One of the ways we can cultivate this exploration, this change of view, is to ask questions in meditation. In the space of the mind, when the attention is quite steady and focused, a question can be placed. When we hear a sound, we can ask, ‘Who is it that hears?’ When we feel a sensation in the body, we can ask, ‘To whom does this feeling belong?’ Or with memories, ‘Who remembers? Does this memory have an owner? What is it that recalls and labels this “mine”?’ When we ask questions like this, we are not looking for explicit, verbal answers. In fact, there aren’t any ‘right’ verbal or conceptual answers. Rather, posing these questions in a sincere and direct way is intended to illuminate the presumptions the mind makes. In that moment of posing the question, ‘Who knows this experience?’ something in the heart knows that the mind is not a person, that the awareness isn’t an individual. This awareness doesn’t have an age, gender or nationality. The labels we give ourselves – ‘I am a man, I am a woman, I am English, I am Sri Lankan, I am old, I am young, I am healthy, I am sick’ – are all just markers, conventional designations, convenient fictions.
While the mind may identify with such characteristics, we come to see them as habits of mind but not the essence of mind. This mind, this heart is not a person, not an individual, not an ‘I’.
This method of enquiry, of asking a question in meditation, is a very direct and straightforward exploration into the nature of experience. We bring the mind to as much quietness, stillness, and steadiness as possible and then drop a question into that open space: ‘What am I?’ When that kind of question is posed, we can notice a small gap, a hesitation before any conceptual answer arises. The wordless ‘answer’ to the question is what is realized in that gap, in the moment before a new ‘me’ has been conjured into being with an idea, a belief, a judgment, an assumption. That gap – that unformed, awake, open quality – is the point of this practice. In that moment, there is alertness, spaciousness, no sense of self. The mind is awake to its own nature: bright, radiant, pure, peaceful, perfectly simple.
We can also develop this practice throughout the course of our daily activities. As we are eating breakfast, we can ask, ‘Who is eating? What owns this flavour?’ When we speak with others, ‘Does that sound belong to someone?’ Or when we’re driving, ‘Where is there to get to (because wherever I get to, I am always here)?’ Even decision-making, ‘Who chooses?’ We can cultivate a quality of enquiry and investigation throughout the flow of the day, whether we are walking, standing, sitting, lying down, being quiet or being active. ‘Who is tidying the garden? Who is washing the dishes? Who is lying down for a nap?’ Even the simple activity of brushing the teeth can uncover our assumptions of ‘me’ and ‘mine’. When you’re brushing your teeth, ask, ‘Do these teeth have an owner? What makes this toothbrush mine? What happens to my ownership of this tube of toothpaste when the tube is empty?’ All around the planet, countless empty toothpaste tubes are buried in landfills, floating in seas and decaying in forests. Where is all the ‘my’-ness that once belonged to those tubes of toothpaste? Once they were ‘mine’, now they are not. As an empty toothpaste tube leaves the hand and enters the rubbish bin, how does it change from ‘mine’ to ‘not mine’? What happened? Did anything happen?
Beyond toothpaste tubes, we can reflect on other items that are much closer to home. Perhaps top on the list is our own body. We give it a name and we think of it as ‘mine’. What do we discover when we question the assumption ‘This is my body’? Consider the breath. If we are in a room together, you breathe in the carbon dioxide that I breathe out, and I breath in the carbon dioxide that you breathe out. My out-breath, which was partly your out-breath, is then absorbed by the trees, grasses and other creatures. All the carbon dioxide that was once ‘me’ is now part of countless other living beings that have absorbed it.
We shed, we acquire. This body is in an incessant state of change. The process never stops. So the statement ‘This is my body’ can really only be a convenient fiction. When we enquire more deeply, we realize that the labels ‘male’, ‘female’, ‘old’, ‘young’, ‘tall’, ‘short’, ‘healthy’, ‘sick’, ‘Buddhist’, ‘Christian’ don’t truly apply. They are all convenient fictions. Cultivating this change of view is one of the ways to support the breakthrough to reality that the Buddha pointed to.
A SAGE AT PEACE
As we develop this kind of investigation, this reflection – ‘What am I? Who is walking? Who is eating? Who is doing?’ – the point is not the repetition of these questions. The questions are just the means. The point of the enquiry is the resulting change of heart, that ‘Aha!’ when the transparent and empty nature of self-view is recognized. When the heart sees through the conceiving ‘I am’, that is when one is called a ‘sage at peace’30. The heart is free of agitation. It knows genuine coolness, freedom, peacefulness. There is nothing that can agitate or confuse it.
The Buddha teaches anicca (change, uncertainty, transiency), dukkha (unsatisfactoriness, incompleteness, unreliability), and anattā (not-self) as the basis for wise reflection. They are not articles of faith or concepts to believe in. Rather, they are tools we can use to examine the way our experience is held and understood. These reflections are ways of meeting the habits of the mind and helping to shift and reshape them.
In meditation, when the mind is steady, we can pay attention to the present and open the field of awareness, not focusing on a particular object. Awakened awareness can simplly receive the flow of impressions – thoughts, sounds, smells, tastes, textures, shapes and colours – within this mode of reflection, this mode of exploration, and ask, ‘Is this changing? Is it satisfying? Does it have an owner?’
As each form, each feeling, each perception takes shape within the field of awareness, watch what happens when those investigative reflections are applied. What happens when the illusion of a permanent, satisfying, personal identity is seen through, when the ‘I’ feeling is recognized as transparent and void of substance? ‘Aha!’ There is a change of heart, a freeing, a disentangling.
This is the point and purpose of insight practice (vipassanā) – seeing into the genuine nature of all things; seeing that everything (every ‘thing’) is simply a pattern of consciousness, a pattern of mind taking shape and dissolving. There is form but no substance, shape but no essence – it is a bubble, a mirage, a conjuring trick. When that recognition is actualized, watch what happens in the heart. What is the experience of the present reality when that illusion is seen through? There is a simplicity, naturalness, freedom, limitlessness – and a quality of ‘of course!’
THE UNANALYSABLE TATHAGATA - AWAKENED AWARENESS
This kind of practice helps the mind to see through and thus shed its sense of identity. But shedding identity can then leave us with doubts: ‘If I’m not a person, what am I? If I’m not a man or a woman, a monastic or a lay person, what am I? If my nationality, age and personal story are not real, who am I?’ When this happens, it’s important to remember that the practice is to let go of identifying with what we are not and let ‘what is’ just be what it is – awake, aware, peaceful, radiant, limitless, natural. As soon as we fall back into trying to define who or what we are, the thinking/conceiving mind creates limitation once again. Even identifying with highly exalted states – ‘I am suchness, that’s what I am,’ ‘I am the Dhamma,’ or even ‘I am nothing’ – any kind of ‘I am’ creates a false limitation.
In another of his deeply significant teachings on this theme, the Buddha said:
The Tathāgata (‘The one thus come, thus gone’) has abandoned any material form … feeling … perceptions … mental formations … consciousness by means of which one trying to describe the Tathāgata would describe him. He has cut it off at the root, made it like a palm tree stump, deprived it of the conditions for existence and rendered it incapable of arising in the future. The Tathāgata is liberated from being reckoned in terms of material form … feeling … perceptions … mental formations … consciousness … He is profound, immeasurable, unfathomable, like the great ocean.
(M 72.20)31
‘The Tathāgata’ is the term the Buddha used to refer to himself, and this Sutta is one of the few instances in which he talks about his subjective experience. I consider the term ‘tathāgata’ to also mean ‘the awakened awareness of our minds’, just as ‘Buddha-wisdom’ was described above (in Chapters 1 & 2). The quality of tathāgata (‘thus come, thus gone’) here refers to the nature of the ‘transcendent knowing’ attribute of our hearts as embodied in each of our lives.
SO WHAT EXACTLY IS IT?
It is. And there is no need, indeed no possibility, to define exactly what it is. That said, notice that the Buddha uses the adjectives ‘profound, immeasurable, unfathomable, like the great ocean’ to describe its presence. The analogy is apposite since, when we stand on some sea-shore and look out to the horizon there is for many people an apprehension of vastness, wonderment, power and mystery. What lies beneath the surface? What’s beyond the horizon? The mind goes quiet in a state of natural awe, that is potent yet peaceful. The great ocean definitely IS yet the conceiving mind cannot fully define what it is; its presence is immeasurable, both dangerous (to the ego) and intimately familiar (to the heart), our origin and yet beyond us… these are the qualities of the awake, aware heart that the Buddha evokes with these words.
Any definitions would have to borrow nouns and adjectives from the world of sound, sight, smell, taste, touch, conceptual thought, time, three-dimensional space, individuality. None of those qualities fully apply but we are offered that analogy of the ocean as a tiny hint. Even the best adjectives in a mythical grammar designed to refer to the numinous, the transcendent, will never be able to do the job completely. Words and concepts simply do not have enough dimensions to represent ultimate reality.
In the above passage, the Buddha is talking about his own nature, but he is also talking about the nature of the awake mind, the quality of awareness at the very heart of experience for each one of us – ‘the Buddha in mind’ as Ajahn Chah put it.
In addition, we don’t have to define what we are because we already are it. The practice is simply about learning to be that, to embody that awakened knowing, which frees that heart from all limitation. As in the statement by the Buddha to Rohitassa that was quoted above:
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.
(S 2.26)
This passage is an illustration of one of the Buddha’s chief attributes, lokavidū, ‘knower of the world’. And when the Buddha in mind sees the world, in this way, this is the Dhamma knowing its own nature. As Ajahn Chah expressed it:
Where is the Buddha? The Buddha is in the Dhamma. Where is the Dhamma? The Dhamma is in the Buddha… Whether a tree, a mountain or an animal, it’s all Dhamma, everything is Dhamma. Where is this Dhamma? Speaking simply, that which is not Dhamma doesn’t exist. Dhamma is nature. This is called the ‘saccadhamma’, the True Dhamma. if one sees nature, one sees Dhamma; if one sees Dhamma, one sees nature. Seeing nature, one knows the Dhamma.32
Ajhan Amaro
Mind Is What Matters
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