endless and boundless capacity to be the basis from which all things spring, this field of pure potentiality. We recognise through deep meditative absorption that something rests in the background, behind the coming and going of things, and upon which everything is arising. It is this that has been symbolised by the sound Om.

This ‘Ommmmmm’ that is chanted is the opening of the heart as it reaches out to touch that universal principle that sits in the background. It is our feeling of connection and that which moves us to prayer, and creates a feeling of devotion to the sacred. This is what in Buddhism is called Dharmakaya. And we recognise that this Dharmakaya is the very basis for not just our being, not just my personal indestructible soul, but the basis of all of creation.

But we also come to recognise that while this is the basis from which all of creation arises, none of it actually arises without a cause. It does not just randomly express itself as all of creation on its own. Left alone it rests effortlessly within itself, in the background, as a field of pure potentiality, unmanifest, unexpressed. It takes this creative impulse to bring things out of this unified field into expression.

The Creative Impulse is What the Buddha called Dependent Origination

This creative impulse is what the Buddha called Dependent Origination. At its simplest level what he was saying is that only with the cause for the coming into being of things, so things appear. Without a cause for the coming into being of things, things do not appear. It is this creative intelligence that we start to recognise in the background, behind the appearance of things, which is prompting them to arise out of that unified field of pure potentiality.

At the most fundamental level, the reason for coming into being was for the purpose of becoming a part of this creative process and experiencing it directly for ourselves. To see what it was all about. It was not for the purpose of showing the world that I am here. Beyond our ego's need to be seen we have a deeper longing, which is the heart’s deepest longing to open up and recognise and awaken to what is actually going on here, behind this pantomime of myself that I have become so intoxicated with.

When we start to develop a spiritual context to our lives, as we open more completely to the experience that we are actually having, some beings come to land more upon the basic ground of pure potentiality, or Dharmakaya, seeing that as an absolute principle behind life, calling that Brahman or God. Others come to land more upon the creative principle by which this becomes expressed and call this God, or ‘the Creator.’

Regardless of what an individual opens up to and to which aspect they first begin to align with, there almost inevitably comes with that an experience of connection and deep sense that it is sacred, and a growing feeling of devotion to it as such. And so even within the recognition that there still remains a degree of not knowing, there comes an ever stronger sense that it is known at another level. This is the point at which the view-forming attitude to life is gradually relinquished and we start to allow the experience itself to become our teacher. It is also the point at which the personal will starts to be surrendered to that higher intelligence.

So we see, behind a lower creative instinct that expresses itself through the ego, there is a higher creative principle that is bringing us into being that we lost sight of, and that longed to know what is the essence of this life. So as far as mantric sound is concerned it was the second mantric sound, the ‘Ah’. It is the first sound that a baby makes when it emerges into this life, and the sound we all make when we experience anything with a sense of wonder: ‘Ahhhhh.’

The emergence if you like, the coming down of the creative process into expression, which is the appearance of manifest reality, this third mantric sound is ‘Hum’. This whole process of creation, the process by which things come into being, is expressed and symbolised by these three syllables: Om, Ah, Hum.

Om, Ah, Hum

These three basic vowel sounds are used as an expression of this process of coming into being. The three aspects of reality. The ground, the cause and the appearance. The symbol on the cover of this book also represents these three basic principles.

When we meditate and we enter into a state of absorption or samādhi that goes beyond our sense of self, when we abide deeply in what it feels like to just rest in that empty stillness that remains when the mind comes to cessation, we recognise a light, a luminosity, that is beyond words and that moves us beyond words. And our heart begins to open to that. And what our heart is opening up to when we pray and when we enter deeply into meditation is that unified experience that connects us all. Gradually, as we develop that relationship, our devotion to that replaces in stages our devotion or attachment to our little ideas of ourself.

That light of pure awareness and luminosity is never not there, every moment of our lives, it is resting mostly unnoticed in the background. And it is never not there when we sleep, and it is never not there as we die. We do not recognise it for what it is in our lives because we are so fixated on our ideas of self and the way they attach to the appearance of things. We do not notice it when we fall asleep because we fall into ignorance and lose our awareness, and the same way that we may fail to recognise it in life, we equally may fail to recognise it in death. Fixated upon that which is coming to pass, we fail to recognise the ground from which it is arising.

In truth there is some part of us that does know this, that has always known it when we sleep, and there is no greater longing in the heart than to know that and feel close to that. When we die it is the strongest impulse during the life, appearing in the dying process, that leads us on. One who has come to recognise this luminous ground to their being in life is drawn towards that in their passing. One who has not is drawn on by the karmic impulses of their egoic attachments.

You have heard me say that this basic ground is a state of pure love. I have not to date read the testimony of anyone who has experienced this saying that it is a barren, dry, or desolate place, or a place of chaos. Everyone without exception who has had a fully conscious experience of this emerges from that experience moved deeply by it in an inspired way, even if they find it hard to express what has happened to them. I am sure all of you have recognised, if you have ever come close to it, that it is not a vacuous and empty space, it is not a desolate space, it is full of love.

What we see when we look out upon the world in all its beauty and all its suffering is that everything we behold, everywhere, is the expression of that love, or the expression of not knowing it. It is the not knowing of that love that is the ground for all the greed, anger, hatred, judgement and pride that beings express, and the coming to know it that brings the suffering thus caused to an end.

The more intoxicated with ourselves we become, the further from that basic ground of love we get, the more life expresses itself as disorder, chaos and suffering, and the more it takes a concerted act of will to hold it all together. The less intoxicated with ourselves as the creator we become, the closer we get to that profound organising intelligence, the more exquisitely life expresses itself, the less effort it takes to keep it in balance.

On the night of his enlightenment the Buddha said to himself, ‘That for which I came here to do, I have done'. He did not make this declaration having invented the wheel, the combustion engine or the microchip, he made it having come to see and enter completely into the way of things, thus ending his sense of separation from them.

Whatever splendours of the highest order there were to be experienced, he had experienced them in his youth as a young prince of the highest good fortune. He had turned away from a life of indulgence and privilege that most today would long for, finding it empty and suffocating. And in turning away he came to experience the highest expression of love and compassion there was to be experienced. And he experienced these things living the simplest of lives, free of all of the intoxication with sensual delights that he had grown accustomed to, leaving the world unscarred by his presence here when he left. It was having come to experience that and having appreciated it for what it was that it emerged in his mind, ‘That for which I came here to do, I have done'.

So think about it in terms of that. I do not know how much faith is going to have to play a part in it for each of you individually. Many people find the way to surrender their ego through a devotional attitude. Without a road map or a way to practise meditation, where they can develop a conscious relationship, as the Buddha did, they connect at a heart level, and walk a path of faith and trust that may only complete itself in the final letting go that comes at death.

Intellectual understanding alone may well not open the heart, for it is the experience that humbles us, not the knowledge. The Buddha used to say that one in whom there was too much wisdom and not enough faith tends to become cunning; seeking to resolve things only in their mind they inevitably land upon a ground that upholds their ideas of themselves, rather than dismantling them.

It is faith and humility in the end that open the heart. Without it the heart remains submissive to this mind of ours. The mind is the very creator of our confused idea of self as the creator. This is the reason for the coming to the view, ‘When I die, it’s just curtains. So my time here is to be spent indulging all of my needs and desires'. In answer to that I can only say, you will have to wait and see, for all of us one day will find out to where our time here leads us.

So our meditation connects us gradually to this deeply profound creative process that is at work within us. These three aspects, this Om, this Ah, and this Hum, the ground, the creative process and the expression of it, are three things that we gradually learn to rest upon when we meditate.

When you rest upon your own presence, within your own space while you sit, you are resting upon the expression of things as they are. Whether it feels full of friction or whether it rests effortlessly within itself, it is still a pure expression of the causes for its coming into being, which is for a large part our personal attachments and desires, but hopefully also gradually an expression of our connection to our higher aspirations.

So the pull and the compression and the compactness and the looking left and right and seeking to add something or take something from our experience is all coming from the mind's idea of itself and its need to impress that upon its experience. Your ability to sit effortlessly with yourself is something that emerges gradually over time as you learn to rest in the heart, in the deeper part of the heart, and come to rest effortlessly within yourself the way the rest of nature does. This is when it can reflect perfectly its essence, its true nature, its Buddha nature.

Now of course we are not going to spend our entire lives sitting on the cushion reflecting on our Buddha nature. Hopefully we are going to get off our backside and we are going to jolly well get involved in life, but without being fixated upon the idea of ourselves, perhaps with a greater sense of gratitude and wonder for what we are actually a part of.

Rest Effortlessly Within Yourself

So the mountain-like presence within you, like everything out there in nature, rests effortlessly within itself. It is not in a state of conflict. When you sit and you do not rest effortlessly within yourself, it is an expression of the conflict that you are going through, the fighting of battles with yourself, the not allowing things to be what they are.

So that is why we sit. We sit so that we can learn to be here, because not being able to be here is just an expression of our conflict with the universe we are a part of, and the battles we are fighting with ourself. And all the tension and all the compaction and all the shaking and all the heat that goes on inside us is nothing more than grasping at, clinging to or rejecting the experience we are actually having or the experiences we have actually had. So we sit, we immerse ourself ever more completely, and we become ever more mountain-like in our own presence.

As to that creative principle, well it is the same creative principle at work producing the Buddha that is creating you, the only difference is that the causes for the coming into being are different. One is free from personal attachment, greed or aversion, the other might not yet be. The chain of volition that has prompted us to act now and in the past is the causal process by which we appear as we do. So we start out sitting not much like a mountain, huffing and puffing, fidgeting, struggling to concentrate upon our breath, but always still emerging every moment from the same basic ground. With the Buddha likewise, when he first went out to the forest there was a certain amount of toiling, huffing and puffing, and a wilful effort put forth to free himself from suffering before he finally surrendered and let go.

Eventually we all come to know the same basic ground, and love as the original and final cause for the arising and the coming into being of things. At that point our suffering comes to an end. For as long as we do not know that, or remain separated from that, we will continue to experience suffering.

So where this all lands is this: what appears here in the universe is always and everywhere an expression of the causes for it. When love is the cause for the coming into being of things, then love gets expressed. When selfishness is the cause, then selfishness gets expressed. So the universe always expresses itself perfectly and none of this is ever out of place.

Everything always expresses itself perfectly the only way it ever could, and so there is never really a hair out of place. Greed expresses itself as greed, anger as anger, selfishness as selfishness, love as love and ignorance as ignorance. So as we gradually surrender our fixation on ourselves and our obsession with our selfish creative desires to more altruistic creative urges, slowly a higher principle, a higher consciousness gets expressed through us, and slowly in that way and only in that way do we come to see what we are truly capable of being.

So that which is still beyond you is reached partly through coming to know and partly through your devotion to what is still to be known. This is the devotion to one day find within you your own expression of that which you most highly aspire to in the purest part of your heart. Our hope is that that which we pray to one day becomes expressed through us. That is our devotional attitude. It does not ask for any personal preference or gain, it is not expecting any help out of our predicaments, it is asking only for the inspiration and the courage to stand upon its conviction and not give up.

Omm, Ahhh, Humm. When we chant that ‘OmmmmmAhhhhhhHummmmmm’, we are watching, meditating upon and contemplating that process by which pure consciousness expresses itself. And we are hoping that in this ‘Ahhh’, this longing in our heart becomes purified enough that this ‘Hummmm’ becomes an expression of our true Buddha nature.

How wonderful.