[9] De-perception | The Karma of Questions

[9] De-perception | The Karma of Questions

De-perception

Meditation teaches you the power of your perceptions. You come to see how the labels you apply to things, the images with which you visualize things, have a huge influence over what you see, how they can weigh you down with suffering and stress. As the meditation develops, though, it gives you the tools you need to gain freedom from that influence.

In the beginning, when you first notice the power of perception, you can easily feel overwhelmed by how pervasive it is. Suppose you’re focusing on the breath. There comes a point when you begin to wonder whether you’re focusing on the breath itself or on your idea of the breath. Once this question arises, the normal reaction is to try to get around the idea to the raw sensation behind it. But if you’re really sensitive as you do this, you’ll notice that you’re simply replacing one caricature of the breath with another, more subtle one. Even the raw sensation of breathing is shaped by how you conceptualize raw sensation. No matter how hard you try to pin down an unfiltered experience of breathing, you still find it shaped by your idea of what breathing actually is. The more you pursue the reality of the breath, the more it recedes like a mirage.

The trick here is to turn this fact to your advantage. After all, you’re not meditating to get to the breath. You’re meditating to understand the processes leading to suffering so that you can put an end to them. The way your relate to your perceptions is part of these processes, so that’s what you want to see. You have to treat your experience of the breath, not as an end in itself, but as a tool for understanding the role of perception in creating suffering and stress.

You do this by de-perception: questioning your assumptions about breathing, deliberately changing those assumptions, and observing what happens as a result. Now, without the proper context, de-perception could easily wander off into random abstractions. So you take the practice of concentration as your context, providing de-perception both with a general direction and with particular tasks that force it to bump up against the operative assumptions that actually shape your experience of the present.

The general direction lies in trying to bring the mind to deeper and more long-lasting levels of stillness so as to eliminate more and more subtle levels of stress. You’re not trying to prove which perceptions of the breath depict it most truly, but simply which ones work best in which situations for eliminating stress. The objectivity you’re looking for is not the objectivity of the breath, but the objectivity of cause and effect.

The particular tasks that teach you these lessons begin with the task of trying to get the mind to stay comfortably focused for long periods of time on the breath—and right there you run into two operative assumptions: What does it mean to breathe? What does it mean to be focused?

It’s common to think of the breath as the air passing in and out through the nose, and this can be a useful perception to start with. Use whatever blatant sensations you associate with that perception as a means of establishing mindfulness, developing alertness, and getting the mind to grow still. But as your attention gets more refined, you may find that level of breath becoming too faint to detect. So try thinking of the breath instead as the energy flow in the body, as a full body process.

Then make that experience as comfortable as possible. If you feel any blockage or obstruction in the breathing, see what you can do to dissolve those feelings. Are you doing anything to create them? If you can catch yourself creating them, then it’s easy to let them dissolve. And what would make you create them aside from your preconceived notions of how the mechanics of breathing have to work? So question those notions: Where does the breath come into the body? Does it come in only through the nose and mouth? Does the body have to pull the breath in? If so, which sensations do the pulling? Which sensations get pulled? Where does the pulling begin? And where is the breath pulled from? Which parts have the breath, and which ones don’t? When you feel a sensation of blockage, which side of the sensation are you on?

These questions may sound strange, but many times your pre-verbal assumptions about the body are strange as well. Only when you confront them head-on with strange questions can you bring them to light. And only when you see them clearly can you replace them with alternative concepts.

So once you catch yourself breathing uncomfortably in line with a particular assumption, turn it around to see what sensations the new assumption highlights. Try staying with those sensations as long as you can, to test them. If, compared to your earlier sensations associated with the breath, they’re easier to stay with, if they provide a more solid and spacious grounding for concentration, the assumption that drew them to your attention is a useful new tool in your meditation. If the new sensations aren’t helpful in that way, you can throw the new tool aside.

For example, if you have a sense of being on one side of a blockage, try thinking of being on the other side. Try being on both. Think of the breath as coming into the body, not through the nose or mouth, but through the middle of the chest, the back of the neck, every pore of your skin, any spot that helps reduce the felt need to push and pull.

Or start questioning the need to push and pull at all. Do you feel that your immediate experience of the body is of the solid parts, and that they have to manage the mechanics of breathing, which is secondary? What happens if you conceive your immediate experience of the body in a different way, as a field of primary breath energy, with the solidity simply a label attached to certain aspects of the breath? Whatever you experience as a primary body sensation, think of it as already breath, without your having to do anything more to it. How does that affect the level of stress and strain in the breathing?

And what about the act of staying focused? How do you conceive that? Is it behind the breath? Surrounded by breath? To what extent does your mental picture of focusing help or hinder the ease and solidity of your concentration? For instance, you may find that you think of the mind as being in one part of the body and not in others. What do you do when you focus attention on another part? Does the mind leave its home base—say, in the head—to go there, or does the other part have to be brought into the head? What kind of tension does this create? What happens if you think of awareness already being in that other part? What happens when you turn things around entirely: instead of the mind’s being in the body, see what stress is eliminated when you think of the body as surrounded by a pre-existing field of awareness.

When you ask questions like this and gain favorable results, the mind can settle down into deeper and deeper levels of solidity. You eliminate unnecessary tension and stress in your focus, finding ways of feeling more and more at home, at ease, in the experience of the present.

Once the mind is settled down, give it time to stay there. Don’t be in too great a hurry to move on. Here the questions are, “Which parts of the process were necessary to focus in? Which can now be let go? Which do you have to hold onto in order to maintain this focus?” Tuning into the right level of awareness is one process; staying there is another. When you learn how to maintain your sense of stillness, try to keep it going in all situations. What do you discover gets in the way? Is it your own resistance to disturbances? Can you make your stillness so porous that disturbances can go through without running into anything, without knocking your center off balance?

As you get more and more absorbed in exploring these issues, concentration becomes less a  battle against disturbance and more an opportunity for inner exploration. And without even thinking about them, you’re developing the four bases of success: the desire to understand things, the persistence that keeps after your exploration, the close attention you’re paying to cause and effect, and the ingenuity you’re putting into framing the questions you ask. All these qualities contribute to concentration, help it get settled, get solid, get clear.

At the same time, they foster discernment. The Buddha once said that the test for a person’s discernment is how he or she frames a question and tries to answer it. Thus to foster discernment, you can’t simply stick to pre-set directions in your meditation. You have to give yourself practice in framing questions and testing the karma of those questions by looking for their results.

Ultimately, when you reach a perception of the breath that allows the sensations of in-and-out breathing to grow still, you can start questioning more subtle perceptions of the body. It’s like tuning into a radio station. If your receiver isn’t precisely tuned to the frequency of the signal, the static interferes with the subtleties of whatever is being transmitted. But when you’re precisely tuned, every nuance comes through. The same with your sensation of the body: when the movements of the breath grow still, the more subtle nuances of how perception interacts with physical sensation come to the fore. The body seems like a mist of atomic sensations, and you can begin to see how your perceptions interact with that mist. To what extent is the shape of the body inherent in the mist? To what extent is it intentional—something added? What happens when you drop the intention to create that shape? Can you focus on the space between the droplets in the mist? What happens then? Can you stay there? What happens when you drop the perception of space and focus on the knowing? Can you stay there? What happens when you drop the oneness of the knowing? Can you stay there? What happens when you try to stop labeling anything at all?

As you settle into these more formless states, it’s important that you not lose sight of your purpose in tuning into them. You’re here to understand suffering, not to over-interpret what you experience. Say, for instance, that you settle into an enveloping sense of space or consciousness. From there, it’s easy to assume that you’ve reached the primordial awareness, the ground of being, from which all things emerge, to which they all return, and which is essentially untouched by the whole process of emerging and returning. You might take descriptions of the Unconditioned and apply them to what you’re experiencing. If you’re abiding in a state of neither perception nor non-perception, it’s easy to see it as a non-abiding, devoid of distinctions between perceiver and perceived, for mental activity is so attenuated as to be virtually imperceptible. Struck with the apparent effortless of the state, you may feel that you’ve gone beyond passion, aversion, and delusion simply by regarding them as unreal. If you latch onto an assumption like this, you can easily think that you’ve reached the end of the path before your work is really done.

Your only protection here is to regard these assumptions as forms of perception, and to dismantle them as well. And here is where the four noble truths prove their worth, as tools for dismantling any assumption by detecting the stress that accompanies it. Ask if there’s still some subtle stress in the concentration that has become your dwelling place. What goes along with that stress? What vagrant movements in the mind are creating it? What persistent movements in the mind are creating it? You have to watch for both.

In this way you come face to face with the perceptions that keep even the most subtle states of concentration going. And you see that even they are stressful. If you replace them with other perceptions, though, you’ll simply exchange one type of stress for another. It’s as if your ascending levels of concentration have brought you to the top of a flag pole. You look down and see aging, illness, and death coming up the pole, in pursuit. You’ve exhausted all the options that perception can offer, so what are you going to do? You can’t just stay where you are. Your only option is to release your grip. And if you’re letting go fully, you let go of gravity, too.

[8] The Agendas of Mindfulness | The Karma of Questions

[8] The Agendas of Mindfulness | The Karma of Questions

The Agendas of Mindfulness

The Pāli term for meditation is bhāvanā: development. It’s a shorthand word for the development of skillful qualities in the mind. Bhāvanā is a type of karma—the intentional activity ultimately leading to the end of karma—but karma nonetheless. This point is underlined by another Pāli term for meditation: kammaṭṭhāna, the work at hand; and by a Thai idiom for meditation: “to make an effort.” These terms are worth keeping in mind, to counterbalance the common assumption that meditation is an exercise in inaction or in passive, all-encompassing acceptance. Actually, as described in the Pāli texts, meditation is a very pro-active process. It has an agenda and works actively to bring it about. This can be seen in the Pāli description of how right mindfulness is fostered through satipaṭṭhāna.

Satipaṭṭhāna is often translated as “foundation of mindfulness,” which gives the impression that it refers to an object of meditation. This impression is reinforced when you see the four satipaṭṭhānas listed as body, feelings, mind, and mental qualities. But if you look at the texts, you find that they teach satipaṭṭhāna as a process, a way of establishing (upatthāna) mindfulness (sati): hence the compound term. When the texts define the compound, they give, not a list of objects, but four formulas describing an activity.

Here’s the first formula:

A meditator remains focused on the body in and of itself—ardent, alert, and mindful—putting aside greed and distress with reference to the world.

Each of the terms in this formula is important. “Remaining focused” can also be translated as “keeping track.” This refers to the element of concentration in the practice, as you hold to one particular theme or frame of reference amid the conflicting currents of experience. “Ardent” refers to the effort you put into the practice, trying to abandon unskillful states of mind and develop skillful ones in their stead, all the while trying to discern the difference between the two.  “Alert” means being clearly aware of what’s happening in the present. “Mindful” means being able to remember or recollect. Sometimes mindfulness is translated as non-reactive awareness, free from agendas, simply present with whatever arises, but the formula for satipaṭṭhāna doesn’t support that translation. Non-reactive awareness is actually part of equanimity, one of many qualities fostered in the course of satipaṭṭhāna, but the ardency involved in satipaṭṭhāna definitely has an agenda, a task to be done, while the role of mindfulness is to keep your task in mind.

The task here is twofold: staying focused on your frame of reference, and putting aside any greed and distress that would result from shifting your frame of reference back to the world. This is the meaning of “the body in and of itself.” In other words, you try to stay with the experience of the body as it’s immediately felt, without referring it to the narratives and views that make up your sense of the world. You stay away from stories of how you have related to your body in the past and how you hope to relate to it in the future. You drop any concern for how your body fits into the world in terms of its beauty, agility, or strength. You simply tune into the body on its own terms—the direct experience of its breathing, its movements, its postures, its elementary properties, and its inevitable decay. In this way you learn how to strip away your assumptions about what does or doesn’t lie behind your experience of the body, and gain practice in referring everything to the experience itself.

The same approach applies to the remaining types of satipaṭṭhāna: focusing on feelings, on mind states, and on mental qualities in and of themselves. At first glance, these may look like new and different meditation exercises, but the Buddha makes clear that they can all center on a single practice: keeping the breath in mind. When the mind is with the breath, all four frames of reference are right there. The difference lies simply in the subtlety of your focus. So when you’ve developed your skills with the first, most blatant type of satipaṭṭhāna, you don’t have to move far to take up the more subtle ones. Simply stay with the breath and shift your focus to the feelings and mind states that arise from being mindful of the breath, and the mental qualities that either get in the way of your focus or strengthen it. Once you’ve chosen your frame of reference, you treat it the same way you’ve been treating the body: taking it as your frame of reference in and of itself, without referring it to stories about yourself or views about the world. You separate feelings—of pleasure, pain, and neither-pleasure-nor-pain—from the stories you normally create around them. You separate states of greed, anger, and delusion from their focal points in the world. In this way you can see them for what they are.

Still, though, you have an agenda, based on the desire for Awakening—a desire that the Buddha classed, not as a cause of suffering, but as part of the path leading to its end. This becomes clearest in the satipaṭṭhāna focused on mental qualities in and of themselves. You acquaint yourself with the unskillful qualities that obstruct concentration—such as sensual desire, ill will, and restlessness—not simply to experience them, but also to understand them so that you can cut them away. Similarly, you acquaint yourself with the skillful qualities that foster discernment so that you can develop them all the way to release.

The texts call these skillful qualities the seven factors of Awakening and show that satipaṭṭhāna practice is aimed at developing them all in order. The first factor is mindfulness. The second is called “analysis of qualities”: the ability to distinguish skillful from unskillful qualities in the mind, seeing what can be accepted and what needs to be changed. The third factor is persistence—persistence in abandoning unskillful qualities and fostering skillful ones in their place. The texts describe a wide variety of methods to use in this endeavor, but they all come down to two sorts. In some cases, an unskillful quality will disappear simply when you watch it steadily. In other cases, you have to make a concerted effort, actively doing what you can to counteract an unskillful quality and replace it with a more skillful one.

As skillful qualities take charge within you, you see that while skillful thinking leads to no harmful actions, long bouts of  it can tire the mind. So you bring your thoughts to stillness, which develops three more of the factors of Awakening: rapture, serenity, and concentration. These provide the mind with a foundation of well-being.

The final factor is equanimity, and its place in the list is significant. Its non-reactivity is fully appropriate only when the more active factors have done what they can. This is true of all the lists in which equanimity is included. It’s never listed on its own, as sufficient for Awakening; and it always comes last, after the pro-active factors in the list. This doesn’t mean that it supplants them, simply that joins in their interaction. Instead of replacing them, it counterbalances them, enabling you to step back and see subtle levels of stress and craving that the more pro-active factors may have obscured. Then it makes room for the pro-active factors to act on the newly discovered levels. Only when all levels of stress and craving are gone is the work of both the pro-active and non-reactive sides of meditation done. That’s when the mind can be truly agenda-free.

It’s like learning to play the piano. As you get more pro-active in playing proficiently, you also become sensitive in listening non-reactively, to discern ever more subtle levels in the music. This allows you to play even more skillfully. In the same way, as you get more skilled in establishing mindfulness on your chosen frame of reference, you gain greater sensitivity in peeling away ever more subtle layers of the present moment until nothing is left standing in the way of total release.

[7] Saṁsāra Divided by Zero | The Karma of Questions

[7] Saṁsāra Divided by Zero | The Karma of Questions

Saṁsāra Divided by Zero

The goal of Buddhist practice, nibbāna, is said to be totally uncaused, and right there is a paradox. If the goal is uncaused, how can a path of practice—which is causal by nature—bring it about? This is an ancient question. The Milinda-pañha, a set of dialogues composed near the start of the common era, reports an exchange where King Milinda challenges a monk, Nagasena, with precisely this question. Nagasena replies with an analogy. The path of practice doesn’t cause nibbāna, he says. It simply takes you there, just as a road to a mountain doesn’t cause the mountain to come into being, but simply leads you to where it is.

Nagasena’s reply, though apt, didn’t really settle the issue within the Buddhist tradition. Over the years many schools of meditation have taught that mental fabrications simply get in the way of a goal that’s uncaused and unfabricated. Only by doing nothing at all and thus not fabricating anything in the mind, they say, will the unfabricated shine forth.

This view is based on a very simplistic understanding of fabricated reality, seeing causality as linear and totally predictable: X causes Y which causes Z and so on, with no effects turning around to condition their causes, and no possible way of using causality to escape from the causal network. However, one of the many things the Buddha discovered in the course of his awakening was that causality is not linear. The experience of the present is shaped both by actions in the present and by actions in the past. Actions in the present shape both the present and the future. The results of past and present actions continually interact. Thus there is always room for new input into the system, which gives scope for free will. There is also room for the many feedback loops that make experience so thoroughly complex, and that are so intriguingly described in chaos theory. Reality doesn’t resemble a simple line or circle. It’s more like the bizarre trajectories of a strange attractor or a Mandelbrot set.

Because there are many similarities between chaos theory and Buddhist explanations of causality, it seems legitimate to explore those similarities to see what light chaos theory can throw on the issue of how a causal path of practice can lead to an uncaused goal. This is not to equate Buddhism with chaos theory, or to engage in pseudo-science. It’s simply a search for similes to clear up an apparent conflict in the Buddha’s teaching.

And it so happens that one of the discoveries of non-linear math—the basis for chaos theory—throws light on just this issue. In the 19th century, the French mathematician Jules-Henri Poincaré discovered that in any complex physical system there are points he called resonances. If the forces governing the system are described as mathematical equations, the resonances are the points where the equations intersect in such a way that one of the members is divided by zero. This, of course, produces an undefined result, which means that if an object within the system strayed into a resonance point, it would no longer be defined by the causal network determining the system. It would be set free.

In actual practice, it’s very rare for an object to hit a resonance point. The equations describing the points immediately around a resonance tend to deflect any incoming object from entering the resonance unless the object is on a precise path to the resonance’s very heart. Still, it doesn’t take too much complexity to create resonances—Poincaré discovered them while calculating the gravitational interactions among three bodies: the earth, the sun, and the moon. The more complex the system, the greater the number of resonances, and the greater the likelihood that objects will stray into them. It’s no wonder that meteors, on a large scale, and electrons on a small scale, occasionally wander right into a resonance in a gravitational or electronic field, and thus to the freedom of total unpredictability. This is why meteors sometimes leave the solar system, and why your computer occasionally freezes for no apparent reason. It’s also why strange things could happen someday to the beating of your heart.

If we were to apply this analogy to the Buddhist path, the system we’re in is saṁsāra, the round of rebirth. Its resonances would be what the texts called “non-fashioning,” the opening to the uncaused: nibbāna. The wall of resistant forces around the resonances would correspond to pain, stress, and attachment. To allow yourself to be repelled by stress or deflected by attachment, no matter how subtle, would be like approaching a resonance but then veering off to another part of the system. But to focus directly on analyzing stress and attachment, and deconstructing their causes, would be like getting on an undeflected trajectory right into the resonance and finding total, undefined freedom.

This, of course, is simply an analogy. But it’s a fruitful one for showing that there is nothing illogical in actively mastering the processes of mental fabrication and causality for the sake of going beyond fabrication, beyond cause and effect. At the same time, it gives a hint as to why a path of total inaction would not lead to the unfabricated. If you simply sit still within the system of causality, you’ll never get near the resonances where true non-fashioning lies. You’ll keep floating around in saṁsāra. But if you take aim at stress and clinging, and work to take them apart, you’ll be able to break through to the point where the present moment gets divided by zero in the mind.

[6] Saṁsāra | The Karma of Questions

[6] Saṁsāra | The Karma of Questions

Saṁsāra

Saṁsāra literally means “wandering-on.” Many people think of it as the Buddhist name for the place where we currently live—the place we leave when we go to nibbāna. But in the early Buddhist texts, it’s the answer, not to the question , “Where are we?” but to the question, “What are we doing?” Instead of a place, it’s a process: the tendency to keep creating worlds and then moving into them. As one world falls apart, you create another one and go there. At the same time, you bump into other people who are creating their own worlds, too.

The play and creativity in the process can sometimes be enjoyable. In fact, it would be perfectly innocuous if it didn’t entail so much suffering. The worlds we create keep caving in and killing us. Moving into a new world requires effort: not only the pains and risks of taking birth, but also the hard knocks—mental and physical—that come from going through childhood into adulthood, over and over again. The Buddha once asked his monks, “Which do you think is greater: the water in the oceans or the tears you’ve shed while wandering on?” His answer: the tears. Think of that the next time you gaze at the ocean or play in its waves.

In addition to creating suffering for ourselves, the worlds we create feed off the worlds of others, just as theirs feed off ours. In some cases the feeding may be mutually enjoyable and beneficial, but even then the arrangement has to come to an end. More typically, it causes harm to at least one side of the relationship, often to both. When you think of all the suffering that goes into keeping just one person clothed, fed, sheltered, and healthy—the suffering both for those who have to pay for these requisites, as well as those who have to labor or die in their production—you see how exploitative even the most rudimentary process of world-building can be.

This is why the Buddha tried to find the way to stop saṁsāra-ing. Once he had found it, he encouraged others to follow it, too. Because saṁsāra-ing is something that each of us does, each of us has to stop it him or her self alone. If saṁsāra were a place, it might seem selfish for one person to look for an escape, leaving others behind. But when you realize that it’s a process, there’s nothing selfish about stopping it at all. It’s like giving up an addiction or an abusive habit. When you learn the skills needed to stop creating your own worlds of suffering, you can share those skills with others so that they can stop creating theirs. At the same time, you’ll never have to feed off the worlds of others, so to that extent you’re lightening their load as well.

It’s true that the Buddha likened the practice for stopping saṁsāra to the act of going from one place to another: from this side of a river to the further shore. But the passages where he makes this comparison often end with a paradox: the further shore has no “here,” no “there,” no “in between.” From that perspective, it’s obvious that saṁsāra’s parameters of space and time were not the pre-existing context in which we wandered. They were the result of our wandering.

For someone addicted to world-building, the lack of familiar parameters sounds unsettling. But if you’re tired of creating incessant, unnecessary suffering, you might want to give it a try. After all, you could always resume building if the lack of “here” or “there” turned out to be dull. But of those who have learned how to break the habit, no one has ever felt tempted to saṁsāra again.

[5] Freedom from Fear | The Karma of Questions

[5] Freedom from Fear | The Karma of Questions

Freedom from Fear

An anthropologist once questioned an Alaskan shaman about his tribe’s belief system. After putting up with the anthropologist’s questions for a while, the shaman finally told him: “Look. We don’t believe. We fear.”

His words have intrigued me ever since I first heard them. I’ve also been intrigued by the responses I get when I share his words with my friends. Some say that the shaman unconsciously put his finger on the line separating primitive religion from civilized religion: primitive religion is founded on childish fear; civilized religion, on love, trust, and joy. Others maintain that the shaman cut through the pretensions and denials of civilized religion and pointed to the true source of all serious religious life.

If we dig down to the assumptions underlying these two responses, we find that the first response views fear itself as our greatest weakness. If we can simply overcome fear, we put ourselves in a position of strength. The second sees fear as the most honest response to our greater weakness in the face of aging, illness, and death—a weakness that can’t be overcome with a simple shift in attitude. If we’re not in touch with our honest fears, we won’t feel motivated to do what’s needed to protect ourselves from genuine dangers.

So—which attitude toward fear is childish, and which is mature? Is there an element of truth in both? If so, how can those elements best be combined? These questions are best answered by rephrasing them: To what extent is fear a useful emotion? To what extent is it not? Does it have a role in the practice that puts an end to fear?

The Buddhist answer to these questions is complex. This is due partly to Buddhism’s dual roots—both as a civilized and as a wilderness tradition—and also to the complexity of fear itself, even in its most primal forms. Think of a deer at night suddenly caught in a hunter’s headlights. It’s confused. Angry. It senses danger, and that it’s weak in the face of the danger. It wants to escape. These five elements—confusion, aversion, a sense of danger, a sense of weakness, and a desire to escape—are present, to a greater or lesser extent, in every fear. The confusion and aversion are the unskillful elements. Even if the deer has many openings to escape from the hunter, its confusion and aversion might cause it to miss them. The same holds true for human beings. The mistakes and evils we commit when finding ourselves weak in the face of danger come from confusion and aversion.

Maddeningly, however, there are also evils that we commit out of complacency, when oblivious to actual dangers: the callous things we do when we feel we can get away with them. Thus the last three elements of fear—the perception of weakness, the perception of danger, and the desire to escape it—are needed to avoid the evils coming from complacency. If stripped of confusion and aversion, these three elements become a positive quality, heedfulness—something so essential to the practice that the Buddha devoted his last words to it. The dangers of life are real. Our weaknesses are real. If we don’t see them clearly, don’t take them to heart, and don’t try to find a way out, there’s no way we can put an end to what causes our fears. Just like the deer: if it’s complacent about the hunter’s headlights, it’s going to end up strapped to the fender for sure.

So to genuinely free the mind from fear, we can’t simply deny that there’s any reason for fear. We have to overcome the basic cause of fear: the mind’s weaknesses in the face of very real dangers. The elegance of the Buddha’s approach to this problem, though, lies in his insight into the confusion—or to use the standard Buddhist term, delusion—that makes fear unskillful. Despite the complexity of fear, delusion is the single factor that, in itself, is both the mind’s prime weakness and its greatest danger. Thus the Buddha approaches the problem of fear by focusing on delusion, and he attacks delusion in two ways: getting us to think about its dangerous role in making fear unskillful, and to develop inner strengths leading to the insights that cut through the delusions that make the mind weak. In this way we not only overcome the factor that makes fear unskillful. We ultimately put the mind in a position where it has no need for fear.

When we think about how delusion infects fear and incites us to do unskillful things, we see that it can act in two ways. First, the delusions surrounding our fears can cause us to misapprehend the dangers we face, seeing danger where there is none, and no danger where there is. If we obsess over non-existent or trivial dangers, we’ll squander time and energy building up useless defenses, diverting our attention from genuine threats. If, on the other hand, we put the genuine dangers of aging, illness, and death out of our minds, we grow complacent in our actions. We let ourselves cling to things—our bodies, our loved ones, our possessions, our views—that leave us exposed to aging, illness, separation, and death in the first place. We allow our cravings to take charge of the mind, sometimes to the point of doing evil with impunity, thinking that we’re immune to the results of our evil, that those results will never return to harm us.

The more complacent we are about the genuine dangers lying in wait all around us, the more shocked and confused we become when they actually hit. This leads to the second way in which the delusions surrounding our fears promote unskillful actions: we react to genuine dangers in ways that, instead of ending the dangers, actually create new ones. We amass wealth to provide security, but wealth creates a high profile that excites jealousy in others. We build walls to keep out dangerous people, but those walls become our prisons. We stockpile weapons, but they can easily be turned against us.

The most unskillful response to fear is when, perceiving dangers to our own life or property, we believe that we can gain strength and security by destroying the lives and property of others. The delusion pervading our fear makes us lose perspective. If other people were to act in this way, we would know they were wrong. But somehow, when we feel threatened, our standards change, our perspective warps, so that wrong seems right as long as we’re the ones doing it.

This is probably the most disconcerting human weakness of all: our inability to trust ourselves to do the right thing when the chips are down. If standards of right and wrong are meaningful only when we find them convenient, they have no real meaning at all.

Fortunately, though, the area of life posing the most danger and insecurity is the area where, through training, we can make the most changes and exercise the most control. Although aging, illness, and death follow inevitably on birth, delusion doesn’t. It can be prevented. If, through thought and contemplation, we become heedful of the dangers it poses, we can feel motivated to overcome it. However, the insights coming from simple thought and contemplation aren’t enough to fully understand and overthrow delusion. It’s the same as with any revolution: no matter how much you may think about the matter, you don’t really know the tricks and strengths of entrenched powers until you amass your own troops and do battle with them. And only when your own troops develop their own tricks and strengths can they come out on top. So it is with delusion: only when you develop mental strengths can you see through the delusions that give fear its power. Beyond that, these strengths can put you in a position where you are no longer exposed to dangers ever again.

The canon lists these mental strengths at five: conviction, persistence, mindfulness, concentration, and discernment. It also emphasizes the role that heedfulness plays in developing each, for heedfulness is what enables each strength to counteract a particular delusion that makes the mind weak and unskillful in the face of its fears. What this means is that none of these strengths are mere brute forces. Each contains an element of wisdom and discernment, which gets more penetrating as you progress along the list.

Of the five strengths, conviction requires the longest explanation, both because it’s one of the most misunderstood and under-appreciated factors in the Buddhist path, and because of the multiple delusions it has to counteract.

The conviction here is conviction in the principle of karma: that the pleasure and pain we experience depends on the quality of the intentions on which we act. This conviction counteracts the delusion that “It’s not in my best interest to stick to moral principles in the face of danger,” and it attacks this delusion in three ways.

First, it insists on what might be called the “boomerang” or “spitting into the wind” principle of karmic cause and effect. If you act on harmful intentions, regardless of the situation, the harm will come back to you. Even if unskillful actions such as killing, stealing, or lying might bring short-term advantages, these are more than offset by the long-term harm to which they leave you exposed.

Conversely, this same principle can make you brave in doing good. If you’re convinced that the results of skillful intentions will have to return to you even if death intervenes, you can more easily make the sacrifices demanded by long-term endeavors for your own good and that of others. Whether of not you live to see the results in this lifetime, you’re convinced that the good you do is never lost. In this way, you develop the courage needed to build a store of skillful actions—generous and virtuous—that forms your first line of defense against dangers and fear.

Second, conviction insists on giving priority to your state of mind above all else, for that’s what shapes your intentions. This counteracts the corollary to the first delusion: “What if sticking to my principles makes it easier for people to do me harm?” This question is based ultimately on the delusion that life is our most precious possession. If that were true, it would be a pretty miserable possession, for it heads inexorably to death, with holdovers in pain, aging, and illness along the way. Conviction views our life as precious only to the extent that it’s used to develop the mind, for the mind—when developed—is something that no one, not even death, can harm. “Quality of life” is measured by the quality and integrity of the intentions on which we act, just as “quality time” is time devoted to the practice. Or, in the Buddha’s words:

Better than a hundred years

lived without virtue, uncentered, is

one day

lived by a virtuous person

absorbed in jhāna.  — Dhp 110

Third, conviction insists that the need for integrity is unconditional. Even though other people may throw away their most valuable possession—their integrity—it’s no excuse for us to throw away ours. The principle of karma isn’t a traffic ordinance in effect only on certain hours of the day or certain days of the week. It’s a law operating around the clock, around the cycles of the cosmos.

Some people have argued that, because the Buddha recognized the principle of conditionality, he would have no problem with the idea that our virtues should depend on conditions as well. This is a misunderstanding of the principle. To begin with, conditionality doesn’t simply mean that everything is changeable and contingent. It’s like the theory of relativity. Relativity doesn’t mean that all things are relative. It simply replaces mass and time—which long were considered constants—with another, unexpected constant: the speed of light. Mass and time may be relative to a particular inertial frame, as the frame relates to the speed of light, but the laws of physics are constant for all inertial frames, regardless of speed. The speed of light is always the same.

In the same way, conditionality means that there are certain unchanging patterns to contingency and change—one of those patterns being that unskillful intentions, based on craving and delusion, invariably lead to unpleasant results.

If we learn to accept this pattern, rather than our feelings and opinions, as absolute, it requires us to become more ingenious in dealing with danger. Instead of following our unskillful knee-jerk reactions, we learn to think outside the box to find responses that best prevent harm of any kind. This gives our actions added precision and grace.

At the same time, we have to note that the Buddha didn’t teach conditionality simply to encourage acceptance for the inevitability of change. He taught it to show how the patterns underlying change can be mastered to create an opening that leads beyond conditionality and change. If we want to reach the unconditioned—the truest security—our integrity has to be unconditional, a gift of temporal security not only to those who treat us well, but to everyone, without exception. As the texts say, when you abstain absolutely from doing harm, you give a great gift—freedom from danger to limitless beings—and you yourself find a share in that limitless freedom as well.

Conviction and integrity of this sort make great demands on us. Until we gain our first taste of the unconditioned, they can easily be shaken. This is why they have to be augmented with other mental strengths. The three middle strengths—persistence, mindfulness, and concentration—act in concert. Persistence, in the form of right effort, counteracts the delusion that we’re no match for our fears, that once they arise we have to give into them. Right effort gives us practice in eliminating milder unskillful qualities and developing skillful ones in their place, so that when stronger unskillful qualities arise, we can use our skillful qualities as allies in fending them off. The strength of mindfulness assists this process in two ways. (1) It reminds us of the danger of giving into fear. (2) It teaches us to focus our attention, not on the object of our fear, but on the fear in and of itself as a mental event, something we can watch from the outside rather jumping in and going along for a ride. The strength of concentration, in providing the mind with a still center of wellbeing, puts us in a solid position where we don’t feel compelled to identify with fears as they come, and where the comings and goings of internal and external dangers are less and less threatening to the mind.

Even then, though, the mind can’t reach ultimate security until it uproots the causes of these comings and goings, which is why the first four strengths require the strength of discernment to make them fully secure. Discernment is what sees that these comings and goings are ultimately rooted in our sense of “I” and “mine,” and that “I” and “mine” are not built into experience. They come from the repeated processes of I-making and my-making, in which we impose these notions on experience and identify with things subject to aging, illness, and death. Furthermore, discernment sees through our inner traitors and weaknesses: the cravings that want us to make an “I” and “mine”; the delusions that make us believe in them once they’re made. It realizes that this level of delusion is precisely the factor that makes aging, illness, and death dangerous to begin with. If we didn’t identify with things that age, grow ill, and die, their aging, illness, and death wouldn’t threaten the mind. Totally unthreatened, the mind would have no reason to do anything unskillful ever again.

When this level of discernment matures and bears the fruit of release, our greatest insecurity—our inability to trust ourselves—has been eliminated. Freed from the attachments of “I” and “mine,” we find that the component factors of fear—both skillful and unskillful—are gone. There’s no remaining confusion or aversion; the mind is no longer weak in the face of danger; and so there’s nothing from which we need to escape.

This is where the questions raised by the shaman’s remarks find their answers. We fear because we believe in “we.” We believe in “we” because of the delusion in our fear. Paradoxically, though, if we love ourselves enough to fear the suffering that comes from unskillful actions and attachments, and learn to believe in the way out, we’ll develop the strengths that allow us to cut through our cravings, delusions, and attachments. That way, the entire complex—the “we,” the fear, the beliefs, the attachments—dissolves away. The freedom remaining is the only true security there is.

This teaching may offer cold comfort to anyone who wants the impossible: security for his or her attachments. But in trading away the hope for an impossible security, you gain the reality of a happiness totally independent and condition-free. Once you’ve made this trade, you know that the pay-off is more than worth the price. As one of the Buddha’s students once reported, “Before, when I was a householder, maintaining the bliss of kingship, I had guards posted within and without the royal apartments, within and without the city, within and without the countryside. But even though I was thus guarded, thus protected, I dwelled in fear—agitated, distrustful, and afraid. But now, on going alone to a forest, to the foot of a tree, or to an empty dwelling, I dwell without fear, unagitated, confident, and unafraid—unconcerned, unruffled, my wants satisfied, with my mind like a wild deer. This is the meaning I have in mind that I repeatedly exclaim, ‘What bliss! What bliss!’”

His deer is obviously not the deer in the headlights. It’s a deer safe in the wilderness, at its ease wherever it goes. What makes it more than a deer is that, free from attachment, it’s called a “consciousness without surface.” Light goes right through it. The hunter can’t shoot it, for it can’t be seen.

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[4] Questions of Skill | The Karma of Questions

[4] Questions of Skill | The Karma of Questions

Questions of Skill

The Buddha wasn’t the sort of teacher who simply answered questions. He also taught which questions to ask. He understood the power of questions: that they give shape to the holes in your knowledge and force that shape—valid or not—onto the answers you hope will fill up those holes. Even if you use right information to answer a wrong question, it can take on the wrong shape. If you then use that answer as a tool, you’re sure to apply it to the wrong situations and end up with the wrong results.

That’s why the Buddha was careful to map out a science of questions, showing which questions—in what order—lead to freedom, and which ones don’t. At the same time, he gave his talks in a question-and-answer format, to make perfectly clear the shape of the questions he was answering.

So if you’re looking to his teaching for answers and want to get the most out of them, you should first be clear about what questions you’re bringing to it, and check to see if they’re in line with the questions the teachings were meant to address. That way your answers won’t lead you astray.

A case in point is the teaching on not-self. Many students interpret this as the Buddha’s answer to two of the most frequently-asked questions in the history of serious thought: “Who am I?” and “Do I have a true self?” In the light of these questions, the teaching seems to be a no-self teaching, saying either an unqualified No: There is no self; or a qualified No: no separate self. But the one time the Buddha was asked point-blank if there is a self, he refused to answer, on the grounds that either a Yes or a No to the question would lead to extreme forms of wrong view that block the path to awakening. A Yes or a qualified No would lead to attachment: you’d keep clinging to a sense of self however you defined it. An unqualified No would lead to bewilderment and alienation, for you’d feel that your innermost sense of intrinsic worth had been denied.

As for the question, “Who am I?” the Buddha included it in a list of dead-end questions that lead to “a thicket of views, a wilderness of views, a contortion, a writhing, a fetter of views. Bound by a fetter of views, [you] don’t gain freedom from birth, aging, and death, from sorrow, lamentation, pain, distress, or despair.” In other words, any attempt to answer either of these questions is unskillful karma, blocking the path to true freedom.

So if the not-self teaching isn’t meant to answer these questions, what question does it answer? A basic one: “What is skillful?” In fact, all of the Buddha’s teachings are direct or indirect answers to this question. His great insight was that all our knowledge and ignorance, all our pleasure and pain, come from our actions, our karma, so the quest for true knowledge and true happiness comes down to a question of skill. In this case, the precise question is: “Is self-identification skillful?” And the answer is: “Only up to a point.” In the areas where you need a healthy sense of self to act skillfully, it’s wise to maintain that sense of self. But eventually, as skillful behavior becomes second nature and you develop more sensitivity, you see that self-identification, even of the most refined sort, is harmful and stressful. You have to let it go.

So, as with any skill, there are definite steps along the road to mastery. And because the asking of a question is a type of karma, the questions you ask not only have to start with the issue of skill, they also have to be skillful—to approach the issue skillfully—themselves. Each step in the Buddha’s skill is thus defined by a set of questions that focus your attention and shape your thinking in the most strategic direction. In fact, the questions he recommends can be taken as a map to the practice: you start out with questions that assume a self and use that assumption to motivate yourself to act more and more skillfully. Only when you reach an appropriate level of skill do the questions turn to deconstruct your sense of self, pinpointing the things you identify as your self and showing that they’re not really you. When the act of self-identification runs out of options, it stops in mid-air—and the mind opens to freedom. So if you put the not-self teaching in its proper context—this regimen of questions—you’ll see that it’s not a dead-end answer to a dead-end question. Instead, it’s a cutting-edge tool for bringing about liberation.

To begin this regimen, the Buddha recommends that when you visit a teacher, the first questions to ask are these: “What is skillful? What is unskillful? What, if I do it, will be for my long-term harm and suffering? Or what, if I do it, will be for my long-term well-being and happiness?” Although these last two questions bring in the concepts of “I” and “my,” they aren’t the focus of the inquiry. The focus is on doing, on developing skill, on using your concern for “me” and “my well-being” to train your actions toward true happiness.

The Buddha’s answers to these preliminary questions read like a course in wilderness survival. First come the do’s and don’ts. A wilderness instructor will tell you: “If a moose charges you, run. If a bear charges you, don’t.” The Buddha’s corresponding do’s and don’ts are ten guidelines dealing with body, speech, and mind. The guidelines for the body are: don’t kill, don’t steal, don’t engage in illicit sex. For speech: don’t tell lies, don’t speak divisively, don’t speak abusively, don’t engage in idle chatter. And for the mind: abandon greed, abandon ill will, cultivate right views. These are the Buddha’s basic ground rules for the survival of your happiness, and many of his teachings simply elaborate on these ten points.

But as any wilderness instructor will tell you, survival requires more than simple rules of thumb. You have to be alert to the gaps not covered by the rules. You need to learn to use your powers of observation, imagination, and ingenuity to dig out unskillful habits and develop new habits to fill in the gaps. That way you can live comfortably in the wilderness, respectful of the bears and moose and other dangers around you without being overwhelmed by them.

The same holds true with the Buddha’s skill: in addition to following the do’s and don’ts, you have to learn how to dig out the roots of unskillful behavior so that you can become adept in all areas of your life, including the areas where the do’s and don’ts don’t apply. The roots of unskillful behavior are three: greed, anger, and delusion. Of the three, delusion is the most insidious, for it blinds you to its very existence. The only way to overcome it is to be relentlessly observant, looking at your actions in terms of cause and effect, gauging their short- and long-term consequences for yourself and others.

Again, this involves learning to ask the right questions. Each time you’re about to act, ask yourself: “This action that I want to do: would it lead to self-harm, to the harm of others, or to both? Is it an unskillful action, with painful consequences, painful results?” If you foresee harm, don’t follow through with it. If not, go ahead and act. While acting, ask yourself if there are any unexpected bad consequences arising. If there are, stop. If there aren’t, continue with what you’re doing. When the action is done, look into its actual short- and long-term consequences. If an action in word or deed has ended up causing harm, inform an experienced fellow-practitioner on the path (this is why the Buddha established the Saṅgha) and listen to that person’s advice. If the mistaken action was purely an act of the mind, try to develop distaste for that kind of thinking. In both cases, resolve never to make the same mistake again, and use your ingenuity to make the resolve stick. If, however, the long-term consequences of the original action were harmless, take joy and satisfaction in being on the right path and continue your training.

As you stay with this line of questioning, it fosters two major results. To begin with, you become more sensitive to your actions and respectful of their effects, both in the present and over time. Unlike the child who says, “It was already broken when I stepped on it,” you’re aware of when you break things—physical or mental—and when you don’t. At the same time, you gain mastery over the patterns of action and effect. You get better and better at handling things without their getting broken. This in turn fosters a healthy sense of “self” and “I”  based on competence and skill. Your sense of self becomes good-humored enough to freely admit mistakes, mature enough to learn from them, quick enough to notice the immediate effects of your actions, while patient enough to strive for long-term goals. Confident in its own powers of observation, this “I” also has the humility needed to learn from the experience and advice of others.

These two results—sensitivity to the effects of your own actions and a competent sense of self—enable you to settle into a level of mental concentration that’s solid and nourishing. You overcome the hindrance of uncertainty as to what’s skillful and unskillful, and are able to develop the skillful qualities needed to center the mind. As this centered focus develops, an interesting thing happens: your sensitivity to actions and your sense of self come face to face. You begin to see that self not as a thing but as an activity, a process of “I-making” and “my-making” in which you repeatedly create and re-create your sense of who you are. You also begin to notice that this I-making, even when it produces the most skillful self possible, inevitably results in stress.

Why? Because any sense of “I” or “mine” involves clinging—even when your concentration tunes into a sense of universal self—and all clinging is stressful. So to take the development of skillfulness to its ultimate degree, you have to unlearn the habit of I-making and my-making. And to do this, another set of questions is required.

These are the questions that introduce the strategy of not-self. The Buddha recommends that you focus on any phenomenon around which you might sense an “I” or a “mine,” and ask a series of questions, starting with: “Is this constant or inconstant?” If you identify with your body, look at it. You’ll see that it grows hungry and thirsty, that it’s aging, destined to grow ill and die. “And is anything inconstant easeful or stressful?” Look at any attempt to find a stable happiness based on the body, and you’ll see how stressful it is. “And is it fitting to regard what’s inconstant, stressful, subject to change as: ‘This is mine. This is my self. This is what I am’?”

Pursue this line of inquiry inward, through layer after layer of physical and mental events, until you can zero in on the high command: the self that’s managing not only the stability of your concentration but also your internal dialogue of questions and answers. Fortified with the sense of stability and calm that come with strong concentration, you can start deconstructing that self with no anxiety over what will happen when it’s gone. And when the intentions making up that self are deconstructed, a strange thing happens. It’s as if you had pulled out a strategic thread holding a tapestry together, and now the whole thing unravels on its own. Everything that could possibly be clung to falls away. What remains is total, absolute freedom—free from time and space, from both self and not-self, for both “self” and “not-self” are perceptions, which that freedom transcends.

Even when you’ve had only a first, humbling taste of this freedom, you appreciate how adroitly the teaching on not-self answers the question of “What is skillful?” And you understand why the Buddha recommends putting the question of “Who am I?” aside. To begin with, it wouldn’t have taken you to this freedom, and could well have stood in freedom’s way. Because your “I” is an activity, any attempt to pin it down before you had mastered the processes of activity would have left you pouncing on shadows, distracted from the real work at hand. Any attempt to deconstruct your “I”  before it had become healthy and mature would have led to a release neurotic and insecure: you’d simply be running away from the messy, mismanaged parts of your life. In addition, any answer to the question “Who am I?” would be totally inappropriate to describe your new-found freedom, for it’s a dimension apart, where the concepts of “I,” “not-I,” “am,” “am not” do not apply.

The only question still concerning you is how to dig out the remaining roots of unskillfulness still latent in the mind. Once they’re dug up, the Buddha promises, nothing stands in the way to full and final freedom. And in that freedom, the mind lacks nothing, has nothing in excess. There’s none of the delusion that would shape the hole of a burning question, and none of the greed or aversion that would give it teeth. The only remaining questions are bonus ones: how best to take whatever skills you’ve developed along the way and use them purely for the benefit of the world.

And what more could you possibly ask?