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“Doesn’t Buddhism also lead us to tell ourselves stories? Stories other than those we’re used to telling ourselves, but stories nonetheless?”

All Buddhist schools argue that our regular perception is conceptually constructed, or as philosopher Tom Tillemans calls it, made up of useful fictions. That does not make these fictions untrue. We need concepts to make sense of a world that is otherwise too vast and complex to comprehend. The useful fiction of ‘my body’ is a theory that generalizes my observations over time regarding dozens of organs, thousands of parts, and trillions of cells. Parts of that ‘fiction’ have good predictive properties and others don’t. To maybe bring water, toilet paper, and paracetamol on a trip is wise; to treat the body as personal property in ways that will harm it in the long run is not so wise.

The Buddha offers healing narratives, that he invites you to investigate with your own wisdom, such that when you know for yourself:

  • ‘These things are unskillful, blameworthy, criticized by sensible people, and when you undertake them, they lead to harm and suffering’, then you should give them up’ and
  • ‘These things are skillful, blameless, praised by sensible people, and when you undertake them, they lead to welfare and happiness’, then you should acquire them and keep them. (AN 3.65)

So, to elaborate on Tom Tillemans’ expression: not all our fictions are useful. In fact, many are straightforward harmful. The fact that we hold ourselves and others to have permanent properties gives rise to desire, attachment, pride, jealousy, and anger, while this is a false narrative, for all our characteristics are temporal, relational, and contextual.

When finally, you have come to realize the Dharma for yourself, with the help of an experienced guide, then you can let go of even the Dharma’s narratives, for they were ‘for crossing over, not for holding on. By understanding the simile of the raft, you will even give up the teachings, let alone what is against the teachings.’ (MN 22)

Pa Auk Tawya’s Arhat

The rainy season in Myanmar was impressive. The first drops gave every bedbug throughout the monastery a new lease on life, but luckily also the flowering plants and creatures great and small. Within a week the trickle transformed into a curtain of water, its rushing sound enclosing the silence of my hut. There were days that I could barely see more than a few meters beyond my window. The mold exploded on my walls as it did on my feet. The season was for that reason popularly called the ‘toe rotting season’. The humidity turned everything into a challenge, especially as nothing would dry anymore. Luckily the season was indiscriminate in making all of us monks smell equally bad. As my hut was located on a slope, it turned into a river island, rendering my flipflops useless.

Going on pindapata, or alms-round, thus became a slow journey of feeling my way down with my toes, with a begging bowl in one hand and an umbrella in the other. Every day though, I would patiently wait for a specific voice to emerge from the forest above me. First softly but then slowly growing in clarity, it would announce the descent of what was renowned to be the Arhat (saint) living above me. On the top of the mountain, he resided in what was little more than a covering made from old robes stretched over a few branches. Despite his barren circumstances he always looked immaculately dressed, almost floating down with elegance and calm, while chanting prayers and Pali suttas with his melodious voice, drawing from each hut that he passed the mesmerized monks, like he was the Pied Piper of Hamelin. He was the general that we all followed into battle, the bee that we followed to the honey, the muse with whom we had all fallen in love.

Freedom from self-criticism and discouragement

How can we keep ourselves from self-criticism and discouragement as we explore what is?

Self-criticism and discouragement depend on what is called in Pāli sakkāya diṭṭhi, or personality view: I am this, I am like that. It is a consequence of the generalising process of conceptuality. According to the Buddha all things happen in a web of causes and conditions. Although he denied determinism, it does mean that actions always arise in relation to a specific moment, environment, embodiment, and karmic imprints. Because of these karmic patterns, our cultural context, and upbringing, we definitely see tendencies in our behaviour, but conceptuality generalises this by taking the individual, contextual, impermanent moments and transforming them into static, permanent characteristics. ‘This happened in this context’ is perverted into ‘I am like that’. 

But none of us ‘is like that’. All our five aggregates, and the person imputed on them, are impermanent. Always in flux, and luckily so. That is why we can respond dynamically to changing circumstances. A permanent self could never learn, adapt, grow, evolve. Precisely because we are empty of a permanent self, we are free to seek relief from unskilful mental patterns and to cultivate skilful patterns. 

When some action was unskilful and our mind’s ignorance (miccha diṭṭhi) transforms it into ‘our fault…again’, this is of course very discouraging. In reality we are free from that action the moment it passed, for the next moment we are already different again. That we are impermanent, dynamic, contextual and depending on the five aggregates, arising new in every single moment is sammā diṭṭhi, or right view. There is no ‘self’ to criticise, for there is no abiding self, merely an always changing process. Freeing us from guilt and fault, it creates the space to take responsibility, to learn and adapt our internal and external conditions through the cultivation of the three higher trainings, the brahmaviharas, the three principles of the path, the six perfections, and so on. 

It is also encouraging, because regardless of our actions being skilful or unskilful, when we apply mindfulness and wisdom they become moments from which we learn and through which we grow. That’s why the Buddha exclaimed: “I am free of the conceit of I am”

Equanimity: letting go of identification and interpretation

To feel or not to feel, that is the question

Equanimity is not indifference towards feelings, and especially not suppression, but the letting go of identification and interpretation. Feelings and emotions are a natural and impermanent part of our makeup. They’re not always pleasant for sure, but we’re not buddhas yet, so this is part of the game. Indifference and suppression generate the infamous Jungian shadow side, in which they fester and influence our behaviour in insidious ways.

The occasional passive aggression in Dharma centers is often caused by this spiritual bypassing. Equanimity in contrast is kind and acknowledging of whatever arises, but without creating more hurt by turning it into ‘I’ or ‘mine’, and the stories that ensue from identification. Of course there’s hurt in our bodies and minds sometimes. It’s not our fault, nor is it unjust. It is simply saṃsāra. The intimacy of equanimity breaths space and gentleness into our troubles without making them into a Shakespearean drama. This calm presence allows for ‘seeing and knowing’ and letting go when we have heard the message. This is the path of understanding when and how to act, or not and finding serenity in either case.

Cultivation rather than meditation

Meditation is an ill-defined Western term that only partially covers the meaning of the Tibetan term gom (སྒོམ་) or the Pāli bhāvanā. Moreover the term is also used to translate different Buddhist terms like samādhi, jhāna and in some cases even the union of calm abiding and special insight. 

Both gom and bhāvanā rather mean cultivation, in specific of the three higher trainings: ethics, serenity (calm, concentration) and wisdom. Rather than something you do on your cushion, gom/bhāvanā refers to a lifestyle in which one cultivates the Dharma, of which meditation on a cushion is a part. 

To have a sitting session is always mentally and physically healthy. It helps us to centre and ground ourselves, and become familiar with our aggregates. It brings rest and perspective to our incessant thoughts. At the same time, if we let the mind go wild 23,5 hours a day and want to train it for half an hour, any development will be limited of course. 

Real transformation takes place when we start to see our days in the context of the Dharma, and we understand ourselves as practitioners of the bodhisattva path, for this provides a perspective that allows you to transform everything into Dharma. Obviously and unfortunately you can learn much about the five hindrances throughout the day, but on the positive side you can also train in mindfulness in everything that you do. Fully attending to whatever you do is not only effective and joyful, but it also prepares you for the sitting sessions. When the mind has free time, instead of letting it run wild, you can occupy it with thinking about the Dharma, for example by using the Lamrim reflections, especially those on definite emergence, bodhicitta and emptiness, for these thoughts turn all your activities into virtue. Especially when we learn to observe, rather than to identify, every skilful and unskilful moment turns into a learning experience. This is the power of especially the Mahāyāna path, as it is accomplished with and for all living beings, which makes them conducive conditions rather than hindrances. 

Finally it is helpful to practice a strict hygiene of mind. Avoid input that contains violence, discrimination, sexual objectification, revenge, polarisation, and partisanship. Look out for wholesome, inspiring contact with specific others, even if they are fantasy. When you want to relax, search for things that are nourishing, calming, and that strengthen your empathy, equanimity and wisdom. 

Don’t believe me in this, even if it seems reasonable, but try it out for yourself!

Is joy an object of shamata?

Is joy an object of shamata, or does it manifest itself when the mind becomes unified in a stable practice of shamata on an object like the breath?

When joy manifests as a result of breath meditation, it is a mental factor. When cultivated as a brahmavihara it is called empathetic or appreciative joy and a more complex emotion, that is an object of the main mind (and therefore also apprehended by the mental factors, as they share the ‘similar object of observation’, as one of the five modes of similarities between main mind and mental factor).

‘No one’ reaches the state of joy

How to stay when we reach a state of joy?

Blue Monastery, Tbilisi

The paradoxical answer is you can’t, and that for two reasons. 

The first reason is that piti (non-sensual joy) is not something that you can generate. It is a side-effect of the mind responding to its own wholesome state. It is important to recognise the presence of piti and even massage it into the mind when it is present, but trying to grasp it makes it go away immediately.

The second reason is that what we mean by this ‘we’ implies a puppet player. In technical terms a permanent, unitary and independent self, and such a thing doesn’t exist. It’s the object of abandonment of the Path of Seeing. You might have noticed that even in the rest of your lives the moment we try to own something it spoils. The moment we identify with something it induces anxiety. The idea that somehow we created this joy, is a form of afflicted pride, an unskilful mental factor. Piti merely arises due to the absence of unskilful emotions. In other words, the moment pride arises piti stops. The same is true for identification with it, for joy is not ‘you’ either, for it comes and goes. Piti is a conditioned phenomenon. Although you can’t control it, you can discover under which circumstances it arises and flourishes. Longing for freedom from the five hindrances and the peace it brings is a good starting point for its arisal. Gratitude blocks both ignorance and pride, and therefore sustains it, just like everything else in life.

Is sufficient trust necessary for deep absorption?

Is sufficient trust necessary for deep absorption to the object? If so, is there any evidence that a secure attachment style aids absorption?

Avalokiteśvara

Trust plays different roles at different times in the evolution of our meditational practice. One of the first hindrances that we encounter is an unwillingness of the mind caused by procrastination, attachment to unskilful activities, and self-underestimation. These three are respectively a lack of trust in the goal, the method and ourselves. 

When our meditation advances, it can often be difficult to stop checking progress, or the state of our mind when that is no longer necessary. Here trust in the process and our newly gained meditative capabilities becomes important. 

Finally we develop trust in our selfless person, which includes a profound understanding of how our person comes into existence in dependence on our aggregates and context, and by extension which conditions cause flourishing and which ones cause dissatisfaction, disempowerment and suffering. This realisation of our selfless, embedded person is the ultimate ‘secure attachment style ‘ one could say.

Trust your buddhanature

What am I supposed to trust?

Your buddhanature. In more modest terms: the five aggregates that make up our person. Each of them is evidently non-self. The body knows quite well how to breath, digest, walk and talk. In a similar vein, our feelings, thoughts, and perceptions come and go without any interference of a “homunculus” or little man in our head. Obsession with our self-story, desires and aversions not only obfuscates our awareness of all that our aggregates do, but also hinders its function through providing it with wrong information.

Trust is gained through getting to know the aggregates and how they function under which circumstances. Knowing what they need allows for building them a healthy environment in which they increasingly perform a function that is both skilful and reliable. It is the task of a yogi to infer these things mainly from his or her own experience; others’ words cannot describe it exactly as it is. Shamatha based on definite emergence is a path of healing the relationship with oneself. As the Uttaratantra says: the highest self is non-self. When you are free of the story things appear as they truly are: effortless and free.

“How can we stop the tendency to utilise people?”

Someone asked “How can we stop the tendency to utilise people?”. This is a very important question that we will explore over time, for the ignorance at the bottom of this is complex. It has to do with the interaction between concepts and reality. Concepts allow you to think of things independent from context, space, time and substance, while in reality these same things only exist interdependently. So while we are deeply interconnected with all things and depend on them, our concepts separate us from them. But again, we will look at this topic in great detail in the future.

An interesting approach I found in the past is by using language itself as a guide to the presence of instrumentalising emotions or their absence. Take for example the difference between saying ‘you are my friend’ and ‘I appreciate your friendship’. These two sentences feel very different. The first sentence implies both a possessive relationship (you are mine) and permanence. Yet, nothing is the inherent possession of anyone, and no relation is permanent. Relations depend on conditions. The second sentence expresses the value that you experience in someone’s presence, and the evaluation of that value: friendship. While you cannot practically escape all usage of the verb ‘to have’, the above is a useful tool to explore what you or others are actually saying, and experiencing, with a certain sentence. I will of course ‘quickly get my laptop’, but I will often repeat the fact that in fact it’s not mine at all, but a gift from a friend that I have the honour of using. The opposite of the possessive is appreciative joy, and the latter is much more fun, and a much better way to maintain your relationships. Appreciative joy reminds you that no relationship is given, but rather is something that needs to be nourished and cared for, even if that is merely with a laptop.