March 26, 2010 Friday Morning, Venture Fourth, Part 1
Pure Awareness Practice
Keywords: awakening, access concentration, pure awareness practice, kilesas, sem, rigpa, trekchod, togyal, dzogchen, luminosity, cessation experience, sankhara, satyagraha
This transcript has only been lightly reviewed, filling in any blanks and spelling errors.
Barbara: I sat for quite awhile last night and again this morning looking at the relationship between access concentration and pure awareness. First I want to take a step backward. Venture Fourth was planned primarily as a way of assisting ourselves to become increasingly clear servants in the world and to do that service from as much a place of emptiness as possible.
Service is a very clear vehicle for awakening. We’re not saying that our intention is not to awaken, awakening is always the highest aspiration. But we don’t start with the intention, “I’m going to do this so I can awaken,” I’m going to do this so as to become an ever clearer servant in the world. And we know that’s going to lead us into the direction of awakening.
We started the program with different tools, meeting your guides, doing shamanic journeying, meeting your crystal guides, breath work, work with the charkas and elements, and more. The various tools that we’ve been developing, including a strong pure awareness practice, are all tools that help to point out where we’re stuck in the small mind, in the ego, and help us to release ourselves from that stuck place.
We can ask our guides for guidance and that’s helpful. We can practice in all these different ways, always working toward the aspired end of becoming ever more clear, more empty of the control of the ego. It’s not that we’re trying to get rid of ego; we’re trying to find that aspect of ourselves that is not controlled by ego and live from that space, from that clarity.
I find Vipassana practice is a complete vehicle that can take us there but it’s useful to find other supports where they’re available. It’s like my feet will take me on a walk from here to California but if there’s a river, a boat would be helpful. We don’t turn our backs on genuine supports and say, “No, I’m committed. I’m just going to do it by foot,” unless there’s a reason to do it by foot.
We’ve taken birth in a culture that has amazing access to all these various traditions. We need not to grasp – it’s been called a spiritual supermarket – and say, “I’ll try a little of this and a little of that and a little of that.” We need to commit ourselves to a tradition, as all of you have; you’ve all committed yourselves to vipassana as a tradition and to understanding that practice and deepening in that practice. But we use these various supports.
Access concentration takes us to a place where the wisdom mind goes deep, where we see objects arising and passing away. We understand the whole conditional aspect of mundane reality, everything arising and passing away, impermanent and not self. There’s no going out to an object, no pulling back from an object. We can’t say the object is not real, it has a relative reality, but it has no ultimate reality, it’s simply impermanent and conditioned.
Access concentration is a very specific form of concentration. It can’t watch the huge picture, it watches this object arising and dissolving. It watches the next object arising and dissolving. It moves into a very deep wisdom about the conditioned realm. Out of that wisdom comes clarity about the emptiness of self, of everything, that nothing has a separate self.
But access concentration doesn’t itself take us into the dharmakaya. I said last night, it’s part of the sambhogakaya bridge. One moves beyond access concentration. Access concentration is a tool that gets us onto the bridge and then something else takes us beyond the bridge.
This is where I was looking last night and this morning, trying to understand, how to articulate this better. I’ve experienced this so many times and until your questions last night I never really thought about it. So I’m changing here a bit of what I said last night.
When I get to that place where access concentration is very strong, it’s very peaceful. There’s complete equanimity, there’s joy, there’s ease. Repeatedly I see what seems like a glow in the distance. That’s the only way I can phrase it, like the very earliest dawn on the horizon. Through closed eyes there’s a sense of approaching light. But I’m not in the light; I only see it out there.
Then there comes the intention within access concentration to enter more fully into the light, If I had never worked with Pure awareness, there would be uncertainty about what that light is. But it is familiar because I’ve done other kinds of practice and experienced it before.
For the vipassana practitioner who has done no pure awareness or other kind of practice, we come to that point that we’ve talked about with many of you where it feels like you’re on the edge of a cliff being asked to jump into the unknown. One asks, “What if I go into that light and the light dissolves everything that I’ve ever thought of as self? Is it safe? Will I annihilate myself?” Solely with the traditional vipassana path, I ask myself to move toward something that people have told me is safe but of which I have no personal knowledge.
Resting in awareness takes me to a different place. First, the term, “resting in awareness: I’m going to use the Tibetan term rigpa here. It’s a simple word and I don’t think it’s intruding on Tibetan practice to use that term, rigpa.
The kilesas, or defilements, temporarily dissolve as you enter rigpa. You can’t be fully in rigpa with the defilements functioning. It doesn’t mean they’re gone, but at that moment while resting in awareness they are not functioning. When a defilement returns, it pulls you out of rigpa.
Q: What’s a defilement?
Barbara: The Pali word is kilesa. It simply means the experiences of fear, hatred, greed, all heavy and self-centered emotions that come with a strong sense of separate self. The whole illusion of the separate self is perhaps the core defilement that we need to get past.
Added while reviewing. From the site: https://www.angelfire.com/indie/anna_jones1/ariyas.html – N70: Please note, here at my cabin my dial-up connection is very slow so this is not a “best” site, only a useable, clear one.
Defilements are divided into three kinds, namely:
1) Coarse kilesa; they manifest by way of body and speech, for example: to cut off the life of living beings; to seize things that belong to other people by robbing, stealing, pilfering, or snatching; sexual misconduct; lying, slandering, insulting; to take intoxicants and drugs which are the origin of carelessness. (Abstention from these acts is sila and a basic requirement for the successful practice of meditation.)
2) Medium kilesa; that is to say the nívarana, kilesa that appear in the mind. They season the mind so that it gives rise to desire; dissatisfaction, anger, dejection, drowsiness, agitation, worry, annoyance, indecision, doubt, and delusion. The medium kilesa have authority when they have arisen, they make the mind hot, stuffy, clumsy, troubled, worried, annoyed, apprehensive, uncertain and skeptical more and more.
3) Subtle kilesa; they are called anusaya-kilesa. They are the nature that lies dormant in the five rúpa-náma-kkhandha. When there is a sufficient cause they are bound to arise. Usually these anusaya-kilesa remain quiet, they are not at all evident and do not issue forth in any way. But when there are any objects, whether good or bad, that come into contact with the eyes, the ears, the nose, the tongue, the body, and the mind then their state changes to the medium and coarse kilesa and they break forth through body and speech later.
As an analogy, to distinguish between these three kinds of coarse, medium, and subtle kilesa, one may compare them with a match. The subtle kilesa resemble the fire that is hidden in the head of the match. The medium kilesa are like taking match and striking the side of the matchbox. The fire then becomes evident. The coarse kilesa compare to using the fire that has sprung up and setting it to some material. The fire will then burn that object and can spread into a big blaze later.
So when any of these are strong – it may be just minor irritation but any anger comes with a sense of self – mind thinks, “Me; I don’t want that.” You can think about rigpa but you can’t move into rigpa. The move into rigpa temporarily releases the defilements. Access concentration also temporarily releases the defilements but access concentration is more in this moment. In this moment seeing even an awareness of body pain arise. Aversion doesn’t arise with the body pain. There’s a sense of pain and it may be felt as unpleasant.
I experienced this firmly once on retreat out at my cabin. I was meditating and in a deep place of access concentration and there was a skunk, probably somewhere near my cabin. There was a very strong acrid smell. My eyes were burning; my nose was burning, noting, “smelling, smelling, strong burning.” In my mind arose the image of a skunk. It was fascinating to me afterwards to realize there was no aversion, just presence, skunk, knowing this too will pass. There was complete equanimity with it and just watching it.
So that degree of concentration is so strong that the defilements temporarily removed. But the defilements are only permanently removed in full realization experience.
Q: Final full realization or like each step <inaudible>.
Barbara: Each of the stages of realization – stream-entry, once-returner, non-returner, arahat, or Sotapanna, Sakadagami, Anagami, Arahat – releases different of the defilements. From the same web site for those who want more detail:
The Arahat (the fourth stage of realization) is a fully Enlightened being who has extinguished all defilements. The Sotapanna (first stage of realization, also Sotapatti-magga-nana) has uprooted wrong view but still has other defilements. The Sakadagami and Anagami are at the second and third stage of realization, respectively .
The Sotapanna and the Sakadagami have consciousness with attachment (lobha-mula-citta) without wrong view, and this citta can be attached to all six classes of objects. The Anagami has lobha-mula-citta without wrong view which is attached to the class of objects which can only be experienced through the mind-door (dhammarammana). He has eradicated attachment to the sense objects which are visible object, sound, odour, flavour and tangible object. The Arahat has neither kusala dhammas nor akusala dhammas on account of the six classes of objects. He has completely eradicated all defilements and akusala dhammas. The person who is not Arahat may understand the characteristics of the objects as they are, he may know when the object is a paramattha dhamma and when a concept. However, so long as one has not eradicated all defilements there are conditions for their arising. There can be happiness or sadness, like or dislike on account of the objects, be they paramattha dhammas or concepts. To what extent defilements arise for the non-arahat depends on the degree of understanding that has been developed, it depends on whether a person is a non-ariya or an Ariya who is a Sotapanna, a Sakadagami or an Anagami.
This web site may be helpful for those who want a more technical explanation: https://www.abhidhamma.org/sujin3a.htm
Each of these 4 stages of enlightenment permanently releases certain of the defilements. Meanwhile the best we can do until we’ve attained that arahat level is to be mindful of how we shift back into a sense of a separate ego that starts running things from a place of fear and contraction and just say no, I’m not going to do that. This is a core of our Mussar-based practice, deepening in awareness and seeing that we can shift these habitual energies. We can create a shift that has us living from a much more centered and loving place rather than the habitual fear-based place.
So with each of these areas that we’ve explored like humility, responsibility, generosity, and so forth, one thing that ties them together is that when we respond in an unwholesome way, that response is coming from a very self-centered and fear-based place. When we respond in a wholesome way we see that this is just a concept of me vs. that; if I release the idea and move past the idea, I’m able to respond to the world in a much more loving way, whether it’s in term of patience of generosity or responsibility or something else.
Pure awareness practice is a bit different because when we rest in pure awareness we’re temporarily outside the whole field of the defilements. The Tibetan system uses 2 Tibetan words, sem, for everyday mind, conceptual everyday mind, and rigpa, the pure awareness mind.
Sem is the mind that makes up the marketing list, feels annoyance at your neighbor whose dog pooped on your property and is trying to plan to get 3 things done this afternoon when you only have time for 2 of them. It’s the everyday mind that’s always racing around, planning, fixing. There’s nothing bad about this mind. Somebody’s got to get to the market. But it doesn’t have to be a “somebody”. A “nobody” can go to the market. There doesn’t have to be a self in it.
The traditional dzogchen teachings are taught at two levels. The first is called trekchod, cutting through. The second is togyal or toghal. The trekchod practice resembles the pure awareness practice you have started with me. We haven’t called it trekchod; we’ve simply called it pure awareness practice. We’ve done this at Emrich retreat for over a decade and many of you have done it with me at other retreats.
There are 3 stages. View, simply seeing the view, as it’s called in Tibetan tradition. This is introducing you to this pure awareness mind. This is what this experience is. And again, we’ve done this countless times under that catalpa tree. Just that moment of the falling blossom. I can remember so many people saying “Ah, I got it!” at the moment seeing the blossom fall, it was just, “I got it! That’s it!” Seeing the view.
After seeing the view we stabilize that in meditation. The meditation phase is the practice that we’ve worked with through the years where we rest in awareness, in rigpa. When pulled out we question or analyze. When the contraction releases, we return to rigpa. One approach is, when something seems separate, when we suddenly feel ourselves moving into a place of self and other, we raise one of several questions. “What is it?” or “Is there anything separate here? Anything other than God here?”
In the Tibetan teachings they ask a question in Flight of the Garuda, is it separate color or form or shape? That question seems to confuse some people because yes, this object that I see might have a specific form or color or shape but that’s not it’s permanent form or color or shape, it’s always changing.
I prefer personally the question, “Is there anything separate here? Can I see that this is just the expression of conditions?” To understand that, you’ve got to have the basis of a vipassana practice that recognizes it’s all arising from conditions and passing away, and there is nothing separate.
That tree someday is going to have fallen and decayed into the ground and presumably a flower garden is going to be growing there and a new tree. Is the new tree, the same tree or a different tree? It may be a totally different species of tree. That’s an evergreen. What if a maple grows there with its roots buried into the rich soil of the decayed evergreen? Is it the same tree or a different tree?
All conditioned objects are arising from conditions and passing away, impermanent and not self, but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist. We need to be careful not to get caught in that seemingly logical pathway of nihilism that says, “Nothing exists. Nothing matters.” Everything exists but it has no separate self. It’s all expression of the divine and we have to cherish it as that. It all exists. But there’s no separate self and there’s no reason to be more attached to one form than another. It’s all constantly changing.
So we work with the meditation practice to stabilize the practice. After it’s stable then we get up off our cushion and take it out into the world. We can and must carry pure awareness into the world. So often Aaron reminds me, just a little tap on my shoulder, where is rigpa? And it’s a wonderful question. It immediately pulls me back. I realize that I’ve closed myself up and separated myself. Because of the depth of my practice, that’s all it takes to just (sound effect), “Okay, here’s rigpa” and as soon as rigpa reopens, the defilements that were gathering dissolve, at least much of the time.
Let’s use a concrete situation. I come into the kitchen; my kids are home for vacation and there’s a whole pile of dirty dishes and garbage in the sink. Anger comes up. “They’re 30-some years old and they still don’t know how to take care of themselves!” Blah blah blah blah! Aaron will then nudge me and say, “Where is rigpa?”
Just seeing, “Okay, they’re the product of their conditions. I suppose I didn’t make them wash dishes enough when they were 10 years old.” Maybe they have been conditioned not to clean up. Letting it go. Watching, seeing the impermanence of the anger mind. Seeing how that arose out of conditions, it’s impermanent and not self. Maybe a few breaths working with feeling the out of balance-ness where there’s a lot of heat and fire energy and not much movement. Even turning the water on at the sink and feeling the water. Using the water element to help cool the anger. It’s not always a matter of instantly moving back into rigpa. There may be need to attend to what has arisen, which in this case might be anger. Releasing it.
And then as there’s re-entry into rigpa, there’s no possibility any more of anger, there’s just compassion and ease. And that compassion doesn’t necessarily clean up after people; it might go and tell them, “I can’t make breakfast until you get your dirty dishes out of the sink.” That’s fine. It doesn’t mean I have to do it. Just from that clarity there’s no anger that asks, “Clean up your dinner dishes.” Maybe they had a late party after Hal and I went to bed and left all the stuff in the kitchen. “Clean it up.” But it’s kindness that asks.
Rigpa is strong and there’s no possibility of the defilements in that moment. But unless I can stay in rigpa 100% of the time the defilements are not eradicated. This takes us back to the vipassana practice. I’m sure that the Tibetan tradition has its own pathway for the complete release of the defilements but I don’t know that pathway. For me, I take this back into the vipassana practice, back to that place where I’m sitting with access concentration and luminosity. Because I’m so familiar with luminosity and I’m so familiar with the emptiness of rigpa, with no sense of a separate self, that instead of saying, “What’s that? I’m not sure I can go there,” it’s inviting. I see this light literally.
Q: Does it pulsate?
Barbara: It pulsates, not so much pulsating as like long rays of light reaching out, inviting. And like the sun coming up this morning, as it came up over the hill. First the ground was all dark and you could just see it across the lake, and then gradually it was lighting the grass. The strength of that luminosity invites me in; it shows me the opening.
There is a strong aspiration; this is where that change of lineage knowledge comes in, the strong aspiration not to keep coming back to the kilesas over and over and over, not to continue entrapped by them. Here is the path.
I don’t know where to put rigpa on that bridge. It seems to be in two places. When rigpa is strong it takes me completely into the dharmakaya. This is the, we talk about the difference between luminosity and this innate clarity and light. This strong light of awareness seems to be dharmakaya. The luminosity is more of the sambhogakaya, more of the bridge.
Q: So does that mean that you can experience the clear light without necessarily experiencing the luminosity <inaudible>?
Barbara: No, the luminosity I think has to come first. (inaudible dialogue and laughter)
Q:…luminosity as in nada or does it have another sign?
Barbara: Luminosity as related to nada. We experience that first.
Q: The direct expression of the Unconditioned. Whatever it is, you experience that first and then the clear light after that.
Barbara: Yes, but then beyond that is that, THAT. That just disc of innate clarity and radiance, which I can’t say is the Unconditioned. It’s like one has stepped off the sambhogakaya bridge and got at least one foot on the dharmakaya shore. One may not have wandered 100 yards into the dharmakaya, one is still touching the bridge, but that innate clarity and radiance is… akin to but not identical to, and here I can only speak of my personal experience, akin to but not identical to the same kind of clarity and radiance that I experience through a vipassana path when there’s complete ego and body dissolution, and then what is called cessation experience, when everything seems to cease arising and dissolving and there’s only stillness. Within that stillness awareness notes that same strong clarity and light.
I wish I had more ways to talk about it but I’ve never talked about these experiences with other people and heard their experiences aside from John, a little bit his experience of it, and his experience has been similar to mine. If I talked to 100 people who had gone deeply into these experiences I’d have a broader range of illustration to give you.
Q: I heard you mention two kinds of experiences in our conversations. This type you’re referring to right now is clear light. It does not seem to have any objects or content in it other than the light. (Barbara: Correct.) Then I heard you speak of being in a state of no self where there are all the objects around you and you are not separate<inaudible>.
Barbara: That would be access concentration. There’s no sense of a separate self, objects are still arising and passing away. They also seem not to have any separate self. There’s not necessarily a strong sense of light.
I feel the experience of what seems like a giant cornucopia; it’s as if I’m standing outside and can just see the rim and I can see objects emerging and then sliding back in. Then I get myself up on the rim. When I’m up on the rim it’s more like resting in rigpa. There’s still the experience of objects arising and passing away and attending to them skillfully. The experience there is of resting in rigpa; if I’m just in access concentration I can only see one at a time. With rigpa I can see the whole play of it, the vastness of it. This conditioned expressing and falling away is not just about this object, it’s about everything.
Then awareness seems to go down into the, “Where is this all coming from?” It’s all arising out of emptiness and passing away. I don’t know at this point whether to say it’s access concentration taking that as an object or if awareness, I think it’s more awareness, holding the whole field.
Okay, I need to ask Aaron something here, just a minute.
(pause)
Aaron: Good morning and my love to you all.
Access concentration is still a form of consciousness, citta. It is bordering on the opening of the lokuttara citta, but it’s still a form of consciousness. As it opens– this instrument is hearing my thoughts and phrasing them not quite the way I might phrase them. I don’t want to incorporate into her body until later.
As access concentration deepens, it moves into what is really identical to the experience of rigpa, of awareness. It is a broad awareness yet retains the ability to shine the spotlight on this object or that object.
Rigpa does not have the ability to shine the spotlight in that way on one object or another. Thus access concentration or simply deep presence provides the practitioner with a certain wisdom about the nature of the conditioned realm. One comes to that point of saying, “What I’m seeking is not in the conditioned realm.” When one is sitting, as Barbara put it, on the edge of the cornucopia, everything is seen as arising from a base of emptiness and falling back into the emptiness.
Within the mind resting in awareness, the innate clarity of mind is liberated. (pause) Access concentration sees the innate clarity of mind also as an object but it’s not a mundane object; it is the dharmakaya itself, revealing itself as the nature of mind, as innate clarity and radiance, as clear light.
The two seem to come together then. If one is sitting on the edge of this cornucopia and sees everything expressing out of emptiness, one understands that one must move into that emptiness, whether it’s from the perspective of the vipassana practitioner with access concentration or the perspective of the practitioner resting in awareness. The practitioner with access concentration has the advantage here because there is a strong mindfulness that can be directed, as is not always present with rigpa. So there’s the ability to direct mind into that emptiness and to realize the nature of that empty clear radiance as Dharmakaya, as the Unconditioned, and to move into it.
For the practitioner who approaches this with no access concentration, simply the dawning of that clear light, awareness, seeing it as clear mind, seeing it as the Dharmakaya, but there may not be the tool developed to direct awareness deeply into it, so that there’s just a glimpse of it rather than a full emergence into it. This is why the vipassana path is such a practical path to taking you through these 3 remaining stages beyond stream entry, which is really the first dawning of that clear light. Let me phrase it differently. Stream entry is the first realization of everything as that clear radiance. Then the non-returner has the experience of going deeper into that clear radiance and seeing how everything is expressing as the aggregates. How the elements themselves come into play, and the various aggregates of form, feeling, perception, and so forth. All are arising out of that emptiness. There’s nothing that’s self.
Then for the non-returner there is the experience, usually, of seeing how this being that you were got trapped into the whole illusion of separation, and a deep understanding of the various karmic aspects that pulled you there. For the non-returner coming out of that experience, there is a very strong release of the kilesas because there’s no longer any self-identification with any of it.
If I could use this as an example; if you built a whole village of snowmen, a dozen of them, and you put different decorations on them, different facial expressions. Some were tall, some were short, some were fat, and some were thin. You gave them each a name. You spent several weeks chatting with them, getting to know them. And then one day there was a heat wave and the sun came out and everything melted. All that remains is a big puddle
The non-realized human in that situation would say, “But I’ve lost my best friends!” And the realized human would say, “Well, of course. They were nothing but snow. But when it next rains tomorrow they’ll all come back to me again, as water from the skies.” Nothing is ever lost. It’s all recycling.
If you were self-identified with one of those snowmen, with a deeper non-returner experience you see how you got to be a snowman or how you got to be a human. What is this human body? It’s just a mixture of the elements. What is the human consciousness? That’s also conditioned. What are these feelings? What are perceptions? There’s nothing there but conditioning, just the outplay of conditions. And samsara is the continued flow of these conditions based on the view of a separate self.
Do you know the word sankhara? I’m looking for a word to explain it in English…Sankhara is everything that arises from conditions and in itself serves as the conditions for future arising.
This insert is from Aaron, page 11 of Aaron’s book, No Chain At All:
The second part of the circle, volitional formations, sankhara means all things that come into being as the effect of causes and conditions, and, in themselves are the causes and conditions for the arising of other phenomena. As used in the doctrine of Dependent Origination, sometimes this word, sankhara, is taken to mean only actions, words and thoughts that lead to reactions, in other words, that which creates adhering karma which keeps one captive to the wheel of becoming. I feel this definition is incomplete, and prefer the first, that is, everything that comes into being as the effect of causes and conditions, and in themselves are causes and conditions for new arising.
I prefer the first for this reason. Sankhara is that which leads to the formation of karma, whether adhering or non-adhering karma. When your loving actions free of self create wholesome and non adhering karma, this does not further chain you, but karma is still created. Only the Arahat, a fully enlightened being who does not need to take rebirth, has the wisdom and complete freedom from attachment and aversion to act, speak or think totally without creating karma.
If you want to plant a sweet apple tree, you need fertile soil; you need water, rain, you need sunshine, and you need an apple seed. If you plant the apple seed, then you walk away and abandon it and the rains don’t come, the seed will not grow. If you plant the apple seed and the wind blows several big thorn bush seeds onto the site, they may grow fast and choke out the apple seed.
Everything is arising from conditions and those conditions become the seed for further conditions. You return 5 years later thinking, “I’m going to find apples.” And instead you find a huge growth of thorn trees in your carefully prepared soil. “What happened to my apples?” You did not take care of your apples so the thorns took over.
If you do not take care of your kilesas – of the various forces of grasping, greed, aversion, hatred and fear – they’ll take over. The beautiful seeds won’t grow.
Sankhara is part of the wheel of dependent origination. It’s in the book No Chain At All. In that book Barbara helped work out a clear English terminology for it but I do not remember the precise English words that were used. Barbara can look it up later and review the definition of it we gave in that book. Or I can explain it to you in the Pali or Thai, if you’d like!
Everything is arising from conditions and passing away. With access concentration we have a temporary release of the defilements, we are temporarily outside the field of defilements. But you are not fully outside the field of defilements; they still arise when the conditions are present. And non-access concentration is a condition under which those conditions will arise. Non-mindfulness is a condition, non-presence. No matter how present you are, the defilements may still arise but they won’t pull you into excessive behavior and reactivity to them if you’re mindful. But they’ll still arise.
Resting in pure awareness, pure awareness does not stop the defilements from arising as access concentration does. With access concentration you’re using a certain energy and focus, holding that access concentration. That’s concentration. Resting in awareness…if something comes along that will stimulate the arising of a defilement, it will still arise and then one must use the cutting through practice to say, “What is it? Is there anything here that’s other than the Unconditioned?” To see the nature of what has arisen is just this or that seed that’s popping up, impermanent and not self. And then you’re back into awareness again, resting in awareness.
So they act differently on the defilements. Each is useful. The combination of the two is beautiful and that’s why we’re teaching it to you.
We’re already beyond our time limit for the next sitting. We’ll change the schedule. I want to finish up, though, and get you back to practice.
Our purpose in coming together these 2 years is to help you all become clear instruments to serve. Not from the ego place but from a place of rigpa, a place of centeredness and clarity, an egoless place. Of course being human it’s not going to be perfect. Some of that service is going to come from the ego place. I want you to be able to recognize when it’s coming from the ego and take care of it.
When it comes from a selfless place it’s much more powerful. Are you familiar with Gandhi’s teachings of satyagraha? The term means soul force in Sanskrit. This was the basis for Gandhi’s non-violent action. He understood that if an ego said, “No, I’m not going to move from here. I’m not going to do this or that,” they would simply shoot. One ego shooting another.
But when you come from this place of soul force, this place of emptiness of self, you invite that in the other. I want Barbara to tell you a story when I finish talking and before you go back to practice because it works to illustrate what we’re aiming for here.
As Barbara said earlier, awakening would be one of the fruits of this work but you are not doing this work solely because you came together for 2 years to say, “We’re going to have a 2-year workshop about awakening.” Great, awaken! Please do. But simply start with the intention to be of service from as clear a place as possible, and because of that intention, to do this hard ongoing work with yourself to release the obscurations, and to shift the old habitual tendencies, especially that of the illusion of the separate self, so that you live from an increasing place of clarity.
The tool that I want you to refine today so it becomes more stable for you is the tool of pure awareness. You’re not going to perfect it in one day; you are going to be working with this as well as the other tools through the next 4 months. And we’ll do a lot more pure awareness practice out on the lake in July.
But I want you to get to know the experience of pure awareness. The second step in the Tibetan phrasing of the teachings, trekchod and togyal, togyal is the releasing– I’m simplifying this, vastly simplifying it. But the releasing of all arising into that clear light, seeing that there is nothing, essentially, nothing but that emptiness, innate clarity, and radiance. And everything that arises merges with that and dissolves into that.
One of the reasons we work with the element practice is because it gives you the experience of working with the various elements and seeing how they merge together, which is a practical step stool to this greater merging of all arising into clear light.
When you start to see how tension can resolve itself when it’s merged with spaciousness and air, you start to see that it’s all flexible; it all changes. Then we start to bring (in) the direct experiences of the sitting. “Sitting; feeling some tension. Am I getting this right? Do I understand it? Maybe I don’t. Maybe I’m doing it all wrong. Open my eyes, look around. Everybody else looks so peaceful. They must all get it. Why don’t I get it? Ahhh, tension. The separate self. Who is this? What is this self? Is there anything solid here? Ahhh, letting it go. Coming back into spaciousness.”
These are all stepping stones. B said last night he needs little steps and I think you all need little steps. So let’s just take it one step at a time. For those who have a fairly clear sense of rigpa, what that experience is, feel free just to practice, alternating between the different practices we’ve spoken of in whatever way feels helpful to you. Do some vipassana practice. Sit some with the eyes open doing pure awareness practice.
If it feels of value to work with the elements at a certain point, do that. If it feels of value to work with your guides, do that. Working with your guides is not a meditation practice so much as a reflective time between the sittings. Talk to your guides about what’s come up and about your questions.
For those who do not have clarity about the experience of rigpa, we will meet– I’m going to leave this to Barbara to arrange the schedule. She has such a better understanding of your linear time than I do. I will leave the body. We will have time for questions this evening but I want you in silence for the day except for the instruction period with pure awareness practice for those who need it. I will return the body to Barbara.
Barbara: I see we’re way past our time! So much for schedules. Aaron is laughing, he said he said the same thing. Aaron says, there’s no linear time anyhow so why are we troubled with it!
Okay, Aaron is asking me to tell you briefly a story as illustration.
This goes back to the south in the early ’60’s, I think maybe 1961 or 62. A sit-in at a small restaurant. They had been holding sit-ins there for several weeks and angry people had come and beaten up the people who were doing the sit-in. Regularly they had had 2 couples come, a black couple and a white couple. The couple earlier had been severely beaten. They asked for volunteers, only volunteers who really understood non-violence and looking for people who had good experience with it.
I was young. (I and a young white man and a middle-aged black couple, the four of us went. The black couple was in the back seat of the car on the floor because we knew we’d never reach the restaurant if people saw them. We went into the restaurant. The other people who were there all immediately left. I could hear then. We could hear an angry mob forming outside.
There was fear. We knew we could be beaten, we knew we could even be killed. A basis of satyagraha is compassion and deep understanding that we’re providing the catalyst for the person who is going to react to that catalyst. They may not be ready not to react violently, so there has to be forgiveness ahead of time. If they beat me or kill me, I accept that I’m contributing to that reaction, I’m giving them a catalyst so they can choose. They can hold back and not beat or kill me but if they do that, there’s already forgiveness. If I take the action expecting them to be someplace that they’re not, then I’m forcing them into a corner. Then I’m co-responsible for them killing me because I’ve put myself in front of, it’s like putting myself in front of a grizzly bear with food hanging out of your pockets and saying, “You’re not going to touch me now. I forbid you to!” Of course he’s going to maul or kill me.
So we sat there for probably close to an hour, all of us in meditation. We knew each other; we trusted each other. We had come to a place of readiness where, simultaneously, we just all looked up and met our eyes and nodded and said, “Okay, we’re ready.” And we knew that the only thing that could protect us was our love and being in a very egoless place. I would not have phrased it as an egoless place back then; I didn’t know dharma in that way. But I knew that I had to be holding space for my fear, have strong compassion, and not walk out there with anger or blame to the people.
We walked out the door; there were some steps and there was an angry mob gathered. They had tomatoes, stones and bricks and sticks and various things. I remember being terrified but also somehow, as I look back on it now, it was like the experience of access concentration. I was able to look at that terror from a place of equanimity and see, it’s just terror. I didn’t phrase it in this way, as I said I didn’t know dharma, but there was an awareness, “it’s just the way conditions have formed here. It’s okay to be terrified and I don’t have to blame anyone for the terror or act out the terror. Just breathe and hold space.”
And all 4 of us walked down and the crowd just opened in front of us. Meeting people’s eyes. In some I saw shame and I just tried to smile into those eyes. In some I saw anger. In some I saw a kind of awakening in themselves. We simply walked down the steps, walked through about 20 feet of crowd that parted in front of us, got into a car and drove off. It was one of the most profound and life-changing experiences of my life because it led me really to know the power of emptiness and compassion.
This is what we’re trying to learn here. I’m not going to send you off into a place where people are going to try to beat you with clubs, but how do we attend to the world from this place of emptiness?
This is the basis of Gandhi’s teaching work. Aaron says he said, “satyagraha.” You might want to read some about satyagraha. It’s a very beautiful teaching.
(session ends)