The second month of the retreat is coming to an end, so wherever one is in one’s practice after months or years, it’s important to recognize that there are fruits, and these fruits have to be properly acknowledged, understood, and reintegrated. Even the small fruits have to be consciously recognized, because one tends to always think of the big picture – of the end of all problems and flawless samadhi or nibbana – and doesn’t recognize the fact that one is a little more patient than one was ten years ago, or something of that nature. And if we don’t acknowledge the tangible, specific results of practice, then we lose touch with the uplifting consequences of Dhamma practice, and are liable to lose heart.

The Dhamma is referred to as that which is ‘lovely (kalyana) in the beginning, lovely in the middle and lovely in the end.’ Kalyana means ‘that which is uplifting, nourishing, strengthening,’ ‘that which causes delight to the heart.’ It is a spiritual rather than a sensory quality.

In this context it refers first to the factors of inspiration (saddha) and interest (chanda), particularly when they ripen into an interest to practise the teachings. One aspires, one is interested: thus there is this lovely quality in the beginning. In ‘the middle’ are the factors of persisting, of establishing mindfulness, of repeatedly working against the hindrances. And ‘in the end’ are the results – of purity, of clarity, of freedom, even when these do not amount to a complete liberation; that is, one is at least liberated from unscrupulousness or from acting on malicious intent. In all these instances, uplift and steadiness arise in the heart.There is a scripture, a sutta1, associated particularly with the word kalyana. It involves Venerable Ananda, the Buddha’s cousin and associate. He was not, at this time, completely enlightened but was willing and totally committed to the Dhamma. One day, feeling inspired by his fellow disciples, he commented to the Buddha ‘kalyanamitta (by which he meant lovely associates, i.e. good companions) must be what half of the practice is about.’ He was commenting on the value of having inspiring companions. The Buddha said, ‘No, don’t say that Ananda, it’s not half: kalyanamitta is the whole of the Holy Life.’ Often people leave it there, thinking, ‘Oh, this means the Buddha agreed that to have good friends in the Holy Life is what it’s all about.’ This is unlikely, especially in Ananda’s case: the Buddha occasionally rebuked him for his fondness of company. So it’s unlikely that the Buddha would be endorsing Ananda’s view – he wasn’t fully enlightened at the time. Then the Buddha goes on to say that kalyanamitta comprises cultivating the Eightfold Path – dependent on detachment, dispassion, cessation and complete relinquishment. This demonstrates the Buddha’s word-play: kalyanamitta means ‘lovely associate,’ and although Ananda was referring to people, the Buddha was referring to aspects of the Path; lovely factors that one should always be associating with.

These words indicate an ongoing process in cultivating the Eightfold Path, and that it has a continually gladdening aspect. Something inspires so you draw close, you’re interested – this is the first sign of the lovely. Then you get involved; also a lovely quality. You practise; and even struggle with yourself, not from a negative position but because you really want to pull out of dullness and delusion. So this energy is also beautiful. And as much as anyone else can inspire, advise or encourage, once you’re involved, you have to find the kalyanamitta in yourself. You have to develop the moral qualities and conscientiousness in yourself. An external kalyanamitta can remind you of that spiritual friend in yourself, by helping you attune to your own core values. The spiritual friend reminds you of things you know and hold dear in your own heart.

This is what the Sangha Refuge is about; it is the company of the accomplished disciples. Of course there may be lay people who fulfil this function for you; but the Samana (monastic) Sangha serves as an emblem of accomplishment by enacting and typifying particular qualities of morality, commitment and renunciation. It is beautiful to recollect what an enlightened being typifies in terms of conduct and to relate to people who are trying to live in that way. The presence of a monk or nun can help one to recollect how the loveliness of the spirit manifests; and to see such qualities in your own heart.

This is something we should remember, particularly in a retreat situation when we aren’t talking or engaging very much. To keep witnessing and remembering each other as meditators, as people who keep the moral precepts, helps to purify the perceptions we may have of each other. Attune your mind to that rather than keep thinking ‘Well, you know, she’s always sleepy,’ or ‘Someone like him is not going to get very far, is he.’ Recognize ‘that’s someone who keeps the Precepts, and that’s what I do.’ That’s much more useful; that way your own quality of virtue is amplified and uplifted. So it helps you to regain and establish and steady the confidence in yourself, especially when your meditation isn’t going so well.

And just as we may be helped by focussing on the exemplary qualities in another, it’s also important to reflect that our own practice may and should present the kalyanadhamma to others. Try to live out the uplifting; it helps to support others, and having that inclination to be a support for others gives one’s own heart an added sense of purpose. In a group or a community instead of forming personality bonds or cliques, or competing and showing off, we can catalyse, enhance and dwell in what is beautiful in each other. Then this loveliness has a holistic quality and it’s not about personalities; it’s a mind-stream that we enter into.

The particular terms that the Buddha used may sound strange: how can cessation or relinquishment be lovely? But this particular sequence – detachment, dispassion, cessation and relinquishment – is applied many times to the enlightenment factors to describe the maturation of the practice: ‘dependent on detachment, dependent on dispassion, dependent on cessation and ripening or maturing into complete relinquishment.’ The mood is of a flowering or blossoming through associating with these.

It begins with ‘detachment’ or viveka in Pali. In the Buddha’s Way, meditation practices are prefaced by viveka, which is the standing back from unskilfulness. It is a withdrawal from counter-productive energies and aims. It allows you to get in touch with your values and see things in perspective. Then, without pretending that there is no potential for evil, you don’t get overwhelmed by it either. In many ways, formal meditation provides exercises in developing that particular perspective and ability to shift and stabilise attention so that you can see mind stuff, body stuff, memories and so on, in perspective. Then you no longer ‘are’ them, they’re something you can now witness and work with. It means you get some way of deciding what you want to act on, what you don’t; you get some sense of judging what’s worthy of you and what’s not. So when you focus on a particular meditation object like a sensation in your body, a word or the breath, then that quality of viveka makes it possible to get a reference point, to establish a steady watchfulness.

Then that point has to be repeatedly established and sustained. This has to be done through energy; it doesn’t just happen, it has to be energetically brought around. And the application to that has to be uplifting because you can’t get the energy through aversion to things or not wanting things. So you need to gladden that application by making it lovely and acknowledging it as such. This refers both to the meditation object and then to the effort to release oneself from the influence of any hindrances that may arise and make you feel dejected and bad-hearted. To associate with the aspiration to overcome hindrances, rather than to identify with the hindrances: this is kalyanamitta.

When you use a meditation object as a way of establishing that steady perspective, you can begin to see that things change. Things arise and pass: you see through the window of impermanence (anicca). One of the fruits of that perspective is that you begin to see points in that flux of mind where there is a moment of emptiness when something stops; when a mind-flow stops or mental activity stops, you see the ending of something. If you’re following the breath you are able to follow the ending of the breath and notice the pause at the end of the breath. There’s a certain lightness about an experience of impermanence; the mind is flowing and it opens into a realm that people ordinarily wouldn’t have any language for. That flow and the letting-go into it isn’t present when life is experienced as continual activity, wall-to-wall noise or endless thinking. So this is a fruition that comes dependent on viveka.

There is a further fruition, which is dependent on dispassion – viraga. The language that is commonly used to describe meditation refers to ‘watching things:’ it uses a visual metaphor. But if this notion is not qualified, it may lead to a separatist position, ‘things are there and I’m here’ – which makes the relationship with phenomena very stale. You may lose the direct responsiveness and sensitivity that is necessary for further cultivation. Behind that position of watching, the watcher may contain residual stuff such as hesitancy, fear and doubt, or lethargy. And if you have strong concentration then what can come up is a sense of conceit, ‘I have done this, I am this, I am watching.’ That sense of being stabilised then acts as the breeding ground for a certain abstractedness, a lack of vitality or specific response to things.

A certain amount of the psychological stuff that goes on in people is about wanting to not exist. We have a life instinct, we have a death instinct. The life instinct is the thing that wants to go out and enjoy, it’s expansive. The death instinct wants to contract, fade out, stop everything. This is bhava and vibhava in Buddhism. Bhava is the inclination to grow, and extend in time into happier states; vibhava inclines to getting away. We have to channel and purify these energies through Dhamma practice until they are redundant. If the bhava instinct is not properly cultivated, we don’t have a direction, we lack aspiration. Also as bhava will still be operative anyway, if we don’t use it, it will go into immature goals – towards greed and selfishness. The vibhava instinct which can lead us on to relinquishing what is unnecessary or unskilful, if not cultivated properly will go into sourness of mind, or ideas about ‘killing the ego.’

Many people who become monks and nuns have a good amount of death in them, because renunciation can attract that ‘get away from it all’ instinct. Words like ‘cessation, extinction’ really appeal to the ‘drop dead, get out of it’ attitude of mind; you don’t become a monk or nun because you wish to fulfill yourself with erotic delight. But this factor of delight, the erotic instinct, has to be acknowledged, directed into the practice and purified of clinging.

It’s the difference between desire as craving (tanha) and desire as a willingness to do (chanda). The bhava instinct gets caught up with craving and attachment, or the search for status and achievement. However, if we can purify the chanda, that willingness goes into appreciation and enjoyment: such as the contentment, uplift or happiness associated with good deeds or meditative skill. These are the Dhamma channels whereby association with the lovely diverts enjoyment energy into the Eightfold Path. I would say it is impossible to be able to sustain the Holy Life, or deepen Dhamma practice, if one is not able to make that connection, if you’re just into ‘getting away from it all.’ The vibhava attitude perceives the dominance of defilements and attachment, and getting away from ‘the world;’ so it starts as heroic and renunciate then it just gets downright mean-hearted.

Now when there is detachment, you can begin to bring the subject into the picture. Instead of only watching things, you also investigate: ‘Who is watching?’ Just to be able to check how one is witnessing, what kind of energy is there. Are you witnessing things in a casual way? Are you witnessing things like a rabbit does a snake, hypnotised? Is the meditator, the subject, very intense, highly critical, restless, inadequate? In other words, begin to touch into things that may not even be that obvious when you were not able to focus on an object very well. You may not even really be that clearly aware of the subject. But the sense of the subject is centred around volition or intention (cetana); objects are based on attention (manasikara) which is the action of consciousness in focussing and forming an object.

‘Intention’ – or ‘intent’ – here doesn’t quite carry the meaning of the word in everyday language when it is applied to more deliberate acts of thought; in the context of Dhamma it means something much more primary – a basic volitional urge, movement, whether it’s weak, agitated, demanding, threatening, loving, skilful or unskilful. It is cetana, the urge to do. And so when that begins to be acknowledged, then that very light of acknowledgement clears away some of the blindness from intention. With introspection you realize you are tensed up, or that you were only half there, or you are meditating or doing something out of a sense of duty – you are not really with it. Getting in touch can help to tune you up again: it brings around an authenticity and gives you the opportunity to associate with that. It may enable you to see that you need to use a different meditation theme. It both cools down that which is over-intense or demanding and it lifts that which is flaccid or weak. This balancing of intention is viraga, dispassion. It gives you a fuller picture.zzAnd so as a process, meditation includes the balancing of intention and attention. If the primary action of viveka finds a position from which you can see things in perspective, when it ripens into viraga it assists finer balance, and leads to a subtler, more holistic experience.zzDispassion evens out an unbalanced intensity. So the intensity of one’s drive, the fascination or the disgust, start to get lightened. The coarsest forms of desire/aversion begin to fade out. As desire always associates vitality with the presence or absence of a particular object, when that is relinquished then that energy, that vitality, is left free and the experience is of a suffusion. Instead of the experience of an object in a separate field, there is a suffusion through the whole field of mind-consciousness. This is blissful. So the fulfilment of dispassion is not a cold, bleached-out feeling, it’s an experience of bliss and ease. Although passion can seem very powerful – as bright or dark and with a lot of movement – it’s actually shallow because it always has to depend upon some particular thought, feeling, or sense object. And these objects are of the nature to change. Dispassion is much more profound because it does not depend upon any particular object, but on the practice of non-attachment. It’s rather like the difference between the waves and the ocean. The ocean is the dispassion which has the depth to it, the waves just splash around on the surface. Admittedly waves can be overwhelming, and one does have to develop the practice of viveka to the point where one can experience moods, feelings, thoughts, and sense objects as changing. Then the fruition of this is dispassion.

Most of us need to work around cultivating viveka and viraga, internally and externally in our meditation, in what we do, what we aim for, how we remember things, how we form opinions of others and so on. Be very specific with it. These are not ethereal spaced-out states, they entail the activity of acknowledging an attachment, and then, having got it in perspective, not creating habitual psychological or emotional patterns around it. Those habitual intentions and attentions that we call ‘myself’ get released. Rather than ‘I’ve got to be someone who doesn’t have this feeling’ or ‘I want more of that feeling’ or ‘This feeling is me or mine’ or something like that, these can be gradually relinquished. In this way the sign of non-self (anatta) becomes established.

Rather than feel helpless because all our problems seem to be due to things out there, we can recognize that anxiety, distaste, and so on are our unreleased stuff. We can bring the reflection: ‘There’s nothing else here but me,’ into the mind. This means we stop transferring the vitality and responsibility of our lives to other people and external situations. Whatever’s happening – ‘it’s here where the liking and the disliking is.’ It doesn’t mean nobody else counts, it means that I’m trying to work immediately with what I’m putting forth no matter what everybody else seems to be doing. It means acknowledging how I am interpreting a situation. My interpretations, my projections, my responses, are happening here. So who is here? The ‘I’ that is here is just a changing conglomerate of forces and energies. There’s a physical form which is experienced moment after moment in consciousness, there are thoughts and impressions which also occur momentarily, there are moods and instincts, there are drives and urges. So I’m not here either. I’m not here and there is nobody else here either: there’s an awareness of these particular kammic energies and forces.

We can also take this investigation into the inner sphere. Now say you are meditating, and on the edge of what you assume this meditation is about there is a nattering circle of onlookers. There are these things in the background going ‘blah, blah, nah, nah.’ They don’t always get words out, they often take the form of disparaging (or occasionally congratulatory) moods. Occasionally they’ve got faces – father, partner etc. – you have a ghostly audience. So you bring them in. There is a resistance to acknowledging that the ‘over the border’ stuff is of fringe perceptions and feelings that form a commentary on your central activity. There’s something in you that doesn’t want to be with that, so you keep pushing it away and saying, ‘it’s him or her,’ ‘it happened all those years ago,’ ‘it’s not relevant to the meditation’ and ‘snap out of it.’ Around that border there’s all kinds of shame and not wanting to go into it. Now when we can open up and say ‘OK come in;’ that’s powerful. We have abandoned a border that was part of our identity. Not having that position any more, we have to start some dialogue going. This is where we begin to resolve backlogs of vipaka, of old inherited stuff. Fear and worry have got locked up and become people on the edge of our mind. Sometimes they’re just nebulous perceptions, forces called ‘them’ or ‘it.’ And you carry them around and they say ‘It must be done’ and ‘They want you to do this’ and ‘They would never understand,’ whoever these ‘its’ and ‘theys’ are. Who are they?

This inquiry only becomes possible when one has developed contemplative skills because if you don’t have enough steadiness to sustain attention, the whole field breaks up into a riot. So just to be able to do this is a sign of some kind of fruition. To be able to receive with equal heart the things that I call ‘me’ and things that I call ‘not me:’ this is dispassion. And the result of it is a kind of wholeness. When all the inner divisions begin to be dissipated then there is an experience of completion and wholeness. The complaining mind, the muttering mind, the raging mind, the weeping mind – bring them in with generous hands. This is where you regain your vitality. As long as you’re divided inwardly by shame or by fear or by dismissiveness then your energy gets blocked.

In the case when the mind is less afflicted with vipaka, wholeness happens through balancing the perceptions and feelings that arise within the meditation object. So with anapanasati for example – when calm deepens, you may experience the breath as a perception of light or softness; then by inclining to the knowing, the citta, you can balance its energies, and its relationship with the breath-impression. It can be gladdened and steadied. When you do that, the meditation object suffuses the mind. This is an example of the experience of wholeness. You have a unified mind which is blissful and dispassionate.

In terms of the Buddha’s teachings this is not a complete end in itself. Wholeness is, of course, a valuable and beautiful experience. But it acts as the ground for the arising of consciousness and identification in that particular mode: a birth in the pure abiding. But there is a further beyond that, which is when the process moves into cessation, when that experience of wholeness is established and there is a stilling of activity around it.

Anything that’s delightful or blissful brings with it the subtle suggestion ‘I am this, I’ve got this, I’m here’ and then the tendency to delve into it and to cleave to it, to delight in it. But when the mind is calm, any further activity to make more or know more is experienced as a disturbance. The Buddha’s advice was that even equanimity is not something to attach to.

Cessation, nirodha, can be seen as the stopping of that tendency to hold a mind-state. Which doesn’t mean not experiencing anything. Again it’s about the quality of intent. As the mind purifies, then the very vehicle of intent feels like a disturbance, so ‘stopping’ refers to the fading out of the intent.

Relinquishment, vossagga, as the final aspect of that process, is an abandonment of the subject. This quality of self-relinquishment is good to bear in mind as a general theme, even though it bears its most profound fruit when associated in the sequence of viveka, viraga and nirodha. It applies to the whole of the practice in subtler ways. Self-relinquishment we can see as a kind of self-offering, a reminder that the idea of getting anything, being anywhere, getting in or getting out of anything is only a half-truth. In other words, relinquishment purifies the notion of attainment. Now this idea of attainment is useful at first, you need that kind of thing to keep going on. But then the problem with it is that as long as there remains that volitional drive to become something, even on a subtle level where the mind feels quite blissful, then there’s a feeling of stress. So that kind of volition goes so far, and then it has to be relinquished. The underlying notion of being something has to be seen through.

If we have a delightful experience, the mind produces a particular pattern or mind-set as a synopsis, the mind’s ‘take’ on things. This ‘taking’ is the process of clinging. What we feel ourselves to be based on that is the inference of becoming, the life-instinct, or bhava. Becoming is about stretching an experience through time. That is, maybe you get an experience of wholeness and then there’s an inclination to hold onto that. Now this becoming process is so familiar to us that we don’t ever question the presumption that there is such a thing as time that we stretch through. But really there’s just a moment, and that moment doesn’t stretch anywhere. So when there’s keen discernment there is the ability to sense consciousness itself as continually, momentarily, arising and ceasing. For example if you are practising anapanasati, the consciousness associated with the in-breath is different from the consciousness associated with the out-breath. If you sense it very closely then it’s a whole process of flickering grains of consciousness or flickering ripples of consciousness. Time, like space, is an inference produced by the activity of consciousness. The becoming instinct builds these as realities.

So, that stretching in time is one of the primary expressions of ‘I am,’ ‘I am a coherent continuing entity.’ And conversely, there is the loss of time, time rushing past; or the weight of time moving too slowly. All connected to ‘I am.’

So relinquishment deals with that piece of mythology. It begins with the capacity to understand the notion in theory and feel some interest in it. That’s what association means. You can have association that’s quite remote or association that’s very intimate, but whether you see it directly, indirectly or vaguely, still relinquishment is something that, once you’ve heard it and you’ve met it, then your life is never the same again. Your practice can never be the same again; you can’t use a ‘here we go on a chariot to nibbana’ style. And the beauty of that is that you see that the heart of practice, on any level, is self-emptying. This is what vossagga means, it means this final emptying out. And it’s a beautiful experience because then there is a kind of bliss, a delight which is freed. You can see that experience is actually empty or transparent; what you make it to be is dependent on how you paint it through often unacknowledged qualities of disturbance, aggravation, fear, need. What is something other than my opinion, my feeling, my reaction, my intent? What is something other than my shaping of it? In other words if all that were put down or diminished, what is a thing? When that’s put down, it’s not that things don’t exist, but they are ontologically transparent, and empty.

Now this may seem very refined but it points out that the continuum, this mind-stream of freedom, is potentially present in all things. The Buddha himself said that of all things – sensual form, subtle form and formlessness – of all things to feed on or cling to, formlessness is the best, but ‘the Deathless is the mind’s not clinging to anything’2. So any time, in any situation that we do not feed upon, or depend upon, or cling with either fascination or aversion, then in some degree we are associating with the Deathless. This is kalyanamitta, association with the lovely, the whole of the Holy Life.

If this Deathlessness is inherent in the proper apprehension of and non-clinging to all dhammas3, this grants us the confidence to apply non-clinging to the specifications of conventional existence. We can begin to bestow rather than to seize, and to get in touch with that mind-stream of the Dhamma which the Buddha expounded thousands of years ago. If we do this with confidence, then our lives are not wasted. We have stepped into the stream and we won’t go out again. To associate with what is beautiful will always bear fruit.

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