Monday, July 25, 2022

NOTHING EXISTS AS IT APPEARS

Let’s take a deep breath and summon courage this week, as we seek to realize something that’s profoundly humbling about ourselves. 

Humbling, because it’s almost certainly true.  

That truth is that the reason we create suffering so often for ourselves and others, despite our sincerest intentions, is that we flat out don’t understand the nature of reality. 

We don’t understand reality full stop; nor the reality that we are; which are one and the same. Because reality is one. 

The one reality that is. 

And we just don’t get it. 

It’s a serious thing not to understand reality, including the reality that we are, in our utmost and simplest being.

So let’s take another moment of contemplation then, to let this sink in. 

We have all the time in the world, and we know this is the most important thing we could ever do, is to take full account of our lack of understanding of reality, and to realize this is no superficial thing. 

It’s not superficial because it’s not a matter of fixing this thing or that thing in our mind or body, and then everything will be all right. 

It’s not about looking in one or another area of our lives, and locating the one problem area, and solving that problem. 

Rather, today we want to absorb the fact that our misunderstanding of reality is complete and total, in an absolutely fundamental way.

How we think is upside-down to reality. 

We want to truly and deeply take this in. 

And we want to realize that as a result of our upside-down thinking, we’re unable to learn not only about reality, but about our own essence as beings.  

Because we are of reality.

Our individual reality is an expression of the one reality, and we just don’t understand that one, the only one that is. We’re a wave in the ocean that knows to some extent its nature as an individual wave. But we haven’t yet fully experienced our essence as the ocean itself, especially its depth, and the stillness and silence at its depth. 

We don’t yet know how the ocean of reality works. We don’t yet know its infinite and eternal nature, nor its many other essences, qualities, and powers. And as a result, we don’t yet know our own essence as infinite and eternal, nor our own qualities and powers. 

So far these reflections are hopefully taking us in a positive direction. 

But there is yet one more sobering fact to absorb about how we understand reality wrongly. 

That is to realize that as a result of our thinking being completely upside-down to reality, we constantly create reality in our minds in a way that is completely opposite to the way that reality works. 

Which is the ultimate set-up for suffering. 

Even if our intentions are good, our upside-down thinking inevitably causes our behaviors—in thought, speech and action—to turn out badly for ourselves and for anyone we meet in our daily rounds. 

The upside-downness of our thinking thus leads directly to the direst possible consequences for human beings and human society, and for everything in creation that we individually, and collectively, touch.   

At every turn, our mind creates the opposite of what our heart desires and knows is best. Which is is letting go of our self-centerednesss. 

Instead of creating the happiness that all hearts seek, our thoughts therefore create the opposite realities of grief, frustration, anger and fear. 

Instead of bringing brightness and clarity to consciousness, our thoughts bring confusion, darkness, and despair. Instead of creating the peace our heart seeks, our thinking creates conflict and war. Instead of love, thinking conjures indifference. In seeking health, thinking creates illness. In seeking wisdom, ignorance comes. In seeking environmental abundance to protect and nourish our living bodies, our great plans and strategies for mining and harvesting the earth instead degrades, diminishes and destroys the planet.

Give these consideration. See if they don’t ring true. 

We start to see the stakes of upside-down thinking clearly now. 

The stakes are very high. 

The Buddha taught about humanity’s upside-downness to reality in detail. He described it from every angle, warning of its toxicity to life and freedom, and prescribing counter-measures in countless ways. This topic is the very heart of his teaching, because upside-down thinking, which he called “ignorance,” he taught was the original root of all suffering. To remove this root was the alpha and the omega of his practice, which he taught in two basic steps: First, how to observe for ourselves, very clearly, how our  misperception of reality creates suffering; and, second, how by various methods we may correct that mental flaw and in that way at last see reality rightside-up, as it truly is, and win our freedom. 

My two main teachers, Sayadaw U Tejaniya, a Buddhist monk and meditation teacher, and Rupert Spira, a non-dual teacher, ground their teachings in the same insight into the perils of upside-down thinking, and very similar methods to put our thinking rightside-up again.

Sayadaw U Tejaniya, for example, stated in the first two sentences of a recent book of his teachings: “First, we must ask ourselves: What is our relationship to reality? What is our understanding of life?” In the remainder of the book, he expanded on this main point, that because human beings misunderstand the nature of reality, we set ourselves on a path of inevitable, relentless suffering. Such suffering can only end once we circle back and practice in  a way that allows us to replace our ignorance of reality with a clear seeing of reality as it actually is, of “the way things are.” 

“Only when there is true understanding, will there be true happiness,” Sayadaw says. “Not the kind of happiness that people like to indulge in, but rather a true happiness, which is happiness that arises because you are completely at peace with the way things are.” 

Rupert Spira teaches the same, while also frequently pointing to the wider implications of humanity’s general ignorance of the nature of reality, for the health and fate of human society, and for all living beings on planet Earth, and indeed for the whole planet itself. 

“I would suggest,” Spira says, “that the most profound problems that humanity faces—the despair felt by many people, the conflict experienced between individuals, communities and nations, and the exploitation and degradation of the Earth—all of these stem from our mistaken notion of the nature of reality.

“Our view of reality is completely upside-down,” Spira says. “Could these two things be correlated? That is, the despair and conflict that we find in the world, and the fact that our view of reality is upside-down? 

“I would suggest they are directly correlated, and that this won’t ever change until our view of reality changes.” 

This is precisely what the Four Foundations practice changes: our view reality, by turning it rightside-up. 

So that at last we can see, and be free. 

And so we return, again and again, to the body. 

The Full Awareness of Breathing begins with these steps, to return awareness towards our experience of the body in this way: 

1 Awareness of the Long Breath

2 Awareness of the Short Breath

3 Awareness of the Whole Body

4 Awareness of Calming the Body

Each of these steps is a way to experience the body, even the first two which direct our attention to the “long breath” and the “short breath.” 

The breath is how the Buddha recommends we return to awareness of the body, if we have been wandering away for a while.

He recommends becoming aware of the breath, again and again, because in becoming aware of the breath, we return to our body.

And most of all, because the breath isn’t different from the body. 

The breath is a way to experience the body. 

The sensations of breathing are sensations of the body. 

Therefore, in becoming aware of breathing, we return to the body, and we become aware that the body is alive. 

The body is breathing. The body is movement. 

The body is energy. 

The body is life. 

This week, let’s pay special attention to Step 3 which is Awareness of the Whole Body. 

Because this is how to be Aware of our Whole Life. 

We want this!

Step 3, we can see, is perhaps the most important of all of the 16 steps in the Full Awareness of Breathing, because it is the most potentially liberating of all the steps.

The Buddha himself said this as you’ll recall: 

“There is one thing,” he said, “that when cultivated and regularly practiced leads to deep spiritual intention, to peace, to awareness and clear comprehension, to vision and knowledge, to a happy life here and now, and to the culmination of wisdom and awakening. And what is that one thing? It is awareness centered on the body.

The overarching importance of Step 3, Awareness of the Whole Body, lies not only in the fact that it leads us to realize that our bodies do not exist as they appear. Specifically, they are not solid in our experience. 

 Step 3 is also crucial because it acts as a doorway to all of the other steps. Once it is opened, then all of the other steps will complete themselves almost effortlessly, like dominoes falling one after the other. 

This is because once we experience the body as not solid but rather as spacious, luminous, and made of pure knowing, then everything else in our experience, such as our mind, our moods, our bad habits and our painful emotions, are all quickly revealed in the same way. 

Which is terrifically liberating. If we experience our rock hard bitterness, anger and depression no longer as solid, dense and seemingly permanent—but instead as 100% empty, spacious, peaceful, luminous and made of pure knowing—that indeed is liberation. 

When we know there is actually no solidity or density to be found anywhere in our experience, then we will never again feel stress or tension, not profoundly. Because suffering results from nothing but our belief in solidity and density, and the belief that that all forms of suffering, which are nothing but forms of energy that for now seem terrifically dense and solid, and permanent as a result.

But they will end, as soon as we see that our actual experience of the body, as opposed to how we think and conceive of the body, contains not the slightest trace of density and solidity.

 In truth, even suffering is made only spacious, luminous, peace. 

That is the nature of reality. 

This practice allows us to know our true nature as that.

The Buddha described awareness of the whole body as like a tiny wormhole in the fabric of our experience. By placing our full attention on this one wormhole, with skill and patience, we may enter it and instantly know the “deathless,” the primordial reality from which all forms of mind, body and world arise, and back into which all living forms eventually dissolve, disappear, and cease. 

“This state, I tell you, is without sorrow, affliction or despair,” the Buddha said. “It is peace; it is exquisite; it is the end of all suffering.

This is the very purpose of our guided meditations. Through them, we give ourselves the time, first to relax and clear the mind, and then to investigate the nature of the body in our actual experience. We look this way and that, to see if we ever noticing anything in our experience that we could honestly call solid, dense, compact, or having a border. 

When we never notice the slightest evidence of any of these in our actual experience, we start to experience the body more and more as vast and spacious and borderless, and luminous with the knowing quality of awareness. In time, we notice more and more that the actual experience of the body is imbued with this same gentle yet powerful quality of a caring, interested intelligence. As awareness fills the body more and more, in every nook and cranny, the distinction between body and awareness breaks down, and the body at last is known as pure awareness that is for now quite miraculously taking the form of the body, which is still yet filled all the qualities of awareness.

Once we know the body as made of pure awareness, the body becomes empty, pure, and luminous with knowing—another way to experience the end of suffering. This is true even when there are aches and pains, as aches and pains like anywhere else in the body fill with awareness, and so too are known as luminous and pure.

Without a doubt, it usually takes a bit of practice to get to this point. 

But it’s no harder than learning any other skill, and much easier than most. Maybe on a par with learning to play beginner piano, or speaking foreign language phrases from a guide book, or learning to ride a bike. From there, you keep adding skill at handling the body and mind as they arise with different feelings, moods and emotions. And one again, as with any skill, the more you practice the better you get. 

Because these skills are about putting our lives more and more in synch with how reality works, instead of constantly working against reality, these skills are truly the highest you could ever learn. 

Even at the very beginning, is entirely skillful to embrace the intuition that this promise of peace, in the body and mind, is grounded in the truth. If we haven’t yet experienced this passage from form into pure reality, we certainly can still feel the desirability of experiencing this, pulling at us like gravity. This experience alone is nature, pure reality, declaring itself to our consciousness and asserting the irresistible fact of its oneness with our being. Simply to feel this unmistakeable pull on our being, at least partially nourishes our confidence in the Buddha. He is trustworthy, our deepest intuition tells us. What he’s recommended at every point seems to work out; and now that he points further, straight at total liberation from suffering, why shouldn’t we trust him just this one bit more? Why shouldn’t we, with courage, take the plunge into awareness that he recommends? 

The Buddha is pointing to this one wormhole—awareness of the whole body—as a passageway to ultimate peace.  

If the description of the deathless above was a teaser to taking the plunge, but still leaves you a bit wanting, consider a much fuller elaboration on the nature of the deathless. It was offered by the Buddha as an all-out enticement to pull up to the very edge of the wormhole of the pure awareness of the whole body, and to fearlessly plunge in. 

Here’s how to do that: Simply drop all of your ideas, concepts, worries and memories of the body. Let them fall away. Experience the body just as it is. In doing so, you will experience reality, just as it is. 

It’s that simple. Nothing more to do. 

In that instant, the Buddha says, the deathless will be known as: 

“The unfashioned, the end, the effluent-less, the true, the beyond, the subtle, the very-hard-to-see, the ageless, permanence, the undecaying, the featureless, non-elaboration, peace, the exquisite, bliss, solace, the exhaustion of craving, the wonderful, marvelous, the secure, security, unbinding, the unafflicted, the passionless, the pure, release, non-attachment, the island, shelter, harbor, refuge, the ultimate.”

Best of luck with your practice this week!

With love 🙏☀️

Doug