April 11, 2023 Tuesday Evening, Living Awake Class
Who Are You? What Remains?
Aaron: This presentation is offered for the highest good of all beings and harm to none.
My focus in these last sessions of class is a deeper opening into non-duality. Knowing the non-duality of positive and negative, of form and emptiness, of light and darkness.
We have used the waves breaking on the beach as an image that’s helpful. When you see a wave, you see the water moving into the aggregate of form. And then it breaks and stretches out on the beach, runs up onto the sand, soaking into the sand. The water element merges with the sand element, and whatever is surplus, not soaking in, runs back into the water. First it was a big, cresting wave. Then it washes up on the shore and washes back, and you can see it merge back into the ocean. Nothing was ever there but ocean.
The aggregates, I know you know them: form, feeling, thought, impulse consciousness; the various aggregates that you believe to be self. You’re not your thoughts. You’re not your feelings. You’re not your outer form. You’re not your consciousness. What remains?
If the ocean is not the wave, is not the water, what is the ocean? What is the fullness of the ocean? If everything has the ability to express itself in form, but the form is not its deepest essence, what is that essence? What are you?
I know some of you have heard Barbara speak of a meditation she did on a long spit of land into Lake Erie, Point Pelee, a Canadian national park. This point extends far out into Lake Erie, with waves—big waves, like ocean waves—breaking against it. She was able to lie there on her stomach, the sand spit extending out, the waves breaking on this side, the other side calm. She just lay there with her head resting over the top, watching the waves coming in, some of them high enough that they almost hit her face. But then they melted into the sand.
I spent hours with her watching the waves break. There was no denying there was a wave; in that moment, it had form. But what was it? It did not hold that form. It didn’t get up and walk around with that form. It was constantly changing.
Your forms are also constantly changing, impermanent. Feelings, feelings of pleasant, unpleasant and neutral. They arise out of conditions and they pass away. You are not your feelings; the feelings are simply arisen from conditions. The mental body, the mental aggregate, thoughts. You often become more identified with your thoughts—this is a good thought; that is bad thought. If I have a bad thought, I must be a bad person, and so forth. But of course, it’s just arisen from conditions.
If you are not your body, your feelings, your thoughts, who are you? Well, some of you might then say I must be my consciousness. But that’s just another aggregate. Consciousness is always arising and passing away. The aggregate of consciousness, it is not you. Who are you? What remains?
(shares screen of waves) You can see these waves. There’s definitely a wave. And you can see how, as it comes into shore, it washes back into the ocean. Each wave is an expression of form. But is there anything there that is not ocean? Let’s run it again…
You can even see the beach coming down and lying under the ocean and the particles of sand being stirred up by the waves. Is there anything separate there? Water, wind energy, tides, sand; nothing is separate.
Let yourself rest in this movement. Feel the tides within your being, within your body, within your mind—the movement…
You can see a wave here picking up form, becoming an independent self momentarily. Moving into shore. Pouring itself out onto the shore and retreating back into its ocean-ness.
Take a few minutes now to meditate and feel yourself coming into seemingly independent existence. “I am this. I am that.” This personality, this appearance, shape and size, and so forth. Feel how easy it is to move into self-identification with something there in the form, in the feelings, in the thoughts, the impulse consciousness. Take a few minutes to just breathe, watching yourself being pulled into that self-identification and then relaxing into: I am not that. What am I? What am I? What am I?
It’s part of the same practice we do when we hug a tree. Feeling merged with the tree. You are the tree; the tree is you. And if you are the tree, you are the earth the tree is planted in and the sun that shines down upon it. This is what we mean when we say there is no separate self. But the human clings to the idea of being a separate self.
Practicing with this is a big part of our learning about being on the bridge. You can’t get caught in the Dharmakaya or the nirmanakaya. You are that awakeness of the Dharmakaya, and you are the human expression of the dharmakaya, of source. To be effective in the work you came to do as a human you need to acknowledge there is the human and the cherished nirmanakaya expression of your being. But it is not self; it does not define you. You are the spaciousness of the Dharmakaya, the light and love.
In your practice, you become increasingly adept at seeing the places where you’re being sucked into some self-identification. Barbara lay in bed last night in a fair amount of pain—body aches, pain in her foot. Fear, because she has had very severe episodes of cellulitis in this leg. What will happen to me? Closing up into being a somebody.
The entity Father John and I, who are working with her, invited her to see the various parts of the foot. The flowing of blood as part of the ocean of her, the water element. The heat of fever or infection as the sun element burning a bit too hot. Any feeling of resistance, just hardening. Inviting her to deeply open to her true being, to feel the tides coming in and washing out, the cool breezes, the warm sun, the water flowing through her body, the hard clay material of her body. And the repeated question, Who am I? Who am I?
She had truly drifted off to sleep into a deep spacious place, just resting in light and the feeling of well-being. Knowing that the different conditions that touch on the elements will come and go. Contracted, spacious; open, closed—it’s all arising from conditions, including the infection arising from conditions. We can bring balance to those conditions. Seeing the places where we feel a condition coming at us and saying, “No!” and pushing it away. I’m going to show you another video here…
(Screen-shares a video of waves) Can you see the video? Now, sometimes in our experience the wave of being just flows gently to the beach and comes back into the greater ocean. And sometimes, if it hits a rock…(picture shows wave exploding outward with great force) We all have different rock experiences in our lives. For Barbara, the infection that started two days ago is a kind of rock experience. If you are human, your wave is going to hit rocks at times. Contraction! The openness of your being smashes up against something solid. But those exploding waves are just water droplets, splashing. That’s part of you too. And the rock is part of you. The sky is part of you.
A valuable question that we’re going to look at tonight is what do you do when you come up against a rock? How do you relate to the rocks? Do you relate to them as something other than self or part of the self? You’re not just the ocean, not just the sky; you’re also the rocks, and the foam. Watch it. You’re all of that.
Each of you has many different kinds of rocks that you constantly experience, the things that you smash against—seemingly this separate self, smashing against that object, that person, that life situation.
Just watch it for a minute… You might ask, is it safe to smash into the rocks? What will become of me? Will I break apart? Will I cease to exist?
But you can see how the water is just falling back into the ocean and sweeping back out to sea. Nothing was ever separate, even for an instant. The water droplets never ceased to be a part of the ocean. The ocean never ceased to be a part of the sky and the rain and the whole cycle of earth existence. Look beyond the rocks for a moment out into the distance, the vast ocean, the vast sky—and the rocks, of course, are part of it. The form aggregate, solid.
I’m going to stop the screen-sharing.
So, our inquiry tonight is a very direct one: Who am I? Who am I? What am I?
And of course, it’s not just one answer. But in the ultimate sense, what are you when you cease to be the form aggregate, the feeling aggregate, the mental aggregate, the consciousness aggregates? What remains? What are you?
The human holds back from that. You need some way to identify yourself, because it feels frightening to go that far out. If I cease to identify myself as this or that, what will happen to me? What remains? But truly letting go of that self-identification as this or that is the only path to freedom.
(Aaron has only been partly incorporated and now returns the body to Barbara; John will continue from here)
My love to you all. I love you very much. And I so admire your love and courage that bring you into this work to discover who you truly are when you’re not caught up in the small self-identifications. You are so vast and so beautiful. I love you. I am Aaron.
Barbara: Thank you, Aaron. One other thing that John and I talked earlier came up that that John suggested I share with you. I remember it was with the ocean—rough and smooth, solid and empty. The waves coming in.
John: We spoke about was your experience on Emerald Isle when that big wave came and you were tumbling around. Aaron asked you to be aware of…
(Barbara screen-shares the wave video)
Barbara: You can see the individuated waves, and you can see the ocean. The turbulence and the stones. John, I’m sorry, I don’t remember what your exact question was. You brought up something that was beautiful. I’m going to stop the sharing for a minute…
John: You and I spoke about your experience on Emerald Isle when you were caught in the wave and you were tumbling around. Aaron said to you, “Right now, with this tumult, where is the spaciousness, where is the calm, within the being tossed around with the wave?” And that that helped you to be able to lift your head and be able to take some air in. I think that was the example that you were going to talk about.
Barbara: Thank you—you picked up on this as helpful, John. Basically, I was drowning. It was a near-death experience. I was knocked unconscious. I was coming in and out of consciousness. My body was just being swept by the waves and knocked onto the bottom; lifted up again. I was not in control of my body. I was out.
Aaron asked me to see both the tumult and energy and movement of the waves and the space between the waves, and to rest in the space between the waves that kept coming. But literally to rest in that spaciousness. And to feel in that spaciousness the opportunity to just rise to the surface. And I know I had spirit’s help to rise in that way, and I had human help as they first saw my head come up out of the water. My face was bleeding; I was clearly in distress. People were able to grab me and lift me up out of the water.
But the experience for me in that moment was I was getting lost in the tumult of the waves and the constancy of them instead of giving equal time to the space and stillness between the waves. That breaking and stillness, breaking and stillness.
So, John pointed this out, and I think it’s valuable for us to see that we’re constantly, when we feel ourselves hitting a rock and it’s very unpleasant… We see the rock coming and contract with —”Oh no!”, whatever that rock represents to you. Losing the job, sickness, financial distress, whatever the rock is, to see both the substance of that rock and the spaciousness, stillness. How can we remember that there is always that spaciousness and stillness, even if the rocks seem immense?
I’m tired; I need to stop here. I’m passing this to John. Thank you. I can talk more about it later.
John: Thank you, Barbara and Aaron. So, Aaron has been speaking with us for some time now about the question, Who am I? What’s the essence of my being?
There are various ways to come to this ever-deepening understanding of the essence of ourselves, of who we are when we’re not identified with our thoughts and emotions, not identified with the body as being ourself. Not identified with any of the aggregates, including what Aaron was speaking about in terms of the consciousness aggregate, sense consciousness aggregate, which arises with what we see or hear or smell or taste or feel or think.
When I was in India as a Buddhist monk with a primary practice of vipassana, I was of course interested in other traditions, especially the Advaita Vedanta school of Hinduism or sect of Hinduism. “Advaita vedanta” means non-dual, so the non-dual aspect of Hindu dharma.
I visited south India where Ramona Maharishi lived, in Tamil Nadu. I believe that he lived somewhere in the area of Madras, or grew up in that area. As a young teenager, he was at his uncle’s house, and he was overcome with this feeling that he was going to die. So he thought, “Okay, I’m going to die. What do I do now?”
He was lying on the ground, and he went into rigor mortis. He just kind of stiffened up as he was lying there. He asked himself the question, “Who am I?” Whenever he would experience what we would call the aggregates—when a thought came into mind, he would say, “I’m not this.” If there was a sound that arose, that hearing consciousness, he would say, “I’m not this.” If there was an emotion of fear that arose, he would say, “I’m not this.” Every time one of the aggregates expressed themselves, he would say, in the terms of Advaita Vedanta, “Neti, neti,” which means “not this”.
He did that for some time. Every time an expression of one of the aggregates arose, say a memory of his life or of his family, he would say, “Not this. I’m not this. Not this.” And he went on with that process until he became fully realized, until he came to the realization of who he truly is or was, which is what we describe in Buddha dharma as that which is unborn and uncreated and undying, or what we described as being the Dharmakaya or the truth body. That this is who I am.
With that powerful realization, he realized that he could not go back to being the person who he was before. He could not be joining his family again. He needed to further process this deep realization that he had. He had a little bit of money, and he got on a train. He went to this place called Arunachala, which is a mountain in southern India, and he spent the rest of his life there without telling anybody. He didn’t tell his family where he was going; he just took off.
He lived at the foot of this mountain for some time. There was a cave up in Arunachala mountain where he later lived and where he did his meditation practice. His mother, seeking her son, finally found him living at this mountain. She joined him, and ultimately there was an ashram that formed at the foot of Arunachala, which became Ramana ashram. I did live in that ashram and also the cave where he meditated. Once you entered into that cave, there was just a profound feeling. You could feel Ramana Maharshi. He was dead at that point, in the mid-1970s when I was there, but you could just kind of feel his awakened energy in that cave.
Every day he would walk down to the base of the mountain and join his mother to do walking meditation around Arunachala, around the mountain. The practice of neti, “not this, not this”, it’s just another way to come to the deep realization of who we are.
In vipassana practice, as Aaron has been describing—as we all know because we’ve been practicing it—we watch the aggregates arise. We skillfully relate to them. We watch them dissolve and cease. We don’t identify and say, “This is who I am. I am this thought. I’m this emotion. I’m this fear. I’m this jealousy,” et cetera. But rather, we develop the skill to just be able to observe and watch what arises within this relative experience of being human and the aggregates. We watch it and then watch it dissolve and cease.
This is what we talked about last time, a couple of weeks ago, in terms of access concentration. That we’re able to see these different expressions of ourselves, the aggregates arising and ceasing clearly, because we’re not identifying with them. We’re not trying to hold onto them. We’re not trying to push them away. We’re not holding onto the pleasant feelings. We’re not trying to push away the unpleasant feelings associated with our thoughts and body sensations and memories and sounds, or whatever it is that we’re experiencing through our consciousness when we’re not moving toward or away from those, or we’re making contact with within ourselves. We just watch it arise and cease. That we’re moving into the experience of access concentration.
And then, through that place of access concentration, we’re more in touch with our inner spaciousness, or the emptiness where the aggregates are arising from and ceasing back into. We’re not drawn into the experience of the aggregates. We’re not becoming solidified by the experience of the aggregates, because we’re not clinging to anything that’s arising, or we’re not pushing anything away out of aversion to what we’re experiencing. Then naturally we start to get in touch with this ground of being, this inner spaciousness or emptiness, the Dharmakaya, because it’s there. Do you see? This is a kind of relationship between the aggregates and access concentration and emptiness.
And so it’s very clear that Aaron is guiding us toward seeing this spaciousness as a result of watching the dissolution of the aggregates. It’s not full dissolution experience, but it is that sense of where we can access the Dharmakaya on the bridge, and where we can increasingly hold simultaneously both the nirmanakaya and the Dharmakaya, so that there’s a sense of not being drawn into the nirmanakaya and the aggregates and being solidified in them. It’s very difficult to experience any degree of spaciousness when we’re so identified with the aggregates as being who we are, or on the other side of the bridge, the Dharmakaya, where we’re experiencing the full dissolution of the aggregates—however, not in touch at all with relative reality and the nirmanakaya. But rather to be able to be more in the middle of the bridge and be able to hold both.
I was meditating this morning. What I was experiencing was exactly that. At the beginning of the meditation, I was aware of my breathing, and through the awareness of the breath, I started to experience that space between the breath and pretty soon moved into that space of inner spaciousness and calm and stillness, into the Dharmakaya.
Then I had the memory of what happened some years ago when I was at Duke university teaching there. We formed a union of non-tenured faculty at Duke, and I was the primary organizer of the union in my department. The chair of the department, of course, didn’t like the fact that I was unionizing within the department, and so he made my life pretty miserable, in terms of the things that he did as a way of getting back at me because of the union organizing, essentially. Some of it was pretty humiliating and painful to experience.
So, naturally, as a result of that, there was judgment, there was anger that I was experiencing toward him. And that was coming up. I was reading online this morning in the Duke paper, the Duke Chronicle, that one of the other faculty members in my department is retiring, a very good fellow. He was from France. He was the fencing coach for the university. I guess there was a memory of that as I was meditating and that brought up the whole thing with the union organizing and some of the pain that I experienced in relationship to the chair of the department.
So, here I was in the Dharmakaya, so to speak. I was just resting in pure awareness, and then all of a sudden there were these thoughts. The aggregate of memory, thought, image, all of it started to arise. I started to see myself moving into old mind, into the judgment and the feeling of separation between myself and him and more and more into the nirmanakaya side of the bridge.
But it felt out of balance, because there wasn’t that sense of spaciousness that we have when we’re right in the middle of the bridge and we’re experiencing both the Dharmakaya and the nirmanakaya. But that’s sometimes the way that it is. We move more and more to that Dharmakaya side of the bridge.
I’m just going to pull up here again what Aaron or Barbara shared with us before, which is, I believe, this one… Here it is again. So, sometimes this is the way that it is in our meditation practice. It can be like this in the beginning, where there are a lot of waves, where there’s a lot of motion. There’s not much stillness, not much of a sense of spaciousness. It can be like this before we meditate; at the beginning of our meditation; at some point during our meditation where there’s just a lot of waves. There’s a lot of energy. We don’t feel very much a sense of settledness and ease and peace.
But if we look here between the waves, we can see there are also spaces between the waves. It’s not wave, wave, wave, wave. There is spaciousness between the waves that sometimes we don’t recognize; that we’re not so aware of.
Increasingly in our practice, what we’ve been talking about in terms of meditation is to be aware of those spaces. Be aware of the spaces between the breaths. Be aware of the spaces between thoughts, between any sense object that arises and ceases, that there is space between these objects. And to start increasingly to pay attention to those spaces so that we don’t feel inundated by the objects themselves, by the waves themselves.
Being aware of the space between objects gives us a different relationship to the objects. just like being aware of the spaces between the waves gives us a different perspective on the waves themselves.
So, I was meditating this morning, and kind of experiencing some of those waves relating to the Duke unionizing experience. Realizing they’re still there. In our human experience, it doesn’t mean these aggregates are not going to arise. It doesn’t mean that there are not going to be memories, for example, of something that happened a number of years ago that was difficult and challenging and created some pain. That those waves, those things are still going to be there. It’s just a matter of how am I going to relate to those waves in this moment, right now, within my experience.
And so I just did that. I started to hold some of the fear, because I knew that way back when we started this union, that if I got into organizing a union in my department, that my chair was going to get rid of me. I was going to lose my job. I knew that. I just had a sense of that. I was going to be retiring anyway, before too long, but there was an awareness of that.
As I was able to hold more of the fear, the anger, and the judgment within myself, in the meditation this morning, I started to experience more of those spaces between those thoughts, and I started to see more clearly into what he might have been experiencing at that time when all this was happening.
Because there were people within the department who were wanting to join the union and he was losing control. Before, he had total control over everything that was happening in the department—in terms of our salaries, in terms of what courses we could teach, in terms of how many courses we could teach each semester. He had control over all of that. With the union, there was going to be a lot that was being put in place that he would no longer have control over, such as how much money we were going to get for each course that we taught, or what would happen if there weren’t enough people in the class to fill the class, that we would still get paid a certain amount of money, or make ourselves available to lead a certain course, for example. He would lose a lot of control.
And when we lose control, what happens? Often fear arises, and grasping after wanting control, or the feeling of some sense of opposition between ourselves and that which we feel out of control with.
So, my heart just started to open to maybe some of the fear that he was experiencing at that time. And in doing that, there was less of a sense of opposition between myself and him, between self and other. That sense of duality of separation of self and other began to melt away. It began to reveal itself as being not separate or non-dual.
I mean, we were within one department. I was there 32 years, a long time. He was a part of that department for many, many years. All of us went to a lot of meetings. We went through a lot together in being part of this experience at the time that we were there.
So, it was kind of like what Aaron was talking about when he was showing us the video of the waves and saying the waves are not separate from the sky, not separate from the sand, not separate from the rocks, that all these things do not exist separately. It’s non-dual.
What I was experiencing this morning in the meditation was very similar. When I was not caught up in the aggregates of the fear and the judgment—which I had been having for a long time, especially four years ago when all this happened—I started to see the non-duality of the situation, the non-separateness of this person and myself. That we met at this particular time; perhaps there was learning for each of us. And what is that learning? Within the context of that learning, is it possible to experience some sense of the non-dual?
So, it really starts with ourselves in our meditation practice, in the sense that when we watch these aggregates arising and ceasing, and we’re not identified with them being self, as being me, when there’s no sense of self, there’s not going to be other.
As Suzuki Roshi, the Zen master, once said, “No self, no problem.” When there’s no sense of a separate self, there’s not going to be the problems in our life that we normally experience when we live in that illusion of a separate self, separate from others.
So, what I want to emphasize in the meditation that we do together today is both the relationship of the aggregates, however they may express themselves in each of us as we’re meditating, and also the space that exists within the arising and the ceasing of those aggregates. That just kind of naturally in our meditation practice comes together, both the sense of the aggregates arising and ceasing and the stillness or the spaciousness from that which the aggregates are arising from and ceasing back into, and seeing that these are not separate from each other. The aggregates and the stillness and the spaciousness are non-dual. That we don’t have to get rid of one in order to experience the other.
This is really what helps us increasingly to find ourselves more in the middle of the bridge, able to hold both the human experience and the essence of our being in non-duality.
(break)