This Dhamma, this teaching and practice, goes to suññata – emptiness. So what’s the good of that? In brief, in the Buddhist sense of the word, emptiness is the very brilliance of the Awakened mind. Emptiness is not a barren experience, it’s an experience of non-differentiation, in which there is an undifferentiated wholeness empty of greed, empty of hatred, and empty of delusion. It is empty of ignorance, empty of self, in that there is nothing there that separates from that whole and says, ‘I’m this,’ ‘that’s that.’

Buddhas are those who dwell in this suññata vihara, the place of emptiness. We should therefore understand that liberating the mind is about emptying it. And that this is something that can be progressively cultivated. The simplest entry to that place is through recognizing what is absent when it is absent – noticing the ending of things, letting things end when they end, noticing that ending, that absence before picking something else up. These are times we are able to recognize, when we can refrain from the impulses of beginning, of clinging, of starting something – the itching impulsiveness to get on, get to the next thing, remember the past or whatever. This emptying out of compulsion is what our practice is about; then the awareness is left bright rather than with this unnecessary notion which always opinionates, subtracts and worries.

The fundamental quality of all the hindrances is restlessness in some form or another. Restlessness is also the mark of self – the need to establish oneself by doing something. It is said that even the refined Brahma deities hold a view of self, so they still have to be proclaiming that they’re Brahmas and how radiant and great they are, how all-seeing and all-knowing. Even the Brahma realms are not completely empty, so emptiness of what constitutes self is not experienced through refining the mind. The self notion, as a conceit, as a view, is only cleaned out through not clinging, not taking a position. In immediate terms, this means not adding the dimension of self to the five categories (khandha) of form, feeling, perception, mental activation and consciousness.

In Buddhist practice we contemplate the experience of form or rupa. Form, notably bodily form, is seen as being just that, as solidity, plasticity, movability and caloricity, rather than signifying something delightful or repulsive. It’s just form, a play of elemental qualities and nothing more. This insight empties form, so that form is seen through. It’s just like a line in air. Form is one-dimensional rather than ‘self.’ Form is just form, free from suppositions, assumptions and values.

Perceptions (sañña) are the contact impressions, the images, the associations that flash through and suffuse the mind, giving rise to a feeling tone. They sum up an experience, they tell us what it means, they say: ‘This is this,’ ‘It’s time for this,’ ‘It’s this situation now.’ And they catalyse an impulse or reflex, the mental activation (sankhara) to ‘get going,’ ‘do this,’ ‘think this,’ ‘don’t do that.’

The feeling tone, or vedana, occurs through the stimulation of the sense bases; it is part of bodily life. When we see it as empty, even if the stimulation is there, the feeling tone is known for what it is, as a vibration in awareness rather than as something substantial and evocative. Then pleasant feeling does not give rise to the reaction: ‘Oh, I must have more of that, let’s do it again!’, it’s just pleasant feeling. Painful feeling is not something that’s ‘shocking! dreadful! It shouldn’t happen!’, it’s just painful feeling. Neutral feeling is not just something that is rested upon as ‘everything’s okay,’ ‘keep going, no need to attend,’ it’s just neutral feeling. When these are seen for what they are then those sankhara, those impulse reactions, can be checked and can cease. This is the requirement for the cessation of kamma, of habits and psychological proliferation. With the cessation of these impulses, with the calming down of these impulses, the consciousness calms down.

Consciousness (viññana) in the Buddhist sense of the word is a discriminative mode of awareness which takes form as an object. It discriminates into six bodily and mental sense-fields, scanning them with perception and feeling and reacting with mental activities. When these five khandha connect, the notion is ‘I am doing this,’ ‘I must do this,’ ‘I shouldn’t feel this,’ ‘I’d like more of that.’ This ‘I’ arises with reference to form, perception and feeling as the agent (or passive subject), rather than the result of those experiences. ‘I’ arises slightly backdated, as the agent of something that has just occurred – but because it’s so quick it doesn't seem like that. Form, feeling, perception, mental activation and discriminative awareness: these five khandha trick us with their sleight of hand.

So how to see through the trick that even the most refined beings in the Cosmos fall for? Every attempt to create a position outside the five khandha is itself an aspect of the mental activity of the sankhara khandha. But when the mind is steadied by attention, we can start to play our own tricks… riddles that can’t be answered but can reveal the structure and the emptiness of the khandha. We can ask, ‘Who is thinking? Who wants to do this?’ When we ask that with sustained attention, there is no sensible answer. We don’t find a person. Yet when we don’t ask that question it’s: ‘I’m thinking. I’m going to do this. I’m going there.’ I am very much there. So although the sense of self is very strong, we notice that it’s something that depends on inattention. It requires support, expects to be listened to, to be needed and taken seriously. When we ask ‘Who is it?’ the mind can say: ‘... I don’t know who it is... it’s just... silly question, let’s get on and do some thing important.’ But try asking yourself, ‘Are the perceptions, the notion or image I have of myself, are they constant?’ Do they fluctuate when you’re happy, when you’re sick, when you’re getting up in the morning, when you’re having your tea? Are there residual tendencies, repetitive experiences in your self-image? When you meditate you can see that it is a fluctuating thing, but it also has particular repetitive patterns in it: of feeling buoyant, or complaining about yourself or others, feeling you are this or that. The core of your assumed identity is just an unexamined familiarity.

Really, ‘yourself’ must be something that is in the present: the future isn’t here yet and the past is gone. If you take away any perception of the future – of becoming something, of what you will, could or should be; if you take away any perception of the past, what you always have been, never did, used to be good at – just yourself in the present without comparing it with something else, what is that? When you take away any ideas about what other people think about you, or have said, or you hope they will say – in other words, when you drop any deflected image – what is there? When you recognize these images and put them aside, what’s left in-and-of-itself? Pure presence: here and now.

Try practising like this, pulling your focal point out of that realm where it is always shifting: the samsara, the struggling, the tangledness, the heaviness, the complexity, the trying to find an answer to it. Keep bringing it back to ‘Who?’

Contemplate viññana – consciousness or discriminative aware-ness through the six senses: eye, ear, nose, tongue, body and mind. Are you all of those or one of them? You must be all of them surely? So when you are walking on your meditation path, how much of your taste is walking? Does your hearing walk? Does your thinking walk? What’s walking? Probably what is walking is your visual consciousness; that experiences the trees moving past and creates the sense of perspective that gives you the sense of going somewhere. What is the difference between walking along and just standing on one spot lifting your feet and putting them down again? In body consciousness it’s probably experienced slightly differently if the path is uneven – you get subtle changes of pressure – but mostly it’s your visual consciousness that is walking. Now if you are all of these consciousnesses then wouldn’t they be doing the same thing? Why is it your hearing doesn’t walk? Contemplate ‘I am walking’ and what that brings up in your mind: ‘going places.’ But your thinking doesn’t walk, does it?

Notice that the sense of ‘I am’ is really just a mental approximation, a sense of familiarity that latches on to whatever sense base dominates at any particular moment. Most often it’s the thinking or the visual consciousness, and occasionally hearing. The ‘I am’ is dependent on an external sense-base and a familiar mind-set; thinking, with visual consciousness lending some background decorations: ‘Here am I disgruntled in Sussex,’ ‘Here am I disgruntled in London,’ ‘Here am I disgruntled in Fiji’ – a stage for it all, a change of scene to keep the whole thing alive. Sense-consciousness gets used as a basis for these mental patterns. That is: instead of there being a focus on the mental dynamic in what is going on, the core of the experience is projected as occurring outside the mind. My psychological and emotional glosses are taken to be aspects of something ‘out there.’ So a mental perception or activity is happening, but because of seeing, touching, hearing, etc., we can put it ‘out there.’ ‘That thing out there I’m seeing is the problem.’

Consciousness is activated to diffuse into this and into that, and bounce feelings and a range of thoughts and moods off an external sense-object. Thus what is established is a moment-by-moment read-out of a three-dimensional being. But it is a confused being: although we may have denied responsibility, we have missed an opportunity to acknowledge and investigate our psychological roots. We’ve lost touch.

But if you bring your attention back to investigating ‘Who?’ in the eagerness, the joyfulness, or the restlessness, when you touch in directly with experience, then where are you in that?

The Buddha pointed to latent or unresolved tendencies (anusaya) of the unawakened mind: the tendency towards sensual greed, irritation, doubt, conceit, becoming and ignorance. Bearing these in mind, how much of the external world of problems is the latent tendency in the mind to be irritated or to doubt? Much of our difficulty with other people is the latent tendency towards becoming something that other people seem to obstruct. The sense of self always requires a context, such as a perception or activity, to support it. The anusaya create them. For example if I’m in a bad mood then the sense of self goes into irritation and conceit: ‘She doesn’t do this, he’s always like that.’ It will tend to go out and see all the things around that will support it.

What about returning to the centre of this contextual world? Who is always at the centre of that world? Try running ‘there’s no-one else here’ through the mind. Then the substantiality of that world collapses. It is created by mental diffusion. There is visual consciousness – but the visual awareness has no greed or doubt in it. And the mental dimension stands out as itself, it is not someone else ‘out there.’ So all those irritating or confusing situations ‘out there’ are really the result of this proliferation (papañca), this projecting out from a mind consciousness which feels unhappy, worried, restless and so on.

When something is experienced as self, the result (vipaka) acts as the base for fresh kamma. Based upon the vipaka of the physical condition – which is the base for sensations and feelings, perceptions, and the experience of form – there is the latent tendency towards greed, towards confusion and so on. But we don’t have to act upon them. Instead they are to be investigated insightfully. Then they can be seen as empty of the three-dimensional self of other people ‘out there,’ and the familiar time-bound ‘self’ in here. The latent tendency can be penetrated and de-activated.

So it’s important to be able to acknowledge the sankhara, the activating tendency – this is the source of fresh kamma – as distinct from the vipaka of form and feeling. This is the basic renunciation of a practitioner; it is always the checking, letting-go discipline that separates moods and feelings from activation principles. When we empty out, then there is refraining from kamma or fresh action based upon impulses, and we can acknowledge and make peace with the past.

Then we can begin to look more clearly. If volition is seen for what it is – as that twitch or that itching – and it is seen in its own terms, it has no significance, it is what it is. It’s like water bubbling, it doesn’t mean anything. It’s when you act upon it, when it is referred to ‘I am’ that it becomes something ‘important,’ ‘delightful,’ ‘terrible.’ In itself it’s just a twitch. It can come out with all kinds of noises and sounds: monkey mind, chattering mind, but you can contemplate it just as so much: ‘the parrot having a little chirp again.’

This contemplation is not a harsh. It enables one to apply the medicine that is necessary to calm or release the mind. The medicine of Dhamma releases the mind from cruelty and ill-will, and releases it from being fondled as ‘self.’ Dhamma opens the cage. Don’t get mesmerised, just let these things go. Which is not to crush or criticize: it’s so you can hear things as they are. Just: ‘Who is this?’ Get to know it then apply the medicine of Dhamma.

This kind of responsiveness is important to cultivate because the other way in which emptiness is not realized is through the assumption that there is an ‘I am’ separate from all this; the assumption that somewhere there is an ‘I am’ that is not bothered, there’s an ‘I am’ somewhere that’s all right, blissful, ‘I’m all right on my own, thank you,’ ‘I’m all right on my own provided with everything I want as long as nobody bothers me.’ That’d be good news, wouldn’t it? Meanwhile, welcome to planetary life with seven billion other human beings and the rest of incarnation. But the notion that one can extract an ‘I am’ from the senses, from the khandha, that there can be an ‘I am’ that is other than pleasant or unpleasant feeling, other than perception, other than mental formations, other than consciousness: this is the tendency towards becoming ‘out of it all’ (vibhava). And the ‘I am’ that wants to be other than that really doesn’t like feelings, it doesn’t want to have mental formations, it doesn’t want to have perceptions, it wants to be left alone by these things. So it is not free from irritation and conceit.

The tone of practice that we undertake for the realization of emptiness has to be warm and clear. It is not possible to empty out irritation and conceit by being bland or uninvolved. The path of emptying is a compassionate responsiveness which doesn’t believe and doesn’t deny, doesn’t reject, doesn’t hold: ‘It’s this way now, this is what’s happening now. There is nothing else that should be happening now, right now it couldn’t be any other way.’ Although the habit is to focus on ‘what I should be,’ and ‘what they should do,’ the path of emptying is to locate the ‘I am’ tucked within the khandha, and clean it out.

Liberation is just this the cleaning-out of self from these five khandha. This is through neither favouring nor being averse to form; and the same for perception, feeling, activating impulses and the discriminating awareness. This is all we need to know. We don’t need to know emptiness, know nibbana, we have to do it.

In the cultivation of anapanasati, we can measure and explore the five khandha. First in terms of form: as we cultivate samadhi, the form of the breath highlights and then calms the experience of body. This enables us to experience form purely as a flowing cascade of sensations. The experience of form thus changes: so what essentially is form? Form is ephemeral; there’s nothing truly that can be made out of it. Then sensation: the experience of pleasant feeling and whatever perceptions the breathing gets denoted by are also fully entered into in meditation. And as the modalities of feeling and perception are focussed on, they are steadied and released from the impulse to make something out of them. And so on with the mind-consciousness and its discriminations and activities: fully entering into an experience, calming it, steadying it, and releasing it. So this process is not about dumbing things down, creating other worlds, or denying this one. It is about fully entering into this world rather than getting over it or finding an answer to it. The attention can be steadied at the point of the arising and passing of the world of phenomena. What arises? The five khandha, or what is called the world, arise, that’s all. That’s what they are supposed to do. And they pass.

This emptying does not lead to a negative state, it leads to brilliance, competence, and potential because there is no particular position that one is pushed into. Then there is an unbiased awareness, and we don’t have to prove ourselves by accumulating things physical, sensed, or psychological. Even true joy and compassion are ‘empty:’ experienced as aspects of awareness rather than as aspects of self. This emptiness is the fullness of the mind freed from being stuck onto objects. And the leading edge of its practice is where that clinging, that tackiness, that persistence to hold to the ‘I am,’ is arising. At that place of arising is the edge of liberation.

CONTENTS