Instead of, ‘I am walking. I am talking we can change the framework to, ‘There is walking. There is talking.

 REFRAMING EXPERIENCE

When we experience the ordinary flow of activity – walking from one place to another, talking with a colleague, checking the time – we can notice and reframe experience. Instead of, ‘I am walking. I am talking. I am checking the time,’ we can change the framework to, ‘There is walking. There is talking.
There is checking the time.’

In a sense, we can retrain the mind to see the experience of the world in a different way. As we sit down for lunch, lunch is happening in our mind. We might think, ‘I’m putting food in my mouth,’ but our mouth is ‘in’ our mind. We might think, ‘I am sitting in a room,’ but the room is in the mind.

Our inner world includes thoughts and emotions, liking and disliking, approval and disapproval. Rather than getting caught up in these experiences, there can be the bare awareness: ‘This is a perception of liking,’ ‘This is a perception of disliking.’ This reframed perception can be applied to seeing, tasting, feeling, hearing ... the whole gamut of experiences: ‘This is hearing. This is seeing. This is reflecting. This is what’s going on.’

We also habitually perceive what we experience as ‘wanted/unwanted’, ‘liked/ disliked’, ‘good/bad.’ Instead, we can take a step back and cultivate a different framework. For example, when we get something we want, we can reflect: ‘I was anticipating this. Now I’ve got it.’ We can notice anticipation changing to gratification. Then we can notice the experience of change itself rather than getting lost in the experience of, ‘Hey, I got what I wanted! Hooray!’

The world is happening in our mind. This is not just a mind game; it is a reframing of experience. So, what is the effect of that? How does that change the way the world is felt? How does that change the way the world is appreciated?

This reframing is not just a matter of learning behaviours or obeying instructions. The whole point of following instructions or advice is the internal effect it might have. What really matters is the change of heart. When there is this shift of view, this change of perspective, how is it felt?

Let that really soak in – the world is happening here, in the mind. We recognize the world as patterns of perception. Arising and passing. What is the felt sense of that in the heart? Is there a quality of freedom? A quality of ease? Is there a way that the sense of stress (dukkha) ends?

Experiment with this and see if it can be sustained. Of course, we may forget or become distracted. It is natural to get lost. We may realize that an hour has gone by and that we were completely absorbed in our own projections, our loves and hates and dramas. But then there is the reframing: ‘Oh yes, this is the experience of getting lost in a drama. It feels like this. This is the mind getting lost in stories. Aha!’

NOBODY GOING ANYWHERE

Ajahn Sumedho used to talk about this theme frequently. He would say, ‘The world is in your mind.’ While on one level it is true that the world is ‘out there’ and we’re moving around in it, on another level the world is experienced only in our minds. Similarly, as Ajahn Sumedho reminded me when I’d once become caught up in planning a tudong walk: ‘In actual fact, there is nobody going anywhere, there are just conditions changing.’9

That was a really wonderful reflection for me. On my journey, I noticed a series of perceptions: a perception of putting on a rucksack, a perception of waving goodbye, a perception of the rain falling down, a perception of walking along the country lanes. And, when I remembered, I saw that all of those perceptions happened ‘here’.

Whenever we are travelling or moving from one place to another, it’s just a perception happening in the moment: a perception of the car, a perception of the motorway, a perception of the towns passing by, or a perception of arriving somewhere. But wherever we go, it is always ‘here’. Have any of us ever been in a place that was not ‘here’? Wherever we’ve been during our entire life, it has always been exactly ‘here’.

Therefore, when we remember that there is really nobody going anywhere – that there are only changing conditions of mind – it shifts our perspective on life. Even though we may be moving vigorously, driving or walking or running, when the mind remembers that it’s all just happening ‘here’, there is a profound restfulness within the movement. A peacefulness. A sense of ‘nobody going anywhere.’ The heart is freed from urgency. This spaciousness is what we call ‘freedom from becoming’.["being" is much more appropriate V.B]

Ajahn Sumedho also frequently pointed out that if we start out with the view that we are an unenlightened person who has to do something now in order to become enlightened in the future, then we are starting out with ignorance (avijjā) and will end up with suffering (dukkha). But if we begin with awareness (vijjā), then we will end up with peacefulness (Nibbāna).

Of course, we might think, ‘But I am an unenlightened person! And I do want to take action to reach enlightenment. After all, isn’t Buddhism about doing spiritual practices to make ourselves better?’ But we must pay close attention to the phrasing ‘I am an unenlightened person who has to do something now in order to become enlightened in the future.’ In that phrasing, in the forming of that attitude, a ‘person’ is being created and ‘time’ is being created. We are unconsciously approaching the practice of Dhamma from the position of self-view: ‘I am a person.’ Right there the mind is grasping self (attā).

If we change our view from ‘I am an unenlightened person who needs to do something now to become enlightened in the future’ to ‘Be awake now,’ then we use the capacity of the mind to be aware and awake without creating any position of self-view, without establishing notions of ‘I, Me and Mine’.

The more the mind is awake, the more we then recognize that awareness is not a person, the mind is not a person. We also see that the personal qualities – being a woman or man, old or young, healthy or sick – arise and pass away. Those qualities are known by awareness, which is not itself male or female, old or young, tall or short. It has no nationality, no shape, no age.

That which is true with respect to ‘time’ and ‘self’ is also true for ‘location’ – awareness is unlocated – so when Ajahn Sumedho said, ‘In actual fact there is nobody going anywhere, there are just conditions changing,’ it punctured the self-based attitude of ‘me going somewhere.'

Furthermore, even though what we experience is ‘this mind’s version of the world,’ it is never truly ‘I’ or ‘me’ or ‘mine’. When figures of speech are used, such as ‘The world that we experience is our version of the world,’ (as above) they should always be understood in the light of this insight into ‘not-self’ (anattā).

IDENTITY , TIME AND LOCATION

The mind creates images of past and future, perceptions of ‘me’ passing through time and space. I have been ‘here’ for the past week; I will go ‘there’ in the future. Past, present, and future – the sense of ‘I’, the sense of place or location – the more we reflect on the nature of experience, of the arising and passing of the world as it happens (sights, sounds, smells, tastes, feelings, thoughts, imaginings), the more clearly we see that it all happens HERE and NOW.

Where is the past? Where is the present? Where is the future? Where is ‘here’? They all take shape within the space of awareness. Wherever we have been throughout our whole life, it has always been exactly ‘here’ – whether it was Malaysia, Sri Lanka, America, England, Thailand. Wherever we have been, whatever the date was on the calendar, it was always ‘now’ as it was being experienced. This mind is the nexus, the centre of experience. The universe is known in the mind; this mind is intrinsically the centre of the universe. There are perceptions of a ‘me’ passing through time and space but those perceptions arise, take shape, and are known here and now.

Memories, ideas, emotions, decisions – they are all known here and now. But, most of the time, we don’t realize that all our everyday assumptions, all our ideas about where we are and where we are going, are based upon habits of perception, self-view, attachment to experience, identification with the body and personality: with identity, time and location.

Ajahn Chah used to present people with the riddle: ‘If you can’t go forward, can’t go back, and can’t stand still, where can you go?’ People would be a bit bewildered, their thinking minds frustrated: ‘What a weird question!’ As long as the mind identifies with the body, with the personality, with time and space as absolute realities, there is no solution to the puzzle. But when the mind lets go of identification with individuality, with time, with place, then the puzzle solves itself. When the mind awakens to its own quality of selfless, timeless, unlocated awareness, then that knowing – the awakened awareness – is clarified. The conundrum is solved as the mind stops identifying with time, individual identity and three-dimensional space – it is simply awakened knowing, buddho. As Ajahn Chah would explain:

The Buddha-Dhamma is not to be found in moving forwards, nor in moving backwards, nor in standing still. This … is your place of non-abiding.

In the collection of Suttas called the Udāna, the Buddha likewise says:

There is that āyatana, that sphere of being, where there is … neither a moving forwards, nor a moving backwards, nor a standing still. Neither an arising, nor a disappearance .... This, indeed, is the end of suffering.
(UD 8.1)

This is the principle Ajahn Chah was pointing to.

The mind is present, it is awake, it knows. This knowing is profound, immeasurable, unfathomable, and aware, but it is not a person, not within a realm of time, not situated in a location. This awake, aware quality is an attribute of Dhamma. As is recounted in the daily reflections on Dhamma:

Sabbe dhamma anattā (Both the created and the Uncreated are not-self); the Dhamma is sandiṭṭhiko (apparent here now), and akāliko (timeless). The mind, in its essence, is Dhamma. It is not a person, although it knows personality, and all personal qualities, as they arise and pass. It is not female or male, although it knows femininity and masculinity. It is neither agitated nor calm, although it knows those feelings. It is not outside or inside, liking or disliking, but it knows those perceptions. The mind is Dhamma, aware, awake.

The Buddha arises from the Dhamma. If Dhamma is the substance of mind then Buddha, awakened awareness, is its function. Ajahn Chah also described the relationship thus:

At present, the Buddha, the real Buddha, is still living, for he is the Dhamma itself, the ‘saccadhamma’. And ‘saccadhamma’, that which enables one to become Buddha, still exists. It hasn’t fled anywhere! It gives rise to two Buddhas: one in body and the other in mind.

‘The real Dhamma,’ the Buddha told Ānanda, ‘can only be realized through practice.’ Whoever sees the Buddha, sees the Dhamma.

And how is this? Previously, no Buddha existed; it was only when Siddhattha Gotama realized the Dhamma that he became the Buddha, if we explain it in this way, then he is the same as us. If we realize the Dhamma, then we will likewise be the Buddha. This is called the Buddha in mind or ‘nāma dhamma’.11

THE INTERSECTION OF TIMELESSNESS AND TIME

When the mind, the heart, awakens and embodies its own nature, then there is a profound peace. This peace does not arise from ‘something’ that has been agitated and then stops being agitated. This peace is of a whole different order – a peace based on selflessness, timelessness, freedom from location. The Buddha taught, ‘Bhavanirodho nibbānaṃ’ (A 10.7), which means, ‘The cessation of becoming is Nibbāna.’ Or as Hui Neng said:

In this moment, there is nothing that comes to be.
In this moment, there is nothing that ceases to be.
Thus, in this moment, there is no birth and death to be brought to an end.12

‘Cessation of becoming’ doesn’t mean stopping in our tracks. It doesn’t mean that we stop breathing or that we freeze while moving, as if we were playing ‘grandmother’s footsteps’. This ‘cessation’ doesn’t mean the ceasing of something that exists in time. Rather, it is the recognition of the timeless presence, the suchness (tathatā), that underlies the flow of perceptions, the recognition of the space within which all perception, feeling, thought, choice and action take place.

Even as the body breathes, that which knows the breath is not moving. Even as the body moves, that which knows the body is ever-present, totally ‘here’, outside of the world of movement and time. The ‘cessation of becoming’ is the heart attuning to the ever-present, selfless, timeless, non-located quality of Dhamma. In his Four Quartets, TS Eliot called it ‘the point of intersection of the timeless with time.’13 This is what the Buddhist meditator is doing, attending to the point of intersection of the timeless with time.

As the body moves, there is a stillness.
As thoughts and words arise and pass, there is a stillness.
As sounds are heard, there is a silence behind them.
As forms arise and pass away, there is a space in which those forms appear.

That said, it should be understood that this kind of stillness is not just referring to a moving thing that has frozen in its tracks; this silence is not merely an absence of noise; this spaciousness is not simply a gap between objects – rather these are figures of speech to indicate qualities of the Dhamma, which is Unborn, Unoriginated, Uncreated, Unformed.14 It is the noumenal, transcendent reality that is the integrative principle underpinning the experience of all phenomena.

Dipping back into the realm of theoretical physics for a moment, I feel this timeless, measureless reality is exactly what David Bohm is referring to when he spoke of ‘the implicate order’ and when he wrote:

So we are led to propose further that the more comprehensive, deeper, and more inward actuality is neither mind nor body but rather a yet higher-dimensional actuality, which is their common ground and which is of a nature beyond both.15

Bohm also has some helpful comments to make about the nature of measurement and the immeasurable quality of reality:

Thus in Sanskrit (which has an origin common to the Indo-European language group) there is a word ‘matra’ meaning ‘measure’, in the musical sense, which is evidently close to the Greek ‘metron’. But then there is another word ‘maya’ obtained from the same root, which means ‘illusion’. This is an extraordinarily significant point. Whereas to Western society, as it derives from the Greeks, measure, with all that this word implies, is the very essence of reality, or at least the key to this essence, in the East measure has now come to be regarded commonly as being in some way false and deceitful. In this view the entire structure and order of forms, proportions, and ‘ratios’ [the Latin word from which our modern ‘reason’ is derived] that present themselves to ordinary perception and reason are regarded as a sort of veil, covering the true reality, which cannot be perceived by the senses and of which nothing can be said or thought.16

As the realm of action becomes more apparent as a known quality in the space of the mind, we develop a sense of timelessness as the context of experience.

We attune to a present that is undisturbed by movement or by the arising and passing of perceptions, objects, feelings.
We often conceive of the present as an insignificant little line between an infinite past and an infinite future, an unimportant sliver of time. In the context of the ‘Big Bang’ thirteen billion or so years in the past, and with the future stretching out infinitely ahead, how could this tiny moment we call ‘the present’ matter? In terms of individual experience, however, the present moment comprises all of time.

Likewise, the mind, awake and aware in the present moment, is everything. Perceptions of past and future, self and other, here and there, are all patterns known in the mind, now, in the timeless present. The world is a world of mind. The degree to which this can be realized, embodied, and fully known is the degree to which the heart can be fully at ease, fully at peace, fully responsive to the flow of perceptions, thoughts, moods, feelings, to the actions of the world, people and things.

Conversely, the unawake mind chases after likes and dislikes. It identifies with self and other, gets caught up in wanting, fearing, hating, hoping. The degree to which the mind is unawake is the degree to which peace is obscured and inaccessible to the heart. The unawake mind ties itself to the agitated, the turbulent, the divisive.

So we’re invited to open our heart to the world and realize the quality of awakened awareness and timeless presence. Even as we go places, take on personæ, engage in activities, and make choices, the mind, the heart, doesn’t need to be doing these things in order to be fulfilled, complete or actualized.
Fulfilment comes from the mind knowing its own nature. The heart is already the Dhamma, so what more is there to get or to do in order to complete the Dhamma? The only truly desirable thing is to be what we are already.

During each day, as the minutes tick by and the sun rises, peaks and descends, the moon comes and goes, we can explore the feelings of becoming someone, going somewhere, doing something. We can awaken to the stillness within which all movement occurs, hear the silence that permeates all sound, be aware of the space within which all forms take shape. There is movement but nobody going anywhere. There is action, but no ‘thing’ being done, no ‘one’ who is doing it. There are choices and decisions, but no person who is deciding. There is the heart, responsive to time, place, situation; there is the ease of peacefulness embodied in awareness.

ROHITASSA

It is quite natural for us as human beings to search for some kind of completion or fulfilment. We steer our lives towards particular goals and various kinds of worldly achievement: possessions, curricula vitæ, destinations visited, even retreats attended. But as Ajahn Chah would often say, ‘If you’re looking for finality in what is endless or for security in that which is insecure, you are bound to be disappointed.’

The Buddhist scriptures tell the story of a deva called Rohitassa, who came to see the Buddha one night. He said to the Buddha, ‘In my last life I was a yogi and a meditator. I developed great spiritual abilities and made a vow to walk in search of the end of the world. But even though I kept on walking for many years, I never reached the end of the world and died on the journey. Now, having been reborn in the deva world, I ask you, “Is it possible to travel to the end of the world, where one is not born, does not age or die?”’

The Buddha replied to Rohitassa:

It is impossible to reach the end of the world by walking; but if you don’t reach the end of the world, you won’t reach the end of dukkha, you won’t reach the end of suffering.
(S 2.26)17

The Buddha then goes on to say:

It is within this fathom-long body, with its thoughts and perceptions, that there is the world, the origin of the world, the cessation of the world, and the way leading to the cessation of the world. And one who knows the world reaches the end of the world. Having reached the end of the world, they do not hanker after this world or another one.
(IBID)

It’s worthy of note that the eminent translator Bhikkhu Bodhi has commented that: ‘This pithy utterance of the Buddha … may well be the most profound proposition in the history of human thought’18 – and Bhikkhu Bodhi is not one who speaks in a hyperbolic way.

Here the Buddha is equating the world (loka) with dissatisfaction (dukkha) in direct alignment with the formulation of the Four Noble Truths: there is dissatisfaction (dukkha), the origin of dissatisfaction, the cessation of dissatisfaction, and the way leading to the cessation of dissatisfaction.

In his previous life, Rohitassa had thought, ‘I am going to walk to the end of the world,’ with the aim of reaching the end of the road, the end of everything. Well, just try walking till you reach the horizon. No matter how far you walk, the horizon will retreat, again and again and again. This is an important reflection about the world and the nature of the world.

In a similar passage, the Buddha is quoted by some of the Sangha members at that time as saying, ‘One cannot reach the end of the world by walking, but it is only by reaching the end of the world that one reaches the end of suffering.’ The Sangha members asked venerable Ānanda, the Buddha’s attendant, to explain this, and Ānanda said, as recounted above:

That whereby one is a perceiver of the world and a conceiver of the world, that is called ‘the world’ in this Dhamma and discipline. And what is it whereby one is a perceiver of the world and a conceiver of the world? The eye, the ear, the nose, the tongue, the body, and the mind – these are the means whereby one is a perceiver of the world and a conceiver of the world.
(S 35.116)19

Once again, ‘The World’ is the world of our experience. It is within this very life – within this body and this mind, with its perceptions and thoughts – that we experience the world. Our version of the world is known here, originates here, and ends here, and the way leading to its end is here.

When we think about ‘the end of the world’, we may imagine planet Earth exploding or being swallowed by the sun in a supernova or being crushed when the whole universe collapses. But in Buddhist terminology ‘the end of the world’ refers to the place where the substantiality of the world comes to an end. It is within this very awareness of life as we experience it. The world ends here, in this awareness.

Now, that might sound a bit mysterious, but the Buddha was very gifted at tweaking a phrase just a little bit to shift the perspective so that it becomes more meaningful on the level of our own experience: ‘You can’t reach the end of suffering unless you reach the end of the world.’ That is the kind of statement that gets your attention.

CONVENIENT FICTIONS

We all seek satisfaction, completion, and wholeness – then we become disappointed because we are seeking these things where they can’t be found: in the approval of other people, in the glittering prizes society offers us, in the warmth of relationships, in the achievements of our children, even in tallying the number of hours (or years) we’ve sat in meditation or the number of ajahns we’ve visited. Yes, even we meditators can easily look down our noses at ‘those poor fools chasing worldly possessions’ whilst blithely pursuing equally worldly, superficial goals that have been labelled spiritual. That sort of arrogance is just as misplaced as taking pride in our academic degrees, the beauty of our children or the size of our house. Spiritual materialism is as disappointing as worldly materialism.

In a way, the Buddha’s teaching to Rohitassa – that the mind creates the world – is also about seeing the empty, insubstantial nature of the world, or ‘my version’ of the world. Things that we experience acquire names and designations. We call this place ‘Amaravati’ because that’s the name Ajahn Sumedho gave it: ‘I want to call this place Amaravati: The Deathless Realm.’ So we all agree to call it that. Someone who had been a schoolteacher here prior to that would have called this place ‘St. Margaret’s School’. So really, there’s no ‘Amaravati’ here. That’s just a human agreement, a ‘convenient fiction’.

When we say ‘the world ends’ we’re talking about recognizing these human agreements, these convenient fictions. Calling this place ‘Amaravati’ or this day ‘Tuesday’ are just relative truths, suppositions, determinations, ways of designating things. They’re our conditioned, relative, subjective perspective, not the whole story. The mind that clings to this perspective is the mind that creates suffering. And the mind that recognizes this process and lets go of it is the mind that is free of suffering. With this understanding, we stop looking for finality in that which is endless, for security in that which is insecure, for satisfaction in that which cannot satisfy.

NO FOOTING FOR DUALITIES

In the Kevaddha Sutta (D 11), the Buddha recounts the story of a meditating monk in whom this question arises in his mind: ‘Where is it that the four great elements – earth, water, fire and wind – fade out, cease without remainder, come to an end?’ This monk visits the various heavenly realms, asking the devas for the answer to his question, finally ascending to the realm of Mahā Brahmā, the ‘All-Seeing, All-Powerful, the Maker and Creator of All That Has Been and Shall Be’, according to his self ascribed title. But even Mahā Brahmā does not know the answer and says to the monk, ‘You are a disciple of the Buddha. Why are you asking me this when you could ask the Master yourself?’

So the monk returns to the earth and asks the Buddha his question. ‘Where is it that the four great elements – earth, water, fire and wind – fade out and cease without remainder? Where do they come to an end?’ The Buddha replies, ‘You are framing the question in the wrong way. Rather than asking where earth, water, fire and wind fade out and cease without remainder, you should have asked, “Where is it that earth, water, fire and wind can find no footing, no landing place?” The answer is: In the awake mind. Here also long or short, coarse or fine, pure or impure, all dualities can find no footing.’ This is the same quality that was described above, awakened knowing, buddho. It is also what is meant by the word vijjā and the phrase ‘seeing with the eye of Dhamma’.

In Pali, in the Kevaddha Sutta, this ‘awake mind’ is described as: ‘viññānaṃ anidassanaṃ anantaṃ sabbato pabhaṃ,’ which means ‘consciousness that is non-manifesting, limitless and radiant in all directions.’ In the mind, the awareness – which is formless, infinite, radiant – this is where earth, water, fire and wind can find no footing.20

Rather than telling him a geographical or celestial place where the world ends, the Buddha points the monk to the awakened awareness, which is where the world is understood or known, where worldly perceptions and thoughts – long or short, coarse or fine, pure or impure – can’t find any footing, can’t gain any traction, don’t stick, aren’t given any value, solidity or meaning. The Buddha said to Rohitassa:

The world’s end can never be reached
By means of travelling [through the world].
Yet without reaching the world’s end
There is no release from suffering.
Therefore, truly, the world-knower, the wise one,
Gone to the world’s end, fulfiller of the holy life,
Having known the world’s end, at peace,
Longs not for this world or another.
(S 2.26, BHIKKHU BODHI TRANS.)

By knowing the world, one reaches the end of the world. This is the understanding that sight is just sight, sound is just sound, taste is just taste, smell is just smell, touch is just touch. Thought and feeling, memory and imagination: these things arise and cease. We do not look for a sense of completion or wholeness in the field of perception. Rather, it is by embodying the awake mind that the world is known. This consciousness – which is non-manifesting, limitless, radiant, formless, infinite, all-illuminating – is what the Buddha is pointing to. Or as Ajahn Sumedho has said many times in his teachings: ‘The world happens here’ or ‘The world happens in the mind.’ Reflections such as these help the mind to awaken to its own nature.

BUDDHA-WISDOM AS A REFUGE

Finding the quality of completion or wholeness in our own heart and mind is what the Buddha calls a ‘Refuge’ or a ‘Jewel’. When we speak of ‘taking refuge in the Buddha’, we are speaking of the capacity we all have to know, to be awake, to experience the present moment. Likewise, a jewel is precious, beautiful, symmetrical, solid, relatively imperishable – a symbol of that which is truly valuable in and of its own nature. In a sense, a jewel embodies those precious aspects of our own nature that are revealed by insight.

Saying ‘taking refuge in awareness’ or ‘being the knowing’ may seem hard to grasp. But in this very moment we can experience it directly. There is seeing (colours, shapes, forms); there are sounds (traffic noise, birds, a plane flying overhead, people speaking); there are the feelings of the body (sensations of weight and temperature, the texture of clothing on skin, aches in our legs, back or shoulders); there is smelling, tasting and thinking. Where is all that happening? The world as we know it is fabricated through sight, sound, smell, taste and touch, thinking and language. For instance, when we close our eyes, the visual world disappears. When we open them again, the visual world reappears. It is known ‘here’, in our own mind.

We may say that our bodies are in the room, but we could just as easily say that the room is in our mind, no? Everything that we know about what we call ‘room’ or what we call ‘home’ is known in this mind. This isn’t to say that everything is a dream or that our mind invented it from scratch. Instead, it’s to say that our version of the world is put together through our particular mind, which has been conditioned by our life experiences, language, feelings of familiarity and unfamiliarity. The experiences of seeing, hearing, touching something vary greatly amongst us.

When there is this recognition that the world is happening in the mind, we can then reframe our moment-by-moment experience. When there is the recognition of the world being pieced together as a collection of patterns of consciousness, then to some degree the heart is taking refuge in the quality of knowing, the quality of awareness. At that moment of awakened knowing, the heart recognizes the fabricated nature of experience. There is a letting go, a separation, a disentangling of awareness from the patterns of experience. Aha!

That awareness is not intrinsically limited or coloured or shaped by what is experienced. It is bigger than that, it is more spacious, it is more all-encompassing: ‘formless, infinite, radiant’. This terminology describes that quality of awareness, this transcendent knowing, that is undisturbed and unconfused by whatever pattern of experience takes shape within it. This is the essence of insight meditation – training the heart to embody the quality of awareness, to be able to receive and to know the flow of perceptions – pleasant or painful, interesting or boring, familiar or unfamiliar. Whether we call an experience a sight, a sound, a thought, or a feeling, the heart abides and embodies that quality of awakened knowing; the different patterns of experience arise and pass away within that knowing.

So, in a sense, the essence of insight meditation is cultivating an attitude of non-entanglement. It is not a rejection of the world; instead, it is a letting go of identifying or grasping or entangling with the world.

Ajahn Chah used the image of oil and water. There is the heart which knows and there is that which is known. They are separate, like oil and water. But if you put oil and water together in a bottle and shake it up, for a time it seems like one liquid. That is what we do all the time. We shake up the bottle and the quality of awareness becomes mixed up with our experience of the world: ‘I like this, I don’t like that. This is mine, that is yours. I am a man, I am a woman. I am young, I am old. I am clever, I am stupid. I am a success, I am a failure.’ When we shake up the bottle, there seems to be a solid and dependable ‘me’ who is having all those experiences.

But as Ajahn Chah would add, if we put the bottle down, we don’t have to tell the oil and the water to separate or make them do it somehow. No. They will separate on their own; they are inherently immiscible. In the same way, awareness, the knowing and the objects of experience separate on their own if we let them. The more we put the bottle down, the more we learn not to identify with what we perceive. We stop taking our own lives and minds personally. Rather, we see the whole field of experience as patterns of nature arising and ceasing, taking shape and dissolving. There is then a freeing of the heart. The qualities of limitlessness, spaciousness, clarity and peaceful awareness become apparent.

The process of meditation is not about acquiring something that we don’t yet have, or becoming something that we aren’t already. Rather, meditation is taking advantage of the capacity of the mind to awaken, to disentangle and cease identifying with what we are not, to stop looking for satisfaction in what cannot satisfy, to stop wishing for finality in that which is endless, to stop seeking security in the inherently insecure. In that stopping there is the realization of the ultimately precious jewel of the ever-present Dhamma.

Ajhan Amaro
Mind is what matters.
The Phenomenogical Approach of the Buddha 

The Sexual is Political (And Profitable)

 

Freud envisages any social order larger than that between sexual partners as founded on a common, enforced, unrecognised renunciation of sexual life. Marcuse wishes to envisage a possible social order in which human relationships are widely informed by that libidinal release and gratification which, according to Freud, would spell the destruction of any social order.”
Alasdair MacIntyre, Marcuse, 1970.

The most comprehensive prostitution decriminalization effort ever initiated in the United States has commenced in New York, led by Richard N. Gottfried, the Jewish head of the State Assembly’s Health Committee. Gottfried is an ardent crusader for sexual ‘liberation’, having previously introduced the first same-sex marriage bill in the Assembly in 2003, acted as key sponsor for GENDA, the Gender Non-Discrimination Act which would “make discrimination based on gender identity illegal,” pioneered legislation compelling the trustees or sole trustee of every school district to establish policies and procedures regarding the treatment of ‘transgender or gender non-conforming students’, and introduced legislation requiring ‘sexuality education’ in schools. In fact, the only conservative position Gottfried has ever taken in his role as head of the Health Committee was when anti-vaccine Ultra-Orthodox Jews came under fire during a measles outbreak in New York back in May. As the New York Times noted, “Richard N. Gottfried, the Assembly’s longest serving member is usually a reliably liberal voice on all things related to health. (Mr. Gottfried, a Democrat from Manhattan, is the sponsor, for example, of the New York Health Act, which would establish a universal single-payer health plan in the state.) But on the issue of eliminating religious exemptions, Mr. Gottfried has withheld his support.” Since Jews benefited more than any other group from exemptions in this instance, Gottfried’s coercive measures relating to health and sexuality are apparently for the goyim only. Coming during ‘Pride Month,’ his advocacy for prostitution reinforced my belief that, in postmodernity, the sexual is political, indeed hyper-political, and I wanted to share some general thoughts on the subject.

Recent social media ranting about a proposed “straight pride march” are strongly indicative of the ways in which the sexual has become hyper-political. To summarize, a heavily ironic group of activists named Super Happy Fun America planned a Straight Pride parade in Boston in reaction to the city’s rejection of the group’s application to raise its “straight pride flag” at Boston’s City Hall earlier this spring. In a statement, the group announced: “We have decided to launch a campaign to educate the public, politicians, and civil servants about the straight community and the unique problems we face. We have determined that a parade would be the best way to promote our community and its diverse history, culture, and identity. We anticipate that the city will eventually choose to embrace tolerance and inclusivity.” This is clearly an ironic and humorous, and ultimately harmless, play with leftist tropes and catchphrases. But if the intention of Super Happy Fun America was to force the totalitarian nature of postmodern sexual politics to the surface, then they succeeded. The reaction to this boyish prank was quite remarkable. The city’s Jewish newspaper warned of ‘The Covert anti-Semitism of Straight Pride,’ while an astonishing number of major news sources (for example, see here, here, and here) warned that the Straight Pride organisers had links to the Alt-Lite and anti-Marxist groups, and were ‘racists’ and ‘anti-Semites.’

Satirizing Straight Pride

Setting aside the genuine right-wing political background of the Straight Pride organisers (Proud Boys, Resist Marxism etc.), the concept of a parade by the sexually normal was itself viewed as inherently political, and with some justification. Homosexuality, transgenderism, and a plurality of related deviances and delusions are now an integral and celebrated part of globalism and its philosophical underpinning. These modes of being, for lack of better terminology, are the biological representation of the anti-border, and their co-operation with contrived concepts of psychological and physical ‘fluidity’ are fully in keeping with globalism’s requirement for the fluidity of capital (both fiscal and human) and the breaking down of national differentiation.

To put it simply, once one accepts the idea that a man can become a woman just by thinking he is one, it is remarkably easy to be persuaded, for example, that England can become ‘other’ than the homogeneous home of the English. And interpretations of marriage can be made more ‘flexible,’ in precisely the same way that national identities and conceptions of citizenship can be made more ‘accommodating.’ Thus, we live in an age where a woman can have a penis, and a sub-Saharan African can be a Scotsman. In both cases, the rejection of ‘rigid’ identities and borders is the political-philosophical precondition for ‘progress,’ ambiguously defined as ‘liberation’ and heavily punctuated with debt-fuelled consumerism.

Just as these modes of being are perfectly suitable for the uses of global capital, so they are perfectly suited to the uses of Judeo-Marxism. For example, the homosexual, the transgendered, and others like them are, in the thinking of Herbert Marcuse, heroic escapees from the repressive sexual behaviour of the normal and reproductive: “Against a society which employs sexuality as a means for a useful end, the perversions uphold sexuality as an end in itself; they thus place themselves outside the domination of the performance principle and challenge its very foundations.”[1] The psycho-biological indeterminacy of effeminate gender benders, and the rebellious teenager who volunteers her unborn child for summary dismemberment and evacuation from the womb, become, in Marcuse’s Judeo-Marxism, the heroic rejectors and opponents of the White family.

Any manifestation of organised ‘Straight Pride’ is thus an act of political opposition to the globalist championing of indeterminacy and a rejection of Marcuse’s celebration of the new heroes (in his words, the “whores, degenerates, and perverts” who “reified” the body) of postmodernity. In the new world-political context of Judeo-Globalism (international finance + cultural marxism), “straightness” is thus something that should never be celebrated or arouse pride because, like “whiteness,” it is the bland and oppressive manifestation of borders, boundaries, rules, and “the domination of the performance principle.” It is, in the Marxist lexicon, anti-liberation, and opposed to the “whores, degenerates, and perverts” who act now as the foot soldiers for social and political “freedom.”

As such, I was unsurprised at the tone and trajectory of most of the reported social media responses to news of the planned straight pride march, most of which portray the family and the sexually normal as bland, stale, or lacking in that elusive prime virtue of postmodernity — “vibrancy.” “The straight pride parade is just the checkout line at Costco,” remarked one user, while Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez asked: “What would folks march in? Socks w/ sandals on? Dad jeans?”

Much of this kind of sarcastic thinking is of course due to saturation of cultural space with homosexual/indeterminacy propaganda portraying sanitized versions (no AIDS, STDs, or suicide) of these “alternative lifestyles” as highly exciting and fashionable, and the gradual marginalization of sexually normal behavior (via the critique of masculinity in feminism) in the production, and subject matter, of art. The fact that Ocasio-Cortez felt compelled to mock her own normal sexual instincts (she has a boyfriend who presumably does not wear socks with sandals or dad jeans) is indicative of the fact that large numbers of normal people will virtue-signal for homosexuals and the transgendered in line with the propaganda flow. The elevation of the homosexual and the transgendered can of course only come about by distancing the masses from the fact that ultimately, only reproductive sex between a man and a woman is primal and essential. Jonathan Bowden put it best when he wrote in his classic argument against homosexuality:

Another fallacy needs to be confronted: and this must be the notion that family life, male-female bonding, the nuclear enclave, children, et cetera … are somehow negative, restrictive, reactionary, unalternative, ‘square’ or Bourgeois. Au contraire, the First Sexuality remains primal, chthonic, volcanic, and biologically productive. It erupts, like one of Norman Lowell’s abstracts, from fundamental fissures. In terms of flesh, without a penis in the vagina nought else exists — even inversion. Perhaps the best analysis has to be the masterwork which convened modern sexology. This was Count Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s work, Psychopathia Sexualis, that appeared in the eighteen seventies. It posited the notion that the Heterosexual or Straight world’s all that exists, and, by definition, every other tendency happens to be its penumbra, shadow, affectation or deliquescence. … A primal sexuality always embodies Heterosexuality. It alone relates to blood, genetics, racial causation and gender’s polarity. All culture springs from a child’s birth — it’s in accordance with Nature. A factor which necessitates the weakness of all alternatives: whether these are same-sex, infantilistic or paedophile, bi-polar, necrophile, coprophiliac, trans-gender or hermaphroditic, et cetera.

Only gross distortions of culture have brought about a situation in which Bowden’s listed malformed shadows of, and weak alternatives to, normal sexual instincts are celebrated above and beyond the primordial vehicle for blood, genetics, and race. Thus, the man who supports, broadens and extends his family tree, fulfilling the promise and demands of his ancient genetic heritage, is seen as less “vibrant” than the man who lives parasitically without any of these responsibilities in the shadow of the reproductive and makes a celebration of living hedonistically and dying without heirs. Or as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez might frame it, when it comes to pure excitement and liberation, “Dad jeans” are really no match for the unlimited cultural opportunities afforded by a colourful flag and giant dildos.

Abortion, homosexuality, and transgenderism are of course also attractive to Judeo-Globalism because they share another important quality. And it isn’t “vibrancy,” but rather sterility. The increasing proliferation and tolerance of all three phenomena in the culture of the West cannot be seen as separate and distinct from White demographic decline. This is not to say that demographic decline is directly or solely caused by abortion, homosexuality, and transgenderism, but it is to say that these things contribute to and proliferate in the contemporary culture of sterility. One HuffPost propagandist has argued that “homosexuality be seen as providing a viable option to overpopulation,” asking that “the world’s nations come to encourage its practice and esteem its benefits. … It is, after all, the most harmonious way to control the population.” Since Jews have an interest in weakening the demographic, cultural, and political strength of White host populations, it should also come as no surprise that Jews are very prominent in promoting the culture of sterility. For example, in one 1980 study of the National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL) and the National Right to Life Committee (NRLC), it was found that “17% of NARAL members are Jewish, compared to almost no NRLC members and 2% for the general population.”[2] Tikkun has announced that “Jews brought America to the tipping point on gay marriage.” And at least one university is running a course on “Jews and the transgender movement” in which it is noted that “several Jews have made significant contributions to transgender theory. Magnus Hirschfeld advocated for transgender rights in 1920’s Germany. Isaac Bashevis Singer’s short story Yentl the Yeshiva Boy about a girl who cross-dresses to study in Yeshiva is far more provocatively transgendered than the better known Oscar winning film Yentl made by Barbara Streisand in the 1980’s. Judith Butler has noted her early background in the study of Jewish ethics as a contributor to her fundamental re-imagination of gender as performance in her groundbreaking Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Interestingly, one of the pioneers of transgender legislation in America is a Jewish man who now calls himself Jennifer Levi. [See also Brenton Sanderson’s fascinating 2015 essay on Jews and transgenderism]

Jewish support for the culture of sterility now coincides catastrophically with developments in postmodern, post-industrial Western capitalism. Our post-industrial economies, increasingly floating on debt-fueled consumerism, no longer have clearly defined class dimensions, resulting, to borrow current language, in “non-binary” class relations and aspirations. As Daniel Bell observed in the 1980s in his The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, “One finds many children of upper-middle-class families joyfully embracing what they think is the “freedom” of working-class or black, lower-class lifestyles.” Today, the young and impressionable are joyfully embracing what they think is the “freedom” of the homosexual, the transgendered, and the promiscuous denizens of the abortion clinics (if not becoming one of their number, then supporting and celebrating them). Mass producers and mega-corporations, whose ability to sell products is often contingent on the illusion of novelty and aspiration, have adapted to the fact consumerism has dissolved traditional class structures by turning to the sale of identities (goth, gamer, sports fan, trans, homosexual, liberal etc.) and the illusion of freedom described above. They are catering to the desire of the consumers to be identified, as Bell notes, “not by their occupational base, but by their cultural tastes and life-styles.” An interesting aspect of the rush of major brands to endorse Pride Month is that most of the Pride-endorsing brands are not those traditionally associated with selling masculine aspirational products (e.g., cars, luxury watches, etc.) but instead those where the need for the illusion of novelty would be more acute, for example those involved in selling more generic or everyday products like potato chips (Doritos) and mouthwash (Listerine), or brands where identity is of more primary importance, for example social media corporations. Endorsing the heroes of postmodernity (Marcuse’s “whores, degenerates, and perverts”) is simply an easy and, for the most part, deeply cynical marketing gimmick, that nevertheless contributes to, and proliferates in, the culture of sterility.

This kind of acute, cynical capitalism is also associated with planned obsolescence, in which products are designed with an artificially limited useful life so that they become obsolete and must be replaced by new purchases, thus generating long-term sales volume. It is a system in which the concept of inheritance is anathema, since nothing is intended to survive even the life of one individual. Both prices and culture now dictate that the young even move away from ownership itself, renting almost everything in their lives. As the economic life of the West moves ever further away from ownership and inheritance (cash inheritance might persist, but cash is fluid), the West moves further away from belief in its ultimate inheritance — the genetic and geographic. A young person reduced to a childless, nomadic existence is unlikely to feel ownership of his nation, or to feel any kind of deep feeling with his fellow nomads. He comes to feel he is a mere tenant in his own land, possessing no intrinsic right to exclude other would-be tenants, no matter how alien and unpredictable. Planned obsolescence thus thrives on the culture of sterility since it designs nothing for heirs, and markets solely to the nomad in possession of nothing but cash and a need for a purchasable, but ultimately false and manufactured, identity.

Homosexuals, the transgendered, and abortion clinic harlots are the natural constituency for planned obsolescence, offering (bizarre exceptions aside) no heirs and caring only for enjoying the “freedom” of their stunted existence. The sexual is political, the political is economic, and the economic adapts itself to reflect the sexual.

All of which brings us back to Mr. Gottfried’s effort to regulate prostitution in New York, much like one would regulate the sale of cigarettes and alcohol. “Trying to stop sex work between consenting adults should not be the business of the criminal justice system,” he has said. “It has not worked for a couple of thousand years.” Gottfried’s logic appears to be that because laws against prostitution have not prevented prostitution from happening, they have failed and should therefore be dispensed with. One wonders, following this logic, whether it’s time to decriminalize murder, theft, fraud, etc. And the familiar trope of legitimacy arising from the presence of two “consenting adults” should really have died an embarrassed death the moment a homosexual consented to be killed, and his penis eaten, by an equally consenting cannibal. Of course, one suspects that Mr. Gottfried knows his arguments to be disingenuous, much as one suspects that Gottfried knows he is but the latest in a long line of his co-ethnics who have attempted to tamper with the sexual (and thus political) habits of his hosts. It was over a century ago, in San Francisco in 1911, that America experienced its first encounter with a Jewish health official advocating for legalized prostitution. In that instance, it was San Francisco Municipal Clinic’s Dr. Julius Rosenstirn who argued that criminalizing prostitution was “bound to fail” and asked, in that keening verbosity peculiar to Jews: “Can we legislate people to become deaf to the passionate call of sex? Do the laws stuff cotton in the ears of men and women as Ulysses put wax into the ears of his crew when his ship passed the isle of sweet singing sirens?”[3]

Dr Rosenstirn and Mr Gottfried, as their almost identical statements suggest, are but birds of a feather. Both, I am sure, were/are well aware that the sexual is political, and that the legalization of prostitution, where sex is commodified and further distanced from reproduction, would be another weapon in the armory of the culture of sterility — a culture in which all is permitted so long as it restricts the existence of our people and denies a future for White children.

[1] H. Marcuse, ‘Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Enquiry into Freud,’ in J. Jackson (ed.) The Underground Reader: Sources in the Trans-Atlantic Counterculture (New York: Berghahn, 2015), p.193

[2] D. Granberg, “The Abortion Activists,” International Family Planning Perspectives, 1981 Jul-Aug;13(4):157-63.

[3] F. Rosenbaum, Cosmopolitans: A Social and Cultural History of the Jews of San Francisco (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), p.155.


Andrew Joyce
https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/

Cholesterol misunderstanding

 Statins

The establishment definition of a statin refers to,

“any one of a class of drugs that inhibit the action of an enzyme involved in the liver’s production of cholesterol.”

The reason that drugs are required to inhibit the production of cholesterol is claimed by the NIH, on the Resources web page entitled High Blood Cholesterol: What You Need to Know, to be because,

“High blood cholesterol is one of the major risk factors for heart disease.”

The medical establishment theory, which claims that a high level of cholesterol is dangerous and needs to be reduced, is, however, flawed. Interestingly, the establishment definition of cholesterol highlights one of the flaws in this theory because it includes the statement that,

“Cholesterol and its esters are important constituents of cell membranes…”

Despite the plethora of recommendations by the medical establishment that people should lower their intake of cholesterol, the total level of cholesterol within the body is not regulated by dietary intake. The overwhelming proportion, approximately 85%, of the body’s requirement for cholesterol is produced by the liver; it is only the remaining 15% approximately that is obtained through the diet. If, for some reason, the diet provides the body with insufficient cholesterol, the liver will increase its production to compensate for that dietary deficiency. It is clear therefore, that it is the body that regulates the level of this vital substance.

Cholesterol is not solely an important constituent of cell membranes; it is also an important constituent of the brain and essential for its proper functioning; as indicated by a 2010 article entitled The Effects of Cholesterol on Learning and Memory, which states that,

“Cholesterol is ubiquitous in the central nervous system (CNS) and vital to normal brain function including signaling, synaptic plasticity, and learning and memory.”

The recognition that cholesterol is vital for the proper functioning of many of the body’s vital organs directly contradicts the information promulgated by the medical establishment that cholesterol is ‘dangerous’, and that high levels in the body pose a serious ‘risk’ to health.

An April 2016 article entitled Re-evaluation of the traditional diet-heart hypothesis, published in the BMJ, explains that the original hypothesis about levels of cholesterol stemmed from a study called the Minnesota Coronary Experiment that was conducted between 1968 and 1973; but the results of this study were not published. This experiment was a controlled study that, for the participants of one of the groups, involved the replacement of saturated fats with vegetable oils rich in linoleic acid, a polyunsaturated fat. This dietary intervention was shown to reduce serum levels of cholesterol and assumed to be beneficial.

The documents and data from this original study have recently been re-analysed and the results published in the BMJ. The reason that the original study was not published is claimed to be because the researcher did not believe the results he had obtained. The BMJ article states that,“In meta-analyses, these cholesterol lowering interventions showed no evidence of benefit on mortality from coronary heart disease.”

In addition to the lack of evidence that any benefits accrued from the lowering of cholesterol levels, the BMJ article reports that the evidence,

“…suggests the possibility of an increased risk of death for the intervention group…”

This is not the only study that has discovered that low cholesterol correlates with an increased risk of mortality, not a reduced risk, as the medical establishment claims.

It is stated that there are two types of cholesterol; LDL (low-density lipoproteins), which is regarded as ‘bad’ and HDL (high-density lipoproteins), which is regarded as ‘good’; but these labels are completely misleading. The idea that cholesterol can be either good or bad is based on a misunderstanding that arose from another study that investigated the effects of cholesterol on laboratory animals. The misunderstanding occurred because it was not recognised at the time that the cholesterol used in the study had been oxidised; it is the oxidation of cholesterol that causes health problems. In his book entitled Health and Nutrition Secrets, Dr Russell Blaylock explains the mistaken perception about the different types of cholesterol,

“The reason LDL cholesterol is bad is that it is much easier to oxidize than HDL cholesterol. But oxidized HDL cholesterol is just as dangerous as oxidized LDL cholesterol.”

Oxidation of the cholesterol that constitutes cell membranes will inevitably, adversely affect the cell’s function and, likewise, oxidation of the cholesterol in the brain will affect brain function. These detrimental effects are the direct result of the process of oxidation; a process that produces ‘free radicals’, which are highly reactive particles that can cause damage to any part of the body with which they make contact. Oxidised cholesterol has been shown to cause damage to blood vessels; although free radicals cause damage wherever they are produced in the body.

On the basis of the flawed idea that it is a high level of cholesterol in the body that is the problem, the pharmaceutical industry developed drugs called statins to inhibit the production of this vitally important substance. Inevitably, there are many dangers associated with the use of statins, which, by intention, are designed to interfere with the body’s normal production of cholesterol. The consequences of inhibiting the enzyme in the liver to reduce the production of cholesterol are discussed by Dr Carolyn Dean in Death by Modern Medicine,

“That enzyme, however, does much more in the body than just make cholesterol, so when it is suppressed by statins there are far-ranging consequences.”

Statins are proclaimed by the medical establishment to be both safe and effective, yet, like all other drugs, they produce a number of severely detrimental effects, some of which are explained by Dr Dean,

“Since the brain has the highest concentration of cholesterol in the body, it’s no wonder that the constant demand for lower and lower cholesterol counts is going to impinge on brain function. Previous studies have shown that statins can result in polyneuropathy, which causes numbness, tingling, and burning pain. Researchers showed that people taking statins were 4 to 14 times more likely to develop polyneuropathy than those who did not take statins.”

Statins are intended to inhibit the production of cholesterol; they are not intended to address the problem of oxidised cholesterol, which means that they fail to address the underlying cause of the problem. There are a number of factors that can cause the oxidation of cholesterol and they include many toxic chemicals that are ubiquitous to the environment, as Dr Dean explains,

“In addition, chlorine, fluoride in water, pesticides and other environmental pollutants can also oxidize cholesterol in the body.”

The problems with these chemicals and other environmental pollutants are discussed in more detail in chapter six. Oxidised cholesterol can also be found in processed and ‘fast’ foods, which are also discussed in more detail in chapter six.

In addition to their increased use as treatments for patients with high levels of cholesterol, statins are increasingly prescribed as preventives on the basis of the idea that this will reduce the risk of developing a CVD. As demonstrated by the study published in the BMJ, there is no evidence that high levels of cholesterol constitute a health problem or even increase the risk of developing health problems. The study in fact revealed the opposite; that low levels of cholesterol produce adverse health consequences and that statins increase the level of harm to health.

The harm that they have been shown to cause is demonstrated by the withdrawal of certain statin drugs from the market following reports about a number of severe ‘side effects’, and even death in some cases. Nevertheless, many statin drugs remain on the market, including some that are known to produce many serious adverse effects, as has been reported by many patients who have taken these drugs. This would seem to be another instance of the benefit being claimed to outweigh the risk; but this is clearly not the case.

One of the serious adverse effects that can result from the use of statins is reported in a December 2015 article entitled Statin Use and the Risk of Kidney Disease With Long-Term Follow-Up (8.4-Year Study) published in the American Journal of Cardiology. This study acknowledges that there had been few studies on the long-term use of statins, especially with respect to the effects on kidney disease. The conclusion to the study states that,

“…statin use is associated with increased incidence of acute and chronic kidney disease.”

The reason that these serious health problems were not discovered from the original clinical trials is also explained by the article that states,

“These findings are cautionary and suggest that long-term effects of statins in real-life patients may differ from shorter term effects in selected clinical trial populations.”

Yet again, the medical establishment’s lack of knowledge about the human body has created more problems than it has solved in the attempt to reduce the incidence of heart disease. Cholesterol is not responsible for heart disease, therefore attempts to reduce the body’s production of cholesterol will not reduce the risk of heart disease.

What Really Makes You Ill?

Why Everything You Thought You Knew About Disease is Wrong

Dawn Lester & David Parker

If I have met an arahant Ajahn Chah definitely was one

 Q: You said you trained under Ajahn Chah and his teaching. Was Ajahn Chah an arahant or not? What are your views on it?

Ajahn Amaro: If I have met an arahant he definitely was one. But you can’t really judge from the outside. If people asked Ajahn Chah if he was an arahant, he would say, ‘It takes one to know one,’ or ‘Why are you asking me that? Instead, you should ask yourself why you are not.’ He certainly seemed like the happiest man in the world. That was one of the most striking things about him.

The scriptures state that one of the qualities of stream-entry is to be ‘independent of others in the training, the practice’. That quality of independence doesn’t mean being isolated or abstracted, or having an egotistical attitude of ‘I don’t care what anybody thinks.’ Rather it is a profound self-reliance, self-confidence. Ajahn Chah didn’t need anyone to like him or to approve of him. If you tried to flatter him, he’d make you look at why on earth you were doing that. You could never second-guess him. He had an extraordinary quality of ease coupled with a tremendous liveliness. He paid close attention to those he was with and what was going on yet he simultaneously displayed an extraordinary relaxation at the same time. He was fully attuned to what was happening but he didn’t need it to be a particular way in order for him to be happy.

Ajahn Chah was an extremely strict and orthodox monk – we practise in a rigorous and traditional religious order that is 2,500 years old – but despite that set of conventional limitations he had an astonishing quality of freedom. He was completely at ease with whatever happened, which doesn’t mean to say that he had ‘checked out’, off in some distracted dream world; he was simply very flexible, responsive and adaptable with respect to how situations unfolded.

Having had a stroke, and pretty much physically paralysed, he was still cracking jokes about his brain function collapsing. Not trying to put a brave face on it out of insecurity, but being genuinely okay with watching what was unfolding in his life. He had enjoyed having his faculties and had made good use of them. He had used them well to help himself and others. Now that those faculties were fading, he was quite okay with them as they disappeared. He did the best he could with them as they were going, but there was no sense of loss as they were fading. The last ever formal Dhamma talk that he gave, in 1981, published in English as Why Are We Here?, spells out this skilful attitude out with great clarity. His stroke and the subsequent brain damage happened shortly thereafter.

Being ready to point out things that students are deeply attached to.

(...)

 Sometimes you’ll see meditation courses or mindfulness programs that do make outrageous promises. ‘Just pay $5,000 for this weekend and your life will be changed forever. You will be happy, liberated, enlightened’ and so on. These are very sweeping statements. I’m not quoting adverts verbatim, but I think we’ve all come across those pieces of literature and their promises.

I do feel that the commercialising of Dharma is an uncomfortable drift. When things have a big price tag on them, they have to be dressed up in a way that makes them interesting, sexy, and attractive. That means that sometimes the challenging aspects of the teaching may be trimmed out. For example, those teachings that point to your opinions, your middle-class value systems, your attachment to your appearance or to your wealth. And teachings like ‘renunciation’ or ‘unattractiveness of the body’ are deleted because they don’t help to fill the seats at your events.

It is an ongoing dialogue, but I feel the degree to which the challenging or less attractive teachings get edited out, or left in the fringes, is a weakness. That can weaken the teaching. In 1979, when our teacher from Thailand, Ajahn Chah, visited the USA, he was invited to teach at a ten-day retreat at the Insight Meditation Society in Massachusetts. He was asked to give advice to the teachers: Jack Kornfield, Sharon Salzberg, Jackie Schwartz (now Jacqueline Mandel) and Joseph Goldstein. They asked Ajahn Chah to give them advice as teachers. He said: ‘You will succeed only if you are prepared to challenge the attachments and obsessions of your students.’ The Thai phrase was literally, ‘If you’re ready to stab their hearts.’ Ajahn Chah had a good way of getting people’s attention. Because that is the kindness of the teacher, in being ready to point out things that students are deeply attached to. Particularly to point out the things that students really don’t want to let go of. That is the job of the teacher. That is the kindness of the teacher.

Probably there are a few doctors and surgeons here. How could a surgeon operate if you didn’t use a knife occasionally? These days there’s a lot of microsurgeries but you need the knife sometimes, to get to where the trouble is. That was pointed advice from Ajahn Chah. The kindness of the teacher sometimes needs to manifest as giving advice that’s painful or challenging. It manifests as giving advice that goes against the preferred version of the student’s reality.

Another story that comes to mind is from a friend of ours, a Tibetan lama, Tsoknyi Rinpoche. He would refer to editing the approach to Dharma practice according to your own preferences, as ‘California Dharma’. ‘Yes, I see, all things are empty, nothing is worth attaching to, but I simply like my comforts. I like to have a few beautiful things around but I’m not attached. I just like to have a beautiful home in Marin County, with a nice view, with a picture window looking out over the Bay. But I’m not attached!’

He was staying in a particularly beautiful house in Marin, and his host was from a very wealthy family, and he was talking in these terms. Rinpoche picked up a coffee pot that was sitting on the table, and he started tilting it towards the hand-made Turkish carpet. He asked, ‘How much did this carpet cost you?’ The host replied, ‘About $35,000.’ Rinpoche said, ‘So, tell me about your non-attachment...’ as he tilted the coffee pot a little bit more and a little bit more. ‘You say you really like this place and you enjoy having beautiful things around, but you’re not attached? So how not attached are you?’ And then he tilted the coffee pot a few more degrees. ‘Alright, alright, alright! I’m attached! I’m attached! Just don’t spoil the carpet.’ That was a very practical teaching. It is also the kind of teaching you get from the Thai Forest Ajahns. Teachings that are very to the point.

One other weakness that is happening in the West – in this trimming and editing of the Dhamma teachings to fit people’s preferences and opinions so that it is not challenging – is particularly with respect to mindfulness teachings and the absence of reference to ethics, the deliberate omission of teachings on ethics. For example, the Five Precepts that the Buddha established as guidance for the lay community. Those Precepts are very deliberately left out of the mindfulness trainings: such as Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), and Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT). I’ve had long discussions and correspondence with Jon Kabat-Zinn, (founder of MBSR) on this and he speaks very strongly for the need to leave ethics as implicit rather than explicit, within those trainings. The same approach has been taken with respect to MBCT.

I’d like to read a piece in relationship to that. There’s a rich ongoing discussion within the field of whether ethics should be articulated or not. My own (probably biased) opinion is that it’s a weakness. It would be much more helpful to be more explicit, to spell things out in terms of what really benefits us as human beings. I would say that ethical guidelines, the Precepts, can be articulated and held, without them being seen as religious dictates or uptight Victorian formalisms. But rather the Precepts can be held as skilful guidelines for living wisely, carefully and compassionately.
As it seems very relevant to the theme, I’d read this extract from a commentary I wrote on an article in the academic journal Mindfulness. It addresses some of the aspects in the relationship between MBSR and the ethical field. The original article was written by Elaine Montero, who is from the University of Toronto, and her partners.

Jon Kabat-Zinn in 2004 defined mindfulness as: ‘Mindfulness means paying attention in a particular way, on purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgmentally.’

My comment is: ‘His definition is somewhat broad and though useful, is open to misinterpretation or misuse.’ On this issue, Montero et al. commented:

‘On the implicit rather than the explicit role of ethics in the teaching and practice of mindfulness. This omission of silā may result in concepts such as ‘non-judgmental awareness’ fostering a range of negative stances from self-indulgence to passivity. And this is where, in the absence of proper teacher-training, a poor grasp of concepts such as bare awareness, non-judgmental awareness, nonduality and so on, are likely to misguide participants into bypassing their experience rather than connecting with it.’

Then in a different section it says:

‘The response to this central issue concerning mindfulness-based interventions from the founder of mindfulness-based stress reduction is significant. Elaine Montero stated: ‘Reflecting on the choice to keep the teachings of ethics implicit, Jon Kabat-Zinn states that, “Each person carries the responsibility both personally and professionally to attend to the quality of their inner and outer relationships.” At the same time, he indicates that this must be supported “by explicit intentions regarding how we conduct ourselves both inwardly and outwardly.”’

Further, Kabat-Zinn, in 2007, responds to earlier concerns about the exclusion of ethics by indicating that personal and professional ethical guidelines are intrinsic to the delivery of MBI (Mindfulness-Based Intervention Programs.) He also argues that because there is a societal tendency to be incongruent with respect to inner and outer moral stances, an implicit teaching of silā is preferable.

My comments:

‘Jon Kabat-Zinn’s words here seem particularly carefully chosen, as though balanced on a tightrope between his acknowledged respect for the source of MBSR: “I’ve always used mindfulness as a placeholder for the Dharma” [Jon Kabat-Zinn, 2013] and his intention to make MBSR as accessible to as broad a field of people as possible. ‘However, the guidelines he gives are, from the Buddhist perspective, significantly vague, in my opinion. The statements that “each person carries the responsibility both personally and professionally to attend to the quality of their inner and outer relationships” and that one should have “explicit intentions regarding how we conduct ourselves both inwardly and outwardly” could comfortably be assigned to the fictional characters of Tony Soprano (the Mafia boss) or Walter White (methamphetamine cook).’ (That’s my comment.)

‘Of even more concern is the statement that: “because there is a societal tendency to be incongruent with respect to inner and outer moral stances, an implicit teaching of silā (ethics) is preferable.” This seems to state that, because there’s a disparity between the ideals people hold and what they actually do, it’s best not to talk about the subject at all. ‘If this is a correct interpretation of the comment – and again from a traditional Buddhist standpoint – this is a very dubious principle on which to structure a pedagogical approach and a system of would-be beneficial psychological practices.’

I was having a bit of a rant there, and I was wondering what Jon Kabat-Zinn would say about that. But he read it and to his credit, he was quite okay with it. But I felt that sense of things being implicit was so vague. And yes, Walter White (from ‘Breaking Bad’) he was cooking methamphetamine and making millions of dollars for his family. Yes, he was doing it on purpose, it was deliberate. He had an intention in mind. He was surveying his internal concerns. Yes, thousands of people are going to have their lives messed up by this, but it’s worth it because this is what my family needs to survive, because I’m dying of cancer. That is his ethic. That is the story of the whole series. And so, yes: it was deliberate. It was thoughtful. He is paying attention to the standard. And he is a meth cook.

So also in the scenario with Tony Soprano, the mafia boss in 'The Sopranos': what he does is deliberate, it is intentional, and it is for the family. And a few people get rubbed out along the way... Those things are not insignificant. Again, this is my biased viewpoint.

There is a way that our actions and our speech can be guided by concerns that there are results. There are beneficial results and harmful results. The Five Precepts create a very helpful standard of conduct to stop creating trouble for ourselves and for others. The Five Precepts are: to refrain from killing, to refrain from stealing, to refrain from sexual misconduct, to refrain from lying and to refrain from using intoxicants. They are a helpful standard for people so that they can live skilfully and kindly.

It doesn’t have to be a decree from above: ‘Thou shalt not…’, a diktat from outside, held as a Victorian moralism. But rather it is like the way the law requires you to have effective brakes on your car. If you’re going to be on the road, if you get pulled over, and the police want to check your brakes and they don’t work, then you’re off the road. So, similarly, I feel it’s helpful to think of these ethical guidelines in terms of driving safely amongst the other members of the traffic on the road.

Another challenge is the ongoing meshing of ancient traditions and patriarchal Asian societal forms, with an egalitarian Western society. That is an interesting mix. We must bear in mind that the Buddha was teaching 2,500 years ago. It was a very long time ago. The forms that you have in traditional Buddhist societies – such as Thailand, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, China, Japan, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Nepal, Tibet and into Mongolia, Siberia and so forth – are forms which have been the body of Buddhist practice developed over many centuries. There are a lot of challenges in taking those forms and planting them into Western society. Challenges in terms of what to keep, what to delete, how to adapt things, how to change things. It is an ongoing dialogue. In some respects, it is a weakness and a challenge; because some things don’t fit very well in terms of the customs, the traditions, the superstitions, and the forms. They are an uncomfortable fit in Western society.

Other things do fit well, but they are unfamiliar and strange to our perceptions. For myself, in my own community, that’s been a very rich ongoing dialogue. When Ajahn Chah first came to teach in Great Britain, he received an invitation from a group in London to visit their little monastery in Hampstead, in Haverstock Hill in London. He accepted the invitation and told Ajahn Sumedho and a few other monks that they should stay there. He said, ‘You can change the robes if you want to, and you can change the chanting. This is a cold country. You can adapt those if you want to, but you must go out on alms-round every single day.’ They thought that was a bit strange, they thought he would insist on the robes and the ritual forms. But why go on alms-round? 'Who is going to put food in our bowls in London?' But Ajahn Chah was insistent about the alms round. He said, ‘You must go out. Your job is to be the fourth heavenly messenger [the sign of renunciation]. You must go out every day.’ That became a very strong ethic for us that we have adapted a little over time.

(...)
Ajhan Amaro

Mental Enema

 

In this winter’s retreat, the month of January has passed and a new month begins in the silence, the cold weather, the stillness of winter. Whether the retreat is organized for us to be meditating as a group or alone, being the listener, the witness to the way it is, is the important issue. We’re not trying to get or get rid of anything but to just be the neutral observer, the Buddho, the witness to the way things are. This is bhāvanā – the Pali word for meditation and for developing the Eightfold Path.

During these days, many of you will experience a lot of suppressed memories or emotions that might arise, such as fear, guilt or remorse. Repressed anger or resentment can come up during these silent retreats. You can be rather frightened by it because sometimes we see a retreat like this as getting tranquil, getting samādhi and living in a blissful state where all the fears and anger, resentments, the world and all its complexities are suppressed and we're just in a one-pointed state of happiness that we'd like to hold on to.

Many times we may have been on retreats where we got various strong senses of samādhi, of luminosity, of peace, and then we want that again. We'd like to always feel like that, to feel enlightened, to feel blissful, to be free from fear and desire. When we practise meditation to get something, remember that the previous blissful experience is now a memory. So when you remember past experiences of being peaceful – feeling bliss through the silence of a retreat – you're remembering something that happened in the past, and that creates a desire to get to that state again. This is where being the witness is the important position to take – not the one who's trying to get something that you don't have in the present, that you remembered having on previous retreats. Be a witness to that very desire, the desire to get something you're not feeling, or that you don't have at this present moment. Much of our life is like this.

The cultural conditioning, the social conditioning that we've all experienced, very much sets up a habit pattern of repression. Cultural conditioning is about what's right and wrong, what's polite, what's impolite, what is true, what is false. You acquire these values from your parents, from your social group, and then carry them through life making value judgments about yourself and the world around you because of the cultural conditioning that you acquired when you were quite innocent, before you had any time to reflect on it. You just absorbed like a sponge, absorbed everything that was thrown at you, given to you, or what you were told was right and wrong.

During these retreats, maybe we have a lot of fear that arises over nothing in particular, either in the monastery or the immediate environment. Or maybe a lot of anger or resentment may manifest when you're in silent meditation. And then you try to get rid of it, that's one reaction, to suppress it, or feel that you can't meditate. Then you feel you're not a good monk or a good nun because you're feeling like this, or because the mind can proliferate, fight, resent. And all of this can be witnessed. All of us have a lot in life to resent because the life we experience from an ideal position isn't like that. It's not about justice and fairness where everything's right and your parents, social group, religious education – whatever it might have been – was right or wrong.

This word ‘conditioning’ is neutral. It's not about right conditioning or wrong conditioning, but conditioning itself through reward and punishment. When you're good, you get rewarded for that, and when you're bad, you're punished. That's the conditioning process. That's social and cultural conditioning that we experience. But witnessing that conditioning is not judging it in any way, but recognizing that there are a lot of repressed feelings, emotions, and desires. Resistance and repression are other forms of clinging. Vibhava taṇhā, the desire to get rid of or resist something, is like this.

Luang Por Chah had many stories to tell about how he dealt with fear. In Thai society, they are very much conditioned to believe in ghosts and spirits that you can't see but that exist in various places. That's very strong cultural conditioning. Being a dhutaṅga bhikkhu, a wandering monk, he would go and live in charnel grounds or graveyards where the suggestions and conditions for fear of ghosts or spirits would be most prominent. A graveyard always gives the impression of someplace you don't generally want to go into, even to someone who was not conditioned like that. It reminds you of death, and death is another fear we all have; fear of dying. In the worldly life, the sensory realm that we experience, there's a lot to fear. It's not an unreasonable emotion; it's primal to the animal world. The animal world is a world of survival and fear. Fear is a kind of protective mechanism, to be aware of where danger lies and try to avoid it. But because of memory, we can remember things even in the safest places and be frightened in our condo in London with locks on the door, guards at the gate.

Resentment is another example of conditioning. We have all maybe experienced unfairness in our lives, from teachers or parents who didn't understand what we were doing. Friends, or society in general, can make value judgments about us. Fear of what other people think is another strong social conditioning experience. ‘What will the neighbours think?’ But the ‘witness’ isn't thinking. It's not about thinking or deliberately trying to do something, but working with the way things are. You don't have to go to a graveyard to deal with fear of ghosts or spirits, or fear of something out there in the atmosphere that is some kind of menacing presence. We can consider just the way we can make ourselves frightened with what we're thinking or by remembering things of the past.

Fear is also an emotion that we sometimes like to experience. You wonder why people go to horror movies to be scared out of their wits by what they see on a screen. Why would you pay money to be scared? It’s because it is an exciting feeling, to be frightened and scared, to feel like you're a victim of life, a victim of society or a social group. There's something very egotistical about playing the role of a victim because it makes us feel that we're somebody who's been unfairly treated or victimized by something else outside ourselves. But the witness is aware. When one feels victimized by life, it’s like this. You're taking the position of ‘Buddhaṁ saraṇaṁ gacchāmi’ – refuge in Buddha, to witness the way it is. It's not about getting rid of fear, or justifying everything and just trying to explain or analyze everything away. Or you try to think about it and analyze yourself, and blame your frightened tendencies on others. Or maybe you blame yourself, thinking you're just a weak person because you have a lot of fear to deal with. Whatever you think, whatever direction the critical mind takes, it's still words and thoughts and habits that you're using. You're not being a witness, you're being a critic – thinking about yourself, thinking about the world.

Sometimes one can relate to meditation, taking the witness position, as a kind of mental enema, a cleansing process. The word enema means a kind of cleansing process for the body, but this is a mental enema where we don't have to do anything but witness the mental conditions that arise. What comes out of your mind might be repulsive like any physical enema, but it's being released from yourself. You're letting go of it and allowing it to manifest, becoming fully conscious and not clinging to it. The Buddho is a refuge that we all refer to – Buddha as a refuge. It’s not refuge in some idealized Buddha of the past, not in some kind of traditional ceremonial chant, but it's about witnessing the way things are. When we talk about Gotama the Buddha’s enlightenment, he was witnessing the way things are, not trying to get rid of things, to fight or resist, or just get into a state where he didn't feel anything. There is that image of him under the Bodhi tree where he gives up trying to control his mind, trying to arrange everything, trying to get into a nice peaceful state. He just lets go of everything and then, as the legend goes, all the forces of the universe come and tempt him both on the fear and desire levels. His response is witnessing, not trying to control it, get rid of it, or condemn it, but just noticing, witnessing the presence and the absence of phenomena that arise. So it's a fearless position.

In my own experience, that's how I've learned to really develop or cultivate bhāvanā or sammā diṭṭhi, right understanding. It's not to fight or resist but to observe. Luang Por Chah’s definition of Buddho, the Buddha's name, is ‘the one who is a witness’. Knowing is like this. During this retreat, when negativity arises – fear, jealousy, anxiety, worry, doubt – see it as a blessing. It's asking to be let go of. It arises in consciousness when the conditions in a retreat here are not frightening. Amaravati Monastery is a very safe place in terms of external conditions. The community is trained with the vinaya – the precepts – so we’re committed to non-violence, to celibacy, to right speech; that's our intention as a group. In terms of safety it's as safe as you can get, where you have the community you're actually living and associated with, that makes such a strong commitment to moral precepts. So even if fear, jealousy, anxiety, worry, or doubt arise, don't take it personally. Don't see it as some kind of thing you've got to get rid of, or that if you want to get enlightened you've got to get rid of doubt. Because that very position of ‘I've got to get rid of doubt, get rid of fear’ is the ego again. ‘I'm somebody who has something I shouldn't have. If I were wise and enlightened, I wouldn't have any doubts or fears.’ That's an ideal we might create around Buddhist monks or nuns, or the Buddha himself. There is social conditioning, for example, the sīlabbata parāmāsa or attachment to conventions, social conventions, religious conventions. The vinaya is a moral convention that we attach to, not to create a sense of personality with it. We can become very arrogant when we look down on others who don't seem to have the high standards of moral conduct that we see in ourselves, that we are clinging to. It's not about creating a sense of moral superiority or condemning others, but they’re guidelines for action and speech in community life, in daily life.

Social conventions are something that we might not even notice. So much of Western psychology is based on the ego. We emphasize the word ego a lot, a sense of self-conceit or self-importance. It includes even an ego where we despise ourselves or look down on or criticize ourselves. Whatever habitual identity you form – an attachment to your physical body, or your physical identity – the ego comes from that strong conditioning, through social conditioning, through thinking.

Vicikicchā, generally translated into English as doubt, is the third fetter which prevents us from seeing the right path to sammā diṭṭhi. So we investigate doubt – to not be sure, to be uncertain, to be unstable, to not know something is like this. And that's about thinking, isn't it? You realize the danger of attachment to thought, how you create a whole world of expectations and fears just through thinking. We live in a realm of doubt and uncertainty and instability because the world is an illusion. It's not what you think. It's not a condition that you can control. The world arises and ceases according to other conditions. The sensory bodies we identify with are conditions: what we see, hear, smell, taste and touch – everything we think – is conditioned. Conditions can be skilful, kusala, or unskilful, akusala. But the Buddho, the knower, the witness, is aware. Skilful, unskilful, good, bad are all conditions created through thinking, through believing, through grasping. When you really penetrate that with wisdom, then the insight you get is letting go. It doesn't mean getting rid of the conditions, it means just releasing your grasp. In terms of samādhi or concentration, it's more like a relaxed state of awareness, not an intense grasping state of intense concentration on an object. It’s a sense of relaxation, of letting go, of releasing the body from all its tensions, releasing your mind from all its fears and desires. So when this happens, when we really trust in letting go, then sammā diṭṭhi – right understanding, or perfect understanding – arises. It’s there naturally. As individual people, we're not trying to be wise and get right understanding. When we think we're very wise and have sammā diṭṭhi, that's another conceit. After 55 years of monastic life, if I still think I have sammā diṭṭhi as a person, that's a delusion. Sumedho is an illusion, it's a costume, it's a convention. It's not a real person. But Buddho you can trust – conscious awareness in the present is like this.

Striving to get right understanding is good. There's nothing bad about it, wanting to become enlightened, wanting to become free from suffering, wanting to attain Buddhahood, wanting to become a bodhisattva. Wanting to become anything, like just a good person or a good monk or nun, that's good karma. It's good but it's still a convention. It's still a condition, a sense of me and mine – me, trying to become a very good monk or a good person, or get a good rebirth in the next life or even to get out of rebirth. Wanting to not be reborn again is still a thought, words that we read in the scriptures. These are good but the grasping of that, the sense of me and mine, ‘I'm somebody who doesn't want to be reborn again’, is like this. It's still a condition that arises and ceases. So, good is impermanent; bad is impermanent. The Buddho makes no judgments about good and bad anymore, it’s just knowing whatever condition you’re experiencing or attached to at present. The insight is to let go, to relax with it. Let it be what it is and it ceases all by itself. Allowing the natural cessation of phenomena is a relaxed open awareness, not an intense effort to destroy evil or get rid of the satanic forces in your mind or the universe.

To want to get rid of ignorance is a noble desire but it's still a creation of words. ‘I want to be free from all ignorance’ is a wholesome thought, but a thought is still a condition. Out of the habit of not understanding the way things are, or avijjā, we cling to these high-minded ideals, these goals, these conventions. The Four Noble Truths, the first sermon of the Buddha, is a really skilful tool to use to investigate that. We're not here to just become good people, good monks, good nuns, good samaṇas, good lay people. Even though that might be wholesome, or that what you think yourself to be as a person is making good karma, that very sense of being a person, a separate form in the universe, is a basic delusion of the ego, sakkāya diṭṭhi. You can't get rid of sakkāya diṭṭhi but you can know it by being the witness to it, whether it be a positive ego or a negative one is not the issue anymore. Perfectly healthy, well-adjusted, a normal personality or a neurotic one, these are judgments made in society. I've heard many people say, ‘I can't meditate, I don't have good karma. I've got to deal with all my repressed anger and fears and I need psychotherapy. I need to get rid of all of these obsessive ideas that come to my mind. I want to become a healthy personality.’ These are all good desires but it's still coming from the sense of total belief that you are what you think, what you're feeling, or what your emotions are. And as long as that belief goes unquestioned, then you're always going to experience suffering, no matter what you do, no matter how good you are.

We all have to witness the changing conditions of life, the COVID pandemic, climate change, the rumours, the political problems of various countries, seeing our parents grow old, get sick and die. We get attached to dogs and cats and then they die, and no matter how good you've been you still feel grief and sorrow at the passing of beloved pets. Is that good or bad or right or wrong? It's not about good or bad, right or wrong anymore, but it's when you attach, when this attachment is caused through ignorance, then we create suffering throughout our lives. Death is always the obvious end of a life. If your sense of self-worth is attached to what you look like, your body, or your social conditioning, beliefs, thoughts and memories, then you die in fear or with the hope to get a rebirth, there's still the desire to become. Some people fear death because they haven't been perfect in life. When people die, many times the relatives fear that they've made bad karma because they didn't tell this person that they love them enough, they didn't give them perfect care and love and total appreciation in their lives. You didn't visit them as often as you should have, so there's a lot of guilt when relatives or good friends pass away because we create this sense of what we should have done in the past. But no matter how good and caring we might be, death is the inevitable end of a birth. We've experienced birth already. We don't remember being physically born because we didn't have a language, we hadn’t developed memory with language to remember what it was like to be born. But we were conscious.

We acquire the cultural, even the religious attitudes about death, that’s social conditioning. Death itself is a rather frightening word for many people. It’s not considered polite to talk about death at social events. Even I find, when somebody dies, to say they're dead seems rather blunt. So we use the words ‘passing away’ or something less startling than ‘they're dead’. That seems so heartless, so final. But it is true, what is born dies.

So a mental enema is a cleansing. It's cleansing consciousness, allowing what you’ve repressed and feared to come into consciousness rather than just try to slam the door every time fear, doubt, anxiety, and worry arise. We get caught in that and spend our lives worrying about anything that we can worry about because it's become one of our thinking habits. The future always has the possibility to worry about something. The future is one big worry right now, isn't it? Who knows what's going to happen with pandemics, climate change, or universal problems like the universe we see and experience through the senses? We know we're all going to get old. And getting old means the physical form weakens; the senses fade and it's like this. But in awareness, the Buddho, the witness doesn't get old, isn't afraid, doesn't worry about anything, is not guilt-ridden, forgetful or blaming or feeling victimized. These are all mental constructions that we tend to hold in us. When they enter the door of consciousness we develop habits of resistance, of repression.

In bhāvanā, or meditation, the fearlessness of the attitude of Buddho, of witnessing the way it is, is not a witness that is afraid. It's aware of fear. So, what is Buddho; what is the witness position? We can call it conscious awareness, mindfulness, pure consciousness or whatever. The word doesn't matter as long as you understand what it really means, that just to be aware of this present moment is like this. Now that sounds very simple in words, but the conditioning process is complicated. Sometimes we have to deal with just witnessing loneliness, boredom, and conditions that we don't want. We don't want to feel alone or lonely or left out. We don't want to feel bored with life. These are created through the idea that life should be just one interesting experience after another. But no matter how many interesting experiences you've had in your life, life is quite boring really. That's why people go to horror shows, because they're bored. Then they feel excited, frightened, horrified, and that's a state they can feel alive with. But boredom, what do you do with it? How do you cope with boredom? How can you get rid of it? Of course, the usual way is to distract yourself with something interesting. Saṁsāra vaṭṭa, the worldly life that we identify with, is an endless seeking of distractions, because otherwise just being consciously aware like this seems like boredom to the thinking mind.

With the thinking mind, you can excite yourself with thoughts. It’s interesting to analyze yourself, or considering your astrological sign you become more interesting as a person because you're born under a certain sign, and the stars and the sun and the moon were all in alignment, and this creates a sense of self-interest. So astrology can be very interesting. Or self-analysis: Why do I fear? Why do I suffer? Who's to blame for it? That can be very interesting because we didn't all come from happy home lives where our parents were absolutely perfect, or from a life that has been perfectly fair. So who's to blame for my suffering? Who can I blame?

Praise and blame are worldly dhammas, or worldly conditions. Praise is what we're after, what we want. That's exciting and interesting. To be praised, to be acknowledged, to be respected, to be admired is very pleasant. To be disregarded, ignored or condemned is very unpleasant. Modern life is very much aimed at trying to become something – become a famous person, become a rock star, become president of the United States, become somebody that's in the news, win a beauty contest, join the French Foreign Legion or some exciting militia group. They're very exciting, to be fighting for righteousness – to be a fighter for human rights, a fighter for democracy, a fighter for freedom. That gives you a sense of being somebody who’s on the right side of goodness and skilfulness. We can devote ourselves to good causes, to peace movements, to social justice, to democratic principles, to the rule of law, to all the best that we can think of. One considers that's good karma. It might be, but it might also not be very good karma because so many righteous groups are very deluded. If feeling righteousness is what you're aiming for, to make everything right according to what you think or according to what you've been told, this can be a form of tyranny. If I am attached to righteousness and you don't agree with me, then you're wrong. And what does that mean in terms of relationship? Then that's a kind of absolutizing of right and wrong. You become absolutely wrong and I become absolutely right. How can there be any communication between right and wrong except through destroying what's wrong; go on righteous wars to kill off the evil forces or the wrong views of others? So we get caught in endless wars. We get news of terrorism, killing, murdering, collateral damage; bombing people, villages and so forth where a lot of innocent people get killed out of a sense of righteousness, of clinging blindly to being right, or for principles such as standing up for democracy. That's exciting, that's not boring. But when you talk to men and women who have been in military lives and dealt with conflicts and wars, wars are quite boring actually. So much of it is waiting around. But when we go to the cinema and watch war movies it's all very exciting. Excitement is available to us, it's a distraction. But boredom is what we don't want, so we ignore it and seek various ways to find pleasure, happiness, comfort, romance, adventure, and excitement. And that's the world. The world is like that and that's why it's an illusory world. It's not the real world that everyone claims it is. It's the world of different illusions that individuals hold and grasp out of ignorance.

So in this retreat, I encourage you to not to take sides with any issues but to investigate. This investigation, how is it done? It's not an investigation of who is right and who is wrong but it's a witnessing, observing, like a really mindful soldier who's out in the field observing, just open to life, and the sounds and sights that are in the present moment are like this. But the soldier is interested in trying to identify any dangerous enemies lurking in the forest or on the horizon. We're not looking for enemies but just observing, witnessing Dhamma, ultimate reality, supreme reality – whatever words you want to use for it, it's apparent here and now, so it's available every moment. That's where we experience life. It's always here and now – it's like this. Just sitting here in the Temple is like this. Breathing is like this. Sitting is like this. What is it that’s aware of sitting? Are you aware of sitting or is sitting just the natural movement of the body: sitting, standing, walking, lying down? Do you force yourself to breathe? You can take pranayama lessons and develop all kinds of exercises with the breath. We're not asking you to do that. We're encouraging you just to be the awareness of the inhalation; it's like this, and the exhalation is like that. It sounds very boring, but getting through boredom is where wisdom lies. When life becomes boring – when you get old, life is increasingly boring. During a winter retreat, where there's nothing to do but sit, stand, walk, lay down, watch your breath, it’s very boring. Then we think of all kinds of things we should do to get rid of the boredom. But boredom is a mental state. It's not ultimate reality. What is ultimate reality? What is supreme reality, here and now, is conscious awareness. And that's where boredom ceases, where loneliness ceases, where the ego collapses, disappears; where the social conditioning, conventional attachments, disappear. You're not resisting or denying them, but they naturally cease. They’re mental states that arise and cease. They're very ephemeral and have no substance.

So it's up to you as individuals. What I've said this afternoon is an encouragement because one thing I can do is encourage you. The Buddha’s teachings are very skilful directions on how to end suffering. The First Noble Truth is about suffering, to be understood. The Third Noble Truth is the end of suffering. The ‘end of suffering’, what does that mean, that you don't get old, you don't get sick anymore, you don't feel grief when your beloved mother passes away or when your favourite cat dies? It means you're aware of grief, of old age, and you're not attaching to it. It doesn't make you cold-hearted and indifferent to life, but it allows empathy to arise in social situations. You don't become a totally unemotional zombie. Then you feel the wisdom of the brahma vihāras. That’s what's left when you’ve let go of everything – mettā, karuṇā, muditā and upekkhā. That’s how we relate to the deluded world, the illusory world that we're experiencing through the forms that we no longer identify with. So I offer this as a reflection.

Ajahn Sumedho