Episode Transcript
Speaker 1 00:00:14 Welcome to my Bob Thurman podcast. I'm so grateful some good friends enabled me to present them to you. If you enjoy them and find them useful, please think of becoming a member of Tibet House us to help preserve Tibetan culture. Tibet house is the Dai Lama's cultural center in America. All this wishes have a great day.
Speaker 2 00:00:48 This is episode 311, Transcendent Wisdom, The Root of Liberation.
Speaker 0 00:00:59 Um,
Speaker 4 00:01:20 It is said that just by achieving the mind of transcendence and then developing the mind of universal compassion and realizing that once ultimate freedom depends on creating the ultimate freedom of all beings. Now we come to the actual root of freedom itself. And now I come back to what I mentioned to you in our first session together, that the Buddha basically realized that the key to salvation can't just be compassion in the sense of just a willing freedom from suffering. It must be an understanding of the nature of reality. This understanding and extreme development is called transcendent wisdom, meaning because it is a kind of awareness, a thorough and total knowledge. It is not just some sort of resignation or coexistence or being with or something. It's a real knowing of everything. Knowing of everything in a way by becoming everything. It's symbolized by the sword of wisdom with flames at the tip, the flame is being like a lamp, like a laser light that burns through the darkness of delusion.
Speaker 4 00:02:38 So this wisdom is in fact the actual thing that accomplishes our liberation. It is the actual tool. It is the actual vehicle of the liberation wishing for one's own and all beings liberation is very crucial and very powerful, but it will not by itself accomplish that liberation. Being transcendent about all lower aims and giving up all mundane preoccupations is extremely essential to give oneself the space and time to focus on the depth of reality. But finally, we have to come to an understanding of the depths of reality. Again, as I said at the very beginning, the wonderful thing about the Buddhas teaching is that it is not just a religious teaching about something we have to believe in. It is a scientific teaching that says that the nature of the world is such that if we understand it, we will be free, but we can only be free Again by understanding it, we won't be free by just believing that if we maybe somebody else understood it, it is freedom or that somebody else said it is freedom by itself. Believing in that will not bring the freedom. We have to come to the understanding of it. And now we have a new set of our PEs, a new set of scales, a new structure for the discovery and the unfolding of our wisdom. First of all, we can say there are three types of wisdom. The three types of wisdom are the wisdom born of learning.
Speaker 4 00:04:08 The second type is the wisdom born of critical reflection. The third type of wisdom is the wisdom born of meditative insight. Sometimes people tend to think that they should jump and meditate right away and actually it is good to meditate right away because if we don't meditate on something positive just by going around in the world and thinking in our own minds, in a way we're meditating on our negative habits of self reoccupation. So in a way it's not a choice in life. Should I be a Buddhist or a Hindu or a yogi or not a yogi? Should I meditate or not meditate? There is no question that a human being is always meditating. Every single person listening to this is meditating all the time. When you walk down the street thinking something in your mind like Where am I? What shall I do? That is a meditation and the problem is that the mind has its own habit, energy of self preoccupation and then the society, the culture has a very powerful cultural habit, energy that it imposes on us repeating and repeating its theory of reality. Its cosmology. It is like a constant stream of reinforcement of our habitual world. Picture, our habitual social picture, our habitual cultural picture. We are constantly meditating on all of these things.
Speaker 4 00:05:28 However, in the context of specifically meditating on the nature of reality, to aim our meditation, to make our meditative insight effective, we first have to learn something. So in a way we have to do the meditation that involves learning and then second, we have to do the meditation. That involves critical reflection and this often involves discussion and debate with others. In the Tibetan tradition and the ancient Indian tradition debate was a crucial part of the discipline of the monastics because you had to debate with others to argue and use reason and see the fallacious of some of your prejudices and biased reasonings. You had to develop that ability to develop a strong critical awareness. And then when you internally meditating without another being present, you will be critiquing your own negative minds, your own prejudiced attitudes. They will advance their arguments, you will advance their opponent arguments and you will come to the truth in meditation. If you don't analyze and bring up what you falsely mis think, miss know, then you'll never come to true knowledge in the learning type of wisdom. We therefore learn sort of the layout of the universe as selfless, as empty, as free from any intrinsic reality.
Speaker 4 00:06:50 In doing that, there are sort of two levels of it. There are what is called subjective, selflessness and objective selflessness. Subjective selflessness means that yourself as a subjectivity is not fixed, independent, absolute thing in itself is sort of an outside witness of what is going on, but doesn't change in any way itself. Objective selflessness means, and it sounds funny at first talking about the self of an object, right? Since we think self is sort of a personal thing, but actually we use the expression self with objects. If you think about it, we say the table itself, the sun, the moon itself, themselves, right? We use the word self. Self is like a reflexive pronoun That goes back to the thing we've mentioned and seems to hit as if it were the essence of the thing. For example, when we say the table itself, we are thinking of a table as having some sort of essential thing about it that gives it its table nest.
Speaker 4 00:07:56 We don't think, oh, we are creating the table by thinking of it as a table. Our perception, even without thinking anything, seems to have the table moving up at us as if it were a thing in itself. Now, if we actually do a thought experiment with the table, it's easier to start with the table and we look to see like what is the table? Okay, I'm looking at this table here, I put my finger on it. Now I could take a little jigsaw on, cut off that piece of wood that I just put my finger on, and would you say the table was still there without the part I just touched? You would say that it would be a table with a little hole in it. If we took one leg off and only had three legs and propped it up on a stack of cinder blocks, would it still be the table?
Speaker 4 00:08:40 Yes, it would. So then actually that leg wasn't the table, so none of the legs in fact are the table. In fact none of the parts of the table or the table or we could disassemble all the parts and put them in a box and mail it to our friend. Here's the table, and yet it would be all disassembled in pieces. Then you know, you could go down to subatomic analysis of the of the atoms in the wood of the table, the quantum level, the wave particle paradox, et cetera. Basically the table dissolves under analysis. In fact, anything in the universe that you can find dissolves under analysis. A marvelous thing about the modern period is that modern investigative science is coming up through its analysis of the material objects of the world with a similar conclusion as that which the bud I reached thousands of years ago, that everything dissolves under analysis.
Speaker 4 00:09:34 There is no indivisible particle in our modern 20th century. There was a lot of relativistic anxiety among scientists and philosophers, which is still very heightened and still goes on a lot because it's hard for them to get used to the idea that we are living in a universe that essentially is Gomer. It is essentially illusory. Seemingly solid objects are made of atoms, which themselves are completely diaphanous, mostly empty space, and then even the nuclei and the little hard particles, which we can picture at some meso level as being hard when looked at inside, they themselves dissolve into inscrutable charms and quirks and quirks and maisons and boons and every other kind of bozos.
Speaker 4 00:10:20 When you meditate, actually you meditate. Second on objective, selflessness, the selflessness of objects, but I'm starting with it because it connects nicely with modern sciences discovery through quantum physics particularly and to through relativity of relativistic classical physics too. But there they po certain Es, whereas the emptiness theory, the selflessness reality, pos no Es except that the only absolute is the lack of an absolute. The only absolute is the absolute emptiness of itself. Therefore, emptiness is something that does not impede the infinite relativity of all relative things. The surface realities like a mirror surface. A mirror surface has nothing on itself, but it reflects all of the objects reflected in it. All of the universe is reflected in the surface of emptiness.
Speaker 4 00:11:19 The reflections are nothing but the surface. They're not something extra on the surface, it won't reflect anything if it's held towards empty sky, it'll seem empty. If it's held towards differentiated objects, it will reflect differentiated objects. Now that's the meaning of what is called objective selflessness or objective emptiness. We live in a world that is illusory. It isn't an illusion that is to say utterly unreal. It's like an illusion. It's somewhat unreal. It is somewhat real as relative processes, relative things, some sort of un inscrutable, indescribable or indescribable relative things. It is not absolutely unreal, but it is somewhat unreal because each thing in the world seems absolute as a thing in itself. When we investigate, we discover that it is not absolute.
Speaker 4 00:12:26 The ultimate reality would be something that does not dissolve under analysis that is real in the way in which it appears. And so it would assume there would be some sort of non apparent absolute or maybe an absolute which would appear to us if we had the wisdom of emptiness. Even people will talk like, Oh yeah, I, the so and so achieved the direct experience of emptiness. They say as if like emptiness were like a big giant space or something that they saw, but whoever saw space, no one can see space. When you say, I see space, it means like I didn't see anything is all it means. I didn't see anything seeming to fill a space. You never see the space. Space is a negation in that sense, it's a pure negation. Similarly emptiness or absolute, absolute away from solution, away from relationship is a kind of negation and negations are such that they're different than objects. Positive objects in that negations are seen when you don't see what they're negating. You look for the elephant and you don't see an elephant and you negate that the elephant is there. You don't ever see a non elephant.
Speaker 4 00:13:43 So it's a different type of awareness in a way. So the absolute is only known through that negative awareness of failing to see any other thing that is absolute in itself and therefore they say when you look for the nature of things and you analyze them and they dissolve under analysis, your non finding of those things is your discovery of emptiness is your discovery of ultimate reality is your direct experience of ultimate reality when everything melts away. However, if you then turn in some deep state and look for the emptiness itself, then you can't find that either you conceive of emptiness as if it were a thing sort of different and kind from the things that you had presumed to be in it, you can't find it. So that is called the emptiness of emptiness or the emptiness of the absolute, which is the antidote to dualism actually.
Speaker 4 00:14:52 But here I'm jumping ahead. I'm just giving this because this gives us an initial feeling about the nature of the world. As the Buddha understood it and as the great Buddhist philosophers and scientists explained it ever more and more sophisticated ways depending on the more and more sophisticated needs of the people to understand, uh, that concludes a little bit of unpacking of the objective selflessness or objective emptiness and gives you a little sense of what it is. Emptiness is not nothingness. The emptiness of the table is not that the table is nothing. The emptiness of the table is that the table is empty of a fixed essence that makes it a table. Therefore it only becomes a table when we use it like a table interactively, relationally at various ways in relation to its causes in relation to its parts in relation to our use of it and our designations for it.
Speaker 4 00:15:59 So in relation to our minds, in other words, so it does have some relative existence. It is not nothing, but it is empty of being absolutely a table as it seems to be. When we originally encounter it, when we originally encountered the table, it seems like a thing in itself to us and so many philosophers west and east throughout history have come up with ideas about the table is a pure idea of a table. A table has some sort of essential table identity in it and all this kind of thing. There are many theories by philosophers that fit with this naive feeling that we have instinctively when we encounter an object that the object is a thing in itself, but that should give you some sense of how it is empty and how that emptiness of it confirms its relativity rather rather than annihilates it into a nothingness. That's very important to understand from the beginning.
Speaker 4 00:16:57 Now we come to the topic which we would first meditate on, which is the topic of personal selflessness, personal self and personal selflessness. And in this one I wanna emphasize again at the beginning right away and here I will pay tribute to the Tibetans particularly that is in Buddha's proclaiming ultimate selflessness. He always taught a relative self. That is to say when someone says, Well, who is it who understands my selflessness? And he says, Well, it is you yourself. And what did he mean by that? He meant your relative self. If there is no self, who is it who is reborn? And the answer is your relative self. If the question comes, if there is no self, who is it who becomes a Buddha? And the answer is your relative self becomes the Buddha. Anything that exists in the world exists relationally, and in a way even the absolute is our notion of the opposite of the relational.
Speaker 4 00:18:05 If you say absolute means uncreate, unrelated, unconnected, und destroyed everything opposite of all relative things. It had cannot possibly be in any kind of contact with relative things and retain its absoluteness, and therefore if it ever existed as a thing in itself, it would be irrelevant to anything relative such as any being or any God or anybody. It would be irrelevant. However, understanding this is not irrelevant understanding this is liberation, in fact, because the fact is our mental habit is such that we ely ize every relative, not only some notion of the absolute, but we absolutely ize every relative thing. I live in a world of book table and especially me, myself, that I think is really real to me. Like my inner self is absolutely indubitably there and so is the table on the floor and so is the world. I am izing making an absolute out of something that is relative. When I am free of doing that, then I am free to be a relative self.
Speaker 4 00:19:30 A relative self is content within permanence and change. A relative self realizes it is not isolated from other things and that its sense of difference and sense of individuation is only arbitrary, is only temporary. And the Tibetans were great about unpacking the relative self and what they call the conventional self and recognizing that even Buddha has a relative self and an ignorant person has a relative self and that the teaching of selflessness is freeing that relative self from false super impositions of absoluteness and in so freeing it thereby changes suffering to happiness. Now, how do we meditate on the personal or subjective selflessness on wisdom as relating to our own personal self? This is the next step we take. I want to give the caveat and underline the caveat because when you begin to meditate on selflessness, people will genuinely have visceral reactions of either fear or delight in some cases that they will think that the great thing to do is to discover that they are nothing and that everything is nothing and that that's liberation and that is absolutely wrong.
Speaker 4 00:21:03 The fear of it is wrong and the delight in it by a more escapist mentality is wrong because again, remember this comes back to one of our overarching themes, I think one of the overarching themes of all of Buddha's insight, which is that there is no nothing. Therefore you cannot become nothing and you never have been nothing and therefore you need not fear becoming nothing since you have been living so long with your relative self entwined around some sort of mentally constructed, never existing but strongly insisted upon absolute self. When you see through the absoluteness of that self, it seems as if you saw through the relative self and you can have moments of feeling as if you disappear. You could have such a moment because the real relative self and the unreal absolute self have been so fused in your habitual psychological perception and your self experience for so long that when you see through the harmful unreal one, it kind of takes away the real one, the helpful real one just for a second. You control that by recognizing that you could not be experiencing nothing because it isn't anything that can be experienced. And what you are experienced is your own notion of nothing. And since it is nothing, you will come right through that and you will then be free of the false absoluteness of your existence and you will achieve truly relational existence.
Speaker 4 00:22:50 Now we come to actually meditating selfness with those sort of warnings and that encouragement at the beginning. And this is a teaching known as the teaching of the four keys. And in this teaching of the four keys to the attainment of personal selflessness, the first key is called the key of the identification of what is to be negated. And that which is to be negated is of course the self less ness means lacking. The absence of so selflessness is a negative expression, meaning that there is no self, but what kind of self is there not you have to know what the self would be if it were there. And here there's a wonderful meditative teaching about how we can identify our absolute ized self, the self held to be the real self by the instinctual and intellectual self habits. How can we recognize that absolute self? Remember a time when you were falsely accused doesn't have to be something super big. It could be a parking infraction, it could be of drinking up the last of the milk in the ice box, whatever it is. It won't be hard for any of us to think of a time when we felt righteously indignant having been falsely accused.
Speaker 4 00:24:29 At that moment when we feel that righteous indignation, especially when we are in the right and our accuser is in the wrong, has made a mistake, although perhaps accusing us with some ves, we then feel a strong like I didn't. I am innocent. I am right. When I comes out, it has almost like a slightly strangled or choked feeling to it because what it refers to seems to be so solid. I know it's me. I know I'm I and I didn't do it. I can safely be righteous about my eye because I'm right and I didn't do it. So we go I, and then we feel really solid inside. Now it is said that when you feel furious anger, when you've been harmed, the self feels more absolutely in not only just righteously indigent and false accusation, but absolutely outraged having been harmed. But they say that's not a good time to remember because you can't witness yourself at that time.
Speaker 4 00:25:35 You're so blown away. Whereas under righteous indignation, you can still have some presence of mind. Now they say you have to split your consciousness to meditate on this properly, this first key of the four keys of the personal selflessness now approached in a meditative way and you have to look at yourself being righteously there like you're sort of observing yourself from a corner and your main self is still being righteous and being there only by developing this sort of subtle splitting of awareness and watching yourself very dally so to speak, will your own self habit emerge in full glory in all its splendor? And this is absolutely crucial that it do. So I believe the 11th Alma, it was who wrote, We should spend six months doing just this, not proceed any further in the meditation on selflessness or emptiness in transcendent wisdom meditation because without first being aware of this, we'll get no realization.
Speaker 4 00:26:44 And what is also very, very clear about it is that Buddha's non dogmatic approach is very clearly revealed here through this procedure because the Buddha doesn't say, Oh, I say all things are selflessness. I expect you to believe that it would do, has no good to believe in selflessness. If we did, we would inevitably misunderstand it as some sort of real nothingness and we would think we're nothing. That's the big key, and I'm sorry, but I know many people who think of themselves as Buddhist who misapprehend selflessness as being non-existent and therefore they're meditating away hard can be hard as rocks expecting themselves to experientially disappear. <laugh> most unfortunate ones have actually had an experience of disappearing and they become attached to that and they feel that's been their enlightenment and those beings are cut off from their compassion. They're cut off from the life of liberation and they're stuck in the anti room of liberation, which is the momentary experience of nothingness and thinking of nothingness as an absolute solid concrete, ultimate reality thing in itself.
Speaker 4 00:27:58 So instead, the Buddha doesn't say, You must believe in selflessness. The Buddha says, I recognize that you don't believe in selflessness and you must recognize that. You must recognize when you really observe your solid self habit arising out of your solar plexus in your throat, in your chest and heart, like I know me, really me life and death ready to struggle me, that you say it's very nice, Buddha, you said, I'm selfless, but I sure am not. I do not agree with you. So then Buddha is not asking for belief. Instead, what he's doing is Buddha is challenging us.
Speaker 4 00:28:46 He's saying, Granted, you feel you are really you, and I'm glad you now can feel how strongly you feel that feeling and how much that feeling powerfully dominates your experience of everything. Often it's dormant. You can sit and meditate and look in your heart and look around in a calm quiet way and feel like you can't really find anything in particular. Be mindful of each sensation it thought as it comes up, which is very valuable to do of course. And you then become more deeply aware of your whole complexity, of all of your processes, and then you sort of don't really see anything solid in there and you feel that, gee, you know that's selflessness. That's what it means. There's no sort of solid structural component. That's just me. And you can have a feeling like that and then someone can come and kick you and you'll leap up to defend yourself and then that solid sense of self will jump right out. So it's crucial that we identify the thing to be negated in the teaching of selflessness, which is the sense of self, the absolute self, the independent self-sufficient, absolute fixed static self that is the referent of I that is referent of the Greek pronoun ego, the Indian aham.
Speaker 4 00:30:07 So then Buddha says, Okay, and I know you feel that way. I felt that way too. I can remember I was unquestioned about it. I was gonna find my enlightenment with my real self, but now I challenge you because you now have noted that this is in the core of your habitual existence, this solid sense of self. Therefore, if it is really there as you feel it to be there, then if you look for it with all your effort, like it was the most important thing in your life to find it, and it is as you habitually feel it to be a thing in itself, irreducible absolute, then you should be able to find it if you focus deeply enough, if you look powerfully enough. So I challenge you to verify it. That's all because you listen to yourself when you do things, you act on the dictates of yourself. When you act. The self is more absolute than your body is when it's filled with a powerful emotion.
Speaker 4 00:31:19 So then the second key fits right here, and it says, if the self is really there in the way it appears to me to be there in my deepest instinctual feeling when I put my full effort into finding it, I will discover it. And if when I pull my full effort into finding it, I do not discover it, then I will cope with the fact that it is not there. I will not allow any third option. I will not say, Well, it's sort of there and not there. It's sort of here another there. It's kind of around. And I will not trail off into some sort of vague thing that, well, I couldn't find it, but maybe it's still there. So that's the second key. And now the third key in meditation. Now remember this is specifically in meditation.
Speaker 4 00:32:13 The third key is when we investigate our body mind processes with a view to discovering whether the self is the same as them or something different from them, something like that. Or is it different from them and in them and above them or beyond them or whatever. This is what we now seek to determine. The third one is where we look to see whether the self is the same as the aggregates of body and mind. The Buddhist found the centuries of meditating that it was most helpful to have five levels of body and mind processes or systems. And these five systems are the physical systems, the sensational systems, the ideational systems, the emotional systems and the awareness systems.
Speaker 4 00:33:00 So now we begin an introspective process of inventorying our five systems to see whether there is this unitary solid self, substantial absolute self is there in those systems or is one of those systems or something like that. So we look through and we look through the material system, which is all of the sense organs, eye, ear, nose, tongue, touch, and their objects of textures, scents, sounds, forms, smells, tastes. And we go through all of those systems, the physical systems, the interior of the body, spine, the nervous system, the neurology of the brain, whatever anatomical pictures we have. We look everywhere and pretty easily because of modern medicine and modern understanding of physical body, we pretty easily can dissect every single thing in thought, experiment, and we find no self amongst the physical systems. It's quite easy to do, although even that has a powerful liberating effect. When we realize how much we do identify our habitual identity or self with our body, like I think of myself as a male because I have a male anatomy, but actually myself as not my anatomy at all.
Speaker 4 00:34:29 Second, we go to the sensational level, which is beginning level of mind, not material, neural impulse of pleasure, pain and numbness. And we zoom around through the nervous system, the level of sensation, and there we don't also find any stable unitive thing like a sensory self. So then we quickly go through that, then we go to the ideational system. And that's more complicated because of course, even the map we have of ourselves as having a body, even the map we have of our nervous system, these are all ideas themselves. So we're sort of looking in something we have an idea of with ideas to see the ideas in it. We find kind of a cloud of imagery, a verbal levels of discourse, all sorts of things. Even our orientation of looking for something is kind of controlled by our ideations. It becomes very complicated actually to look at the ideational system, the conceptual system in our being. But when we do, one thing we get clear on pretty quickly is the instability of it and the multiplicity of it. There's no way that any image or anything, any inner picture can be sort of unocal, unchanging, absolute fixed thing in itself. It's all kind of clouds of imagery and showers of forms and concepts and sounds.
Speaker 4 00:35:54 Then we go to the emotions those times when we feel so absolutely concrete and solid in times of fury, in times of righteous indignation, in times of fear and terror, in times of great lust or great greed or great depression or alienation, we feel so, so solid. And it is when powerful emotions seem to be emanating from that self or seem to have that self in their grip, that the self feels most solid. So then it's logical to think maybe it's here in the system of emotions. And we look though in them and we find them completely transient, completely like mercurial, powerful but totally changing, totally buzzing, blooming confusion type of thing.
Speaker 4 00:36:40 So then we come to the course, the great candidate for the fixed self consciousness, the fifth system, and then we break consciousness down into six systems within that system, five of them being sense consciousnesses and the sense consciousness. We recognize our visual audio, all factory gustatory and textile. And of course we wouldn't never have a taste, we wouldn't have a vision if the consciousness didn't go and align itself with the sense organ and the object and sort of interpret it and say that's such and such a thing. But even in bear awareness, consciousness has to operate. So we realize that a great deal of our consciousness is tied up in our sense experience as just the agent or the witness or the subject of our sense impressions. And when we realize that those consciousness are none of them stable, none of them unitive, all of them very changeable and fluctuating. When I'm listening intently, I don't see something when I'm looking intently. I don't hear something when I'm tasting intently. I don't see or hear. It's sort of the concept jumps around, aligns with this one and that one, it's completely fluctuating and a fluid process. So then we go to the sixth consciousness, which is called mental consciousness.
Speaker 4 00:37:56 And then we realize that it is this mental consciousness that coordinates all of the impressions that coordinates all of the functions and the motor realities and the emotions and the ideas and the sensations. So we think, well, there's something that's trying to unify all of these things into a unitive experience. But on the other hand, we realize that in its effort to unify our experience, it's always changing too. It's constantly dealing with new inputs from here and there with new inner surges of emotion from here and there. There's nothing stable or fixed or absolute about it that we can deter at first glance.
Speaker 4 00:38:31 And then if we ate on it further of course, and we go deeper and deeper, we can go into where we can withdraw from sense impressions. We can withdraw from the ideational flow, we can withdraw from emotional content and affect, and we can come into some sort of mental states seeming to be pure being. We can reach the formless realms of pure infinite space, infinite consciousness, absolute nothingness beyond consciousness and unconsciousness. But even there we recognize that we go in and out of those states, even though while in them they seem very vast and absolute. There's a time before we were in them when we were more out in the sense world, we'd withdrew. And so even they somehow never appear to be absolute as thing in themself. When we really investigate them, we cannot find in them something that fits this feeling of the absolute eye.
Speaker 4 00:39:30 They're all changing their affected either in altered meditative states or in altering constantly in permanent sensory states. And in the last ditch of this tiny, at the deepest core in consciousness, we come into a situation where we seem to be like a whirling dervish where we're coming into, Well, the reason I'm not finding this unaffected observer of everything, which is my unchanging self, is that it's myself that's looking. But so then I keep turning back on my looking, looking for myself. And this is like a dog chasing its tail at a very subtle level. It becomes like a whirling feeling. And I whl on myself to kind of catch myself when I really concentrate and I don't accept any kind of easy things like, Oh, well this realm of boundless form, this must be the real self because that's not an absolute. I entered into that feeling of boundless form from not feeling that. And I'll go back at into it afterwards. I whirl and turn and turn on the subjectivity. And as I do, this becomes what is called the diamond cutting drill.
Speaker 4 00:40:33 And I don't allow myself any kind of veering off into some zone of nothingness or some zone of listeners. I still feel like I'm really here doing this. So I'm still looking for my real person that's here. And I don't say, Well, this is just a dog chasing his tale. You never will catch yourself and drop out. I'm way past such verbalization. And in that deep inner turning of the diamond drill of wisdom, it is said the whole nu of the self absolutization begins to sort of erode. Or sometimes they say it's like a, a fire stick, a bow, you know, with a string which you pull back and forth and makes a stick spin on another piece of wood with a little bunch of kindling around and to Kindle fire without flint. So like the drilling is like the spinning of a fire stick, and then the wood itself ignites and it burns.
Speaker 4 00:41:21 That feeling of Ely, the absoluteness turned against its own absoluteness in a way begins to burn the sense of absoluteness and erod it. I have an experience as if I were dissolving an empty space, pure clean voidness. I have a kind of feeling like that, which I must be quite careful not to think of as that as being the absolute, but it doesn't seem like a self that because it's sort of neither self nor selfless. This is referred to as the direct experience of emptiness or selflessness, like water being poured in water. And I feel vast. I don't feel like a subject looking out into an empty space. I the subject becomes a vast empty space at the same time as the realm is a vast empty space.
Speaker 4 00:42:06 I'm just still looking for the self here. I don't start looking and enjoying that. I don't veer off and say, Oh, great, here I am in space cuz I'm still looking for self even though fruitlessly, but I'm not finding my failure to find it. And so this just erodes me. This launches me into this vast spaciousness. It threshold feels a little like death. It can be very frightening. It has nothing that states and boundlessness states very close to it, which if I'm not careful, I might veer off into hide in. But if I keep focusing on the quest of the self, I will not veer off into them. And then the quest, the quest, everything dissolves.
Speaker 4 00:42:55 And there is a feeling of vast space, although it's not like I have a feeling of vast space, and therefore it is a huge relief of freedom, timeless boundaryless, duality less. And then at some point the momentum of my intellect, my wisdom empowered by concentration, evaluates being in vast space at some very subtle plane. It doesn't sudden think, there's no words, there's no mouth, there's no language, there's no humanity, there's no life, there's no death in the experience. But yet there is the subtle probing. I stop and there's kind of like a sense of is this space then it. And of course it immediately disappears then itself. And what that moment kind of is, is like in the winter you're looking at a pane of glass and your breath has created frost on the glass and your attention is to the frost, the surface. But then perhaps you turn your nose down and the frost slowly dissolves, and then you find your eye goes through the glass and you see everything on the other side, out the window, the trees and the forest and the snow.
Speaker 4 00:44:13 And so the differentiated world, the world of relativity reemerges in this realm, but it reemerges in a way where it is not divisible from the vastness of the space because the space is not a thing that could impede the relative world and therefore non-duality embraces relativity. And then you enter what is called the mirror like or the dream like or the illusion like aftermath, soma in which you are of course immediately attracted amongst all the differentiated things in the world to the living beings among them inside and outside, how perceived as equal self and other are perceived as equal in this illusion like aftermath freedom. At the same time as engagement with relativity, you're not stressed out trying to just collapse everything into the absolute or or just resign yourself into just there only being a relative. You're sort of aware of the surface of the mirror, transparency of the void and the infinite ness and the shape and the beauty of differentiated relativity. You're aware of that simultaneously.
Speaker 4 00:45:28 So this is a rehearsal of achieving the realization of the freedom from a unity of true self and life through exploring that, knowing what kind of self you're looking for, clearly from the first key, being aware that you either find it or you don't. And therefore never giving up looking, never finding a sort of, not finding then being catapulted into a vast space like experience of the dissolution of subject and object in the vast void. And then seeing the void itself dissolve. This is an initial taste of the wisdom of selflessness. You then go back into business in that session or another where you then acknowledge that your mind then produces the idea. Well, if there's no true unity of self and life systems, maybe the self is something different from the life systems and there's a true plurality, a multiplicity of them, and the self is something like the owner of the life systems, the harnesser of the life system, the central content of the life systems, different modes of relationship of this unitive self that you felt was there and you can remember that you still can feel is there.
Speaker 4 00:46:58 And then you explore all possible modes of relationship. Then this makes you realize as you do this specifically that anything that relates to anything else is affected by the relationship. There is no one way relationship where an absolute can remain absolute and yet relate to a relative. And by looking at all the life systems and how you know, the self might be some sort of a shining thing somewhere outside of the life systems with little silver cord leading down to the life systems, all this kind of mystical type of ideas, a little shining angel flying above with one of those like toy airplane monitors manipulating the system. And when you fail to find any convincing ground for an absolutely real self, then yet being real and solid and absolute and so forth, then you fail to find again the absolute self looking in that way.
Speaker 4 00:47:46 When you fail to find that you and the life systems and the sense of environment and everything dissolve, you go back into the space and then you come back into the illusion like aftermath experience. You have to do it again and again and again because now that you're in the meditation and the cultivation of transcendent wisdom, now you are going after beginningless instincts that are ingrained in your being gut feelings, that you are real, that you really exist. And this is such a powerful gut feeling. It's like the gut feeling that underlies your wish to defend your life against life threatening attack. And therefore, meditation again and again, pounds and pulverizes, all different varieties of this upwelling gut feelings to transform even the instincts. The deeper you go with this in the gradual smoothing down of this absolute izing habits, the more and more relational you feel and the more broadly and vastly connected you feel so that then compassion orientation and spirit of enlightenment or relative spirit of enlightenment orientation or compassion orientation and absolute spirit of enlightenment orientation or wisdom orientation reinforce each other. And even when you're meditating in a formal way or when you're living in the world and interacting with others, your wisdom is developing. When you're meditating in a formal way, your compassion is developing relativity and absolute relativity mutually reinforce in non Julie. They don't become mutually contradictory, they become mutually complimentary and you become happier and happier and lighter and lighter. And opener and opener.
Speaker 4 00:49:30 This is actually the pasana. Theasa begins with mindfulness of the body, of the sensations, the mind and of ideas, their wielding of wisdom and the wielding of wisdom from basic mindfulness, which sees through the apparent intrinsic reality of every little sensation, of every little thought, of every little identity manifestation, which is the real meditative path of finding liberation from being just a mechanistic machine like being, and then the consummation of the ppo when it goes beyond the impermanence, the awareness of the impermanence and beyond the awareness of the suffering and comes to the awareness of the selflessness and penetrates through the deepest core ization of identity and realizes identity dealness, which then far from crippling a person into feeling that they're nothing or stuck in the experience of they're nothing, makes the person realize the conventionality and the total relativity of their being. And once you realize your total relationality of your being, you then become finally responsible for imagining yourself.
Speaker 4 00:50:39 There is no seeming istic identity, no sort of substantial thing that sort of you're stuck with being. You realize that you, what you imagine is what you are, what the world imagines you to be also is what you are. It's not solipsistic, it's the combined interface of the imaginations of you and all beings. It's what you and what all things are. Emptiness means all things are open to be created into any form depending on how the beings perceive them, what the beings agree to, how they work together with it. So therefore, emptiness means the potential of not only you being Buddha, but your environment being Buddha. Not only you being Buddha, but others being Buddha. So you begin to take responsibility with the arch of developing the Buddha self, of developing that self that interacts with other cells in a totally altruistic way where its manifestations, even its embodiment, ultimately are only for the benefit of producing happiness in the other self and removing suffering from the other self ing freedom, the womb of compassion, emptiness, whose essence is compassion, voidness the birth of compassion. This remains the most lovely expression in all of the Buddhist literature.
Speaker 2 00:52:48 The Bob Thurman podcast is produced under Creative Commons, no derivatives license. Please be sure to like, share and repost on your favorite social media platforms. This recording is an excerpt from the Jewel Tree of Tibet, available through Sounds True Music for the Bob Thurman podcast is generously supplied by Tenzing Choal. To learn more about the work and music of Tenzing Choal, please visit his website at tenzing. Do thanks for tuning in and Tasha Del.
