Insight and Reflection Tejananda, Vajraloka, December 2003

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1 Insight and Reflection Tejananda, Vajraloka, December 2003 Kaya and Vedana We're here to awaken. To see things as they really are - now! In this moment. This is the incredible opportunity this retreat represents - to cultivate insight. Our main approach is satipatthana: i.e. being fully present to or attending closely to (upatthana) our immediate experience of the four objects of awareness (sati). 1. Body (touch + hearing, sight, taste, smell) = kaya 2. Feeling-tone or hedonic-tone = vedana 3. Nonconceptual mental events (emotions, mood, impulses etc) = citta 4. Conceptual & imaginative mental events (thoughts, images etc) = dhamma The closer we attend, the more we become aware of their true 'marks' - impermanent, unsatisfactory and insubstantial/empty. (anicca, dukkha, anatta/sunnata) We will attend to these objects in and (crucially) out of meditation This = the main practice on this retreat - and it's a 24/7 one! But we need to make it 24/7 and this will be hard work! There will be plenty of space for the practice of mindfulness of breathing, metta bhavana and (Order members) sadhana - etc. And when it's appropriate you can take up whatever forms of insight-reflection suit you best. In fact by and large what exactly you do will be up to you - in consultation with your practice 'reviewer'. The main object to which we initially aim to be fully present with awareness (satipatthana) is our body - kaya - together with the vedanas / feeling/hedonic tones which we experience in the body. Citta and Dhamma What's the point of practising mindfulness? On a retreat we can go quite far with our meditation practice. But we only spend maybe a quarter or a third of the day meditating. In daily life, we meditate (much) less than that. We need to make the effort to extend our practice to the whole of our life. If we just meditate, we'll make progress, but very slowly. In mindfulness / satipatthana, awareness of cittas and dhammas are crucial. Cittas: mental states or better, mental processes because they are always changing. These include mood, feelings (in the colloquial, non-vedana sense) impulses, wishes, wants, desires and so on. Dhammas: mental contents not, in this context, dhamma in sense of ultimates (not initially, anyway). These are thoughts, mental images, daydreams, imaginings, ideas, notions, conceptions etc. Both cittas and dhammas have associated vedanas. Cittas are non-conceptual. They always have an associated felt sense or sensation in the body. We re not always aware of this because cittas tend to be exacerbated/overlaid by thoughts viz thoughts perpetuating craving, aversion & indifference. So we need to become aware of our thoughts (acknowledge/accept them) and allow them to settle / calm. (this may take a long time!) We then just experience the felt sense of our cittas in our body acknowledge / accept them and allow them to settle / calm. (this may take an even longer time!) When the mind (citta & dhamma) has settled, we see things more directly/truly. Untainted by craving, aversion and delusion. However, we shouldn t become goal orientated about this. The practice of satipatthana is about being here/now with whatever is going on in the four foundations. Daily Practice An important opportunity for practice is being aware of transitions between sitting/walking between one formal practice and another. This is an aspect of everyday life practice when just stretching your legs, or getting up. Formal practice is indispensable. But in a way, everyday-life practice is more important and more difficult. Here on retreat, life is deliberately simplified, so we can get to grips with it more effectively. How can we practise in everyday life in our activities? We ve talked about triggers, journals etc. These are important aids to remembering to be aware / mindful. But using triggers isn t the same as being aware just as practising metta bhavana isn t the same as being mettaful. Both are a means to an end. What does it mean to be aware, then? We often think that we have to develop awareness but we don t: awareness is something that we have naturally. It s what we are. But we re often going around in a fog we barely know what

2 we re doing. We re certainly not aware of our everyday activities. In fact, we re not here at all. This means that something is obscuring / covering up our awareness. What is this fog? Quite simply, we re usually lost in thoughts (as distinct from being aware of our thoughts, as in the exercise we did yesterday). If we re lost in thoughts, we re almost certainly lost in some manifestation of delusion i.e. craving or aversion, etc. So what do we do about this? Quite simply (which is not to say it s easy!) we need to be aware of our thoughts everywhere and whatever we are doing. We need to be aware of them in such a way that we re allowing those gaps to appear between them. Note we re not trying to make gaps appear we re just being aware of our thoughts, whatever they are. If we re doing that work, gaps will naturally appear. And what happens when gaps appear? We naturally become aware of our body and the felt sense of the emotions in our body. So in your everyday practice, you can potentially approach this in two ways: in satipatthana terms these are kayanupassana and dhammanupassana. That s to say, via contemplation of the body or via contemplation of the thoughts (or of course, a combination of both together). In other words, by bringing your awareness into your body, into the immediate physical activity you re involved with, you can give the flow of thoughts a chance to dry up. Or by bringing awareness to the thoughts themselves, you can see what s going on and through awareness alone (i.e. the sky-like attitude ) allow gaps to appear. So the point is not to become more fully caught up in our thoughts by being aware of them quite the reverse: it s to create the conditions for these gaps to appear so that we become more and more fully present in our body (which also implicitly contains our experience of vedana and citta). Whichever way you approach it, gradually, gaps between thoughts will appear and become longer and longer & your awareness will become more and more present present to your body and the sensation of the emotions in your body. So this is the everyday life practice I recommend on the retreat and I recommend that you pay at least as much attention to this as to your practice in the shrine room. If not more. Working Meditation Continue to regard out of shrine room practice as the main thing to develop we re doing very well in the shrine room, so we don t (yet) need to give it any special attention. A particular opportunity for developing out of shrine room practice is the working meditation period. We could regard our job as just a chore or (much, much better!) as a great opportunity to set up conditions for bridging the gap (a different gap to the one referred to above!) i.e. the gap between meditation & out of shrine room practice on retreat and between retreat & our everyday life practice when we leave the retreat. So how could we approach the working meditation? I suggest simply as I outlined yesterday: the jobs are all simple, physical tasks. They don t require much brain power or intellectual acumen! This is ideal for simply practising awareness of the body: be in your body as you work, be aware of the tools/utensils you are using as extensions of your body & be aware of the environment the area of your work as not separate from your body. At the same time, be aware of the thoughts that are tending to take you away from your immediate experience. Let your thoughts just be in the body and its actions to do these jobs, you hardly need to think; in fact probably you don t need to think at all! So practice a sky-like awareness of the thoughts that arise as you work that is, be aware that you are thinking (if you are) and be aware of what kinds of thoughts they are but don t get entangled in them don t hold on to them. And don t engender further thoughts about the thoughts, e.g. God, it does annoy me when he does that oh, that was a bit unskilful, damn! I should be doing better than that on retreat etc. As soon as you become conscious that a thought is arising, or that a stream of thoughts (e.g. a daydream, fantasy etc) is underway, just allow it to pass don t put any more energy into it. It isn t easy to let go of thoughts directly it s much easier to do so indirectly by bringing your awareness (fully) back into your body experience. Especially, bringing it into your hara centre of gravity keep in contact with that as much as you can as you work. Every few minutes stop the work activity for a few seconds and re-contact your body experience / hara. This doesn t have to be obtrusive, nor should it make your work any less effective the reverse in fact. Obviously all this applies to all and any other activities outside of the formal periods of practice but I suggest at least work on it carefully during the working meditation period.

3 Vipassana - Reflection on Impermanence We ve been practising satipatthana, in and out of the shrine room, and samatha meditation - setting up a basis for vipassana insight meditation. It is of course good & necessary to cultivate absorption (samatha) the ability to stay more or less undistractedly with an object / topic. But really, it s a complete waste of time if we don t use that opportunity to cultivate insight (samatha-vipassana). We have that opportunity on this retreat so let s make most of it! Let s remind ourselves of what we re doing here & why: All beings have the fundamental wish to be happy how we construe this depends (presumably) on what kind of being we are. A dog seems very happy digging up a smelly old bone and gnawing it, which presumably we wouldn t be! How do we construe happiness? We surely all want to be well and free from suffering. More than this, we want well, we want what we want! We feel that if we get what we want whatever that happens to be right now then we ll be happy. Of course, we re not so stupid (us adults) as to think that getting what we want for Christmas is going to make us permanently happy! No, we do it in a slightly more sophisticated and crafty way. There s a continuous, never-ending succession of things that we want: I want to be comfortable, I want a snack, I want a love affair with the subtext then I ll be happy. Generally, along these lines, we do (at least half the time) get what we want or we can be reasonably philosophical about it if we don t especially if we ve been practising Dharma for some years! And as long as we do, more or less, get what we want a reasonable amount of the time, we re reasonably happy. Or at lest, we have the illusion that we re reasonably happy. But there are other things that we want that aren t so easy to get maybe things that we want to be free of: I don t want this pain/illness; I don t want to be getting older & wrinklier; I don t want to die; I don t to lose my friends/lovers/parents and so on. Fundamentally what we really and truly want is to stay young forever, never experience pain or suffering and always to have around all the things/people that make us feel comfortable and secure. We want what we want to really, truly, always be there for us. Now we all know, rationally, that all this is just a pile of dung it s just impossible for this to happen. And yet, irrespective, we believe that unless we get it, we re not going to be happy. In other words, we re completely bonkers (this was apparently said by the Buddha himself: all unawakened beings are bonkers ). So we re here to do something about this ridiculous situation we re here to wake up a bit, to become a bit more sane. This is where the vipassana comes in: with as much of ourselves present as we can muster, we look steadily & objectively at the actual situation in the light of reality. Reality in this case is represented by the 3 marks/lakshanas (or the first 3 viparyasas topsy-turvy views): 1. We want to stay young forever i.e. we don t want things to change, don t want to lose what we ve got and so forth. But of course they do change/get lost, & so we suffer. We work to change our fundamental view of this by contemplating the actual situation the mark of impermanence or change. 2. Similarly we want never to experience pain or suffering we want our lives to be fully satisfactory. Or course, pain can t be avoided in this life but most of the pain we experience is self-inflicted. So by contemplating the actual situation the mark of unsatisfactoriness dukkha, we work to change our view. 3. And finally we want what we want to really, always be there for us we want things (including ourselves) to be really real something which we can really hold onto, to make us really secure. So we counter the inevitable pain we cause for ourselves by holding this unrealistic view by contemplating the actual situation: the mark of insubstantiality or not-self. So how do we engage with this in practice? I suggest keeping it as directly related to our experience as possible: i.e. relate each of the 3 marks to each of the 4 objects of satipatthana as we experience them. The main thing is: don t think about the mark too much. Do thinking reflection to the extent that you need to, to clarify the teaching maybe outside of sitting meditation. But the essence of the vipassana practice is to reflect directly (as a mirror reflects not with mental verbiage). So, say if you are contemplating kaya-anicca, the impermanence of the body, ideally you d be fully aware of your body (sensations & vedana) and its impermanence in one your awareness of the impermanence is in your body.

4 Any thinking is subtle, not a gross this is impermanent this sensation is changing etc (though you could use this to some extent just to get you going). You need to find in your own experience what this subtle use of thinking entails. (See Background material for vipassana / insight / reflection retreats for much more on how to reflect.) Reflecting on Dukkha Although today/tomorrow I m introducing the other marks/lakshanas, I suggest you carry on reflecting on impermanence in the four objects of satipatthana for some time maybe several days. If you really get a feeling for that, the others will emerge more naturally. Today we re approaching dukkha unsatisfactoriness / pain. As a lakshana, we mainly approach it as unsatisfactoriness as I said yesterday, we can t avoid pain. Well, we can t avoid unsatisfactoriness either. But unlike immediate pain (dukkha-dukkha), a great deal of the unsatisfactoriness we find in life is because of the way in which we live it in a word, because of our delusion. Or, as I put it yesterday, because we re bonkers. And I this mean quite literally (though not exactly clinically!) after all, would we do half the frankly bizarre and peculiar things we do if we were really sane? E.g. would we spend hours, days, weeks obsessively mulling over some petty disagreement with a partner, friend or colleague? Would we be so concerned with status or class or the way that we believe we look in other people s eyes? Would we (here s a difficult one!) fall in love??? All of these things and hundreds more we could easily think of if we tried give us a bit of immediate satisfaction or pleasure, and a lot of angst, disgruntlement, pain and dissatisfaction. And we know it. But we still do it. So reflecting on the mark of dukkha is a way of getting a perspective on this and freeing ourselves from these obsessive and painful behaviours. This last point is of general importance. The very point of meditating on the three marks is to gain freedom from our limiting, painful delusive states. Someone mentioned in our group discussion that he finds it useful to reflect on the three liberations that correspond with the three marks (signless, directionless, emptiness), to counteract any tendency to doom and gloom which might come from the contemplation of the marks themselves particularly, perhaps, dukkha. Well I m not going to go into the three liberations now, but I think that it would be very useful to reflect a lot on the fact that the very reason we re contemplating the three marks is in order to gain liberation - to free ourselves, loosen up from our pain-causing attachments and delusions. And that this freedom is not just something we ll attain Three Great Aeons in the future, with Supreme And Perfect Buddhahood (i.e. indefinitely postponed to the future). As a little awakening, it s something that potentially can arise in our practice here and now. I.e. by contemplating the marks, we see through our ego-reactions to some extent and to that extent they stop. Thus, we can actually be free from craving, grasping, repulsing, anger and so on. We can enter the sense of spaciousness and freedom which is there in their absence and this is what we mean by vipassana. So to the extent that we loosen up, to that extent we can experience the fruits of liberation as far as it goes (and as long as it lasts). But this isn t something that we can make happen or something we should obsess about getting either of these approaches just makes it another source of dukkha but we can bear in mind that liberation, freedom is the real point of doing this practice & it may well arise to some extent or other, almost at any moment. If we re just aware, and open to it. A few general points: Carry on practising awareness of the four objects of satipatthana in & out of shrine room practice don t forget! Review your triggers if you do this work, the effectiveness of your practice will increase exponentially! As you practice sitting reflection on the lakshanas, you ll find that awareness of them naturally occurs in your out of shrine room practice as well. You can also stimulate this deliberately especially when you are contemplatively walking or sitting in a chair just being. The meditation I led yesterday gives just one possible approach to reflecting on the marks (viz. drop-in in the form of asking oneself a question and receptively waiting upon the awareness which arises from this). A lot of other approaches are possible (see other handout). Here is one way of meditating on dukkha in the four objects of awareness e.g. body:

5 Cultivate absorption effectively (this may only take a couple of minutes, indeed you might be right there right away; on the other hand, you might find you don t achieve it in the whole meditation session but unless you have an effective level of absorption/ samatha, you can t engage in vipassana effectively.) Get the body in view i.e. experience your body! Let your mind take in, reflect directly, what is painful / unpleasant in your experience. Then you might drop in a question such as what is it about my body [experience] that is unsatisfactory? and remain aware for the implicit answer to arise. With this lakshana you may need to do a bit more thinking reflection e.g. to be clear why the body, etc, is unsatisfactory but keep it as simple as possible. Reflecting on Insubstantiality Depending on your point of view, each of the 3 marks contains or implies the other two. From the point of view of our existential human situation, dukkha is primary. Dukkha our suffering is what we experience inevitably if we don t get to grips with the other two, and it s the primary reason for getting to grips with the other two. Why is it that dukkha arises if we don t understand impermanence and insubstantiality? It all comes down to expectations: to put it as simply as possible, we expect (want) one thing, but the universe gives us something quite different. As I said the other day, what we want is permanence we don t want to lose anything or anyone that we ve got. Above all, we don t want to lose ourselves our body, our life. Of course, unfortunately this isn t the deal that the universe offers to us. And because we resist and deny this truth, we suffer (and also often cause suffering to others) Its much the same with insubstantiality: we want things/ people/ ourselves to be truly dependable, truly real in other words, substantial. We don t want to be let down what we want is a source of security which will never, ever let us down. And of course, we know already that this isn t what we re going to get. Because things are impermanent, they are also insubstantial and vice-versa. Impermanence and insubstantiality are the same truth, looked at respectively from the point of view of time (process) and space. The point is, we re going to continue to suffer not just until we know things as they really are, but until we bring our entire being into harmony with the way things really are. To some extent, we do already know that things are impermanent and insubstantial we re on the bottom of the ladder of wisdom, so to speak (sutamayapanna conceptual understanding) but we are still a very long way from bringing our entire being into harmony with these truths & so becoming fully liberated from our unrealistic and dukkha-producing expectations & illusions. Really getting to grips with this is the entire process of awakening. So by reflecting on the lakshanas (or any other kind of vipassana practice) we re aiming to open as much of our being as possible to the truth this is why it s important to develop sufficient samatha as the basis for vipassana samatha is about being all there (or here); the whole of ourself is attending to the matter at hand, i.e. the matter of really taking in what the lakshana is telling our deeply-held expectations, and allowing those expectations to loosen their dukkha-producing hold on us. So the reflection on anatta, insubstantiality (lit. not-self ) is an opening up to the fact that there is nothing (no-thing) we can depend on as a source of ultimate security. In fact, there are no things things are merely a conceptual construct that we produce in order to make ourselves feel better (and which, of course, in practice it always ends up making us feel worse.) So we can look at contemplate our body, hedonic tone, emotions and thoughts in the light of this to see whether in fact there is any substantial entity here any thing which really, ultimately exists. Is there even a single cell in our body which always has and always will exist? Is there a feeling of pleasure or pain that can be absolutely depended upon always to be there? Is there an emotion or mood or impulse which is truly existent and never absent? Is there a single thought / image which is totally stable and dependable?

6 And in case, despite all this, we still think that there is a true self somewhere to be found it might help to reflect: is there anything about me which doesn t come into these four categories? (e.g. is there perhaps an atman a truly existent soul?) So this is what we are going to do! Satipatthana and vipassana in action Remember that the essence of the practice on this retreat is doing it all-the-time. This is the most important thing to train ourselves in just remembering to practice, whatever we are doing. If you want a simple and essentialised satipatthana practice for out of shrine room, then: mindfulness of the four objects of satipatthana boils down to awareness of your body body awareness boils down to bringing our awareness again and again back to the centre of gravity, the hara (lower abdomen area). Be in your body be in your hara let your awareness and practice come from your centre of gravity. Whatever you are doing. To put it another way don t try to practice with your head. Most of us are caught up in our heads most of the time anyway. We re caught up in the endless round of thoughts and images mental distractions and kleshas. These endless distracted thoughts/images make absent-minded professors out of all of us! We can t counter this tendency by thinking about stopping them. Bringing awareness into the body again and again and again is the most effective way of being present and stemming the endless torrent of thoughts. The point about not practising with our heads also applies to whatever vipassana practice we do this is one reason why we develop samatha as a basis first it enables us to become quieter, more centred and less conceptual, or even non-conceptual. So, having become quieter, more centred and as non-conceptual as possible, it d be a big mistake to start doing vipassana in a very heady and conceptual way i.e. having a lot of conceptual thoughts about the insight-topic. This is a danger or mis-direction to look out for and especially if we re the sort of person who loves ideas it s very easy to get caught up, in effect, in philosophising our mind is very clear and we re dealing with some very fundamental philosophical issues! This is of course fine if we want to do it as an activity in its own right, but it s not the approach to vipassana meditation. What we want is a very simple, direct awareness of the aspect of insight we re contemplating whether it s impermanence, dukkha, insubstantiality, emptiness or whatever which is right here in our body ideally it s one with our awareness of our body. Or nondual with our awareness of our body. This is what we mean by subtle thought it s thought which is in the body & of the body. Reflection and contemplation mean the same it s not a thought-process but (we could say) a body-awareness imbued with insight. The more that we do this, the more our body remembers the import of the vipassana in this way, in time, to become aware of the body is to become directly and non-conceptually aware of the vipassana. They aren t two different things. This is a process it won t just happen right away, but you re going in the right direction if you a) are working to be aware of the body all the time particularly being centred in the hara. b) reflect subtly with awareness of the body. c) do this both in and out of the shrine room awareness of the lakshanas can be there all the time, potentially. A final point: the reflections on lakshanas are not just about ourselves: they apply to others & the whole universe. Let this be in your awareness when you are contemplating them.