The more you enter into and fully give yourself to the experience of anicca – impermanence and relativity – the more you pass through the patterns that bind awareness. Bodily experience, the experience of feeling, the experience of mind-states – even the experience of holding on is an impermanent one. Every now and then the grip slips on things: even uncertainty or dread can’t be held onto for ever, they start wearing out. Acknowledge this, because the mind continues to interpret things in terms of permanence; it doesn’t notice the spaces and the pauses. For example, if you set a line of skittles up you’d recognize the skittles and form a pattern out of that line-up – but if you focussed on the gaps, your experience of the pattern would be radically affected. So with the moments of worry, pain, fear or stress – notice the spaces in-between, like the gaps between the skittles. It’s not that they’re invisible, they’re detectable, but they’re not manifest in the same way.

It is through the sign of impermanence that the mind inclines towards the non-manifest. The manifest is only a series of signs, markers like skittles, within the non-manifest. The non-manifest is far greater. As we attend to the passing of phenomena and to the spaces between thoughts and moods, we can discern that gap, that spaciousness at the heart of things. All conditions ebb into that and flow out of that. And, as the mind tends to take on the quality of what it attends to, the contemplation of impermanence makes the mind very spacious.

When one enters into this contemplation, the experience of pleasure and pain is felt in a more relative way. When you contemplate agreeable and disagreeable mental or physical feelings, you notice that any diminution in what is agreeable is felt as disagreeable – the unpleasantness is related to the retained impression of the pleasant. Similarly, any diminution in the disagreeable is felt as pleasant. Say one has a headache, or an itch – the moment when that wanes or disappears is such a relief. But if one hadn’t been suffering, a similar normative state would have been experienced as neutral, tedious – or not noticed. Or if one was returning to that normative state after a pleasant experience of warmth and relaxation, it would be experienced as less pleasant than.... And so on. Feeling is never permanent or substantial – it arises dependent on relating to another impression, and it cannot be sustained in any sense object. One gets used to what was initially a delightful flavour, and that object ceases to delight; and one can acclimatise to discomfort. Although this may sound bleak if one depends on feelings for well-being, actually if we can realize and enter into the impermanence of feelings, it makes things freer and lighter. Whatever comes up won’t be an issue, one can be flexible, there’s no need to tighten up and manipulate. That freedom itself is a more useful and far-reaching source of well-being.

As well as feeling, there are the perceptions, the ‘meanings’ conjoined with them. These also affect us powerfully. We form perceptions based on eye contact, and upon mental activities, but what are things actually? If you’ve been brought up on Yogi Bear, Koala bears and Pooh Bear, then bears are lovely fluffy creatures that eat honey, but if you’re with a wild bear then it’s a very different animal. These things are relative. Now, if you direct this realization towards the perception of yourself – what then?

There are different ways through which self is experienced, and they are all relative. There is the localised coming together of particular factors at this point in time, ‘I am this state:’ the flow is localised to the point ‘I am,’ which thereby becomes a substantial entity. Let’s call this ‘I.’ ‘I feel happy.’ ‘I am’ is also experienced as non-localised, some vaguely defined psycho-physical awareness that persists through time, came from somewhere and is going somewhere else; a field rather than a point. Just for the sake of clarity, call this ‘myself.’ So ‘I am’ has a local, specific, but momentary dimension of ‘I’, and a general, non-specific, temporal dimension, ‘myself.’ Trying to bring them together, or, to ignore one and concentrate on the other, is quite a strain. Can you remember the stress that occurs when ‘I don’t quite feel myself today?’

They don’t even add up in themselves: the sense of being a solid, specific thing right now is really dependent on the field of changing processes that are happening to it. For example what one experiences one’s self as being is different in a group from when one is alone. We attempt to establish an identity around favoured contexts such as friendships or situations in which we perform well. ‘I’ attempt to establish ‘myself’ in terms of localised activities and structures. Maybe one is very good at doing a particular thing, and experiences oneself in that light. But in terms of other activities, perhaps that same light can’t shine. That same self isn’t there. It was dependent on a particular set of ‘I’ activities and a context. So the sense of a locatable, independent and substantial self doesn’t remain the same. It is relative.

The sense of being some field of experience that does persist is vaguely defined and uncertain. We may imagine we could separate ‘myself’ from ‘I’ and activities. However the field is quite alive with activities, which, even if they are familiar, are unpredictable. Then again the boundaries shift: I seem to be an entity defined sometimes by bodily sensations and sometimes by moods, and sometimes by an awareness of these. The most reliable definition is that I am a series of processes that change through time. This hardly makes for much of an identity: so why am ‘I’ so obstinately present and active?

When we attune to anicca, we begin to penetrate the illusion of time. Time occurs through relating to impressions that are imagined as outside the present. It’s a building up of a pattern of past, present and future – of linear progression – an activity that is always present. And the cause of that activity is the requirement to establish a sense of a manifest reality – either oneself or one’s world – that is permanent and persisting. When we think about the future, it’s always about establishing a definite point in the indefinite unknown to move towards – ideally, in a step-by-step way. But reality outside of the present is an indefinite unknown. Ideas of the future don’t count for much. The past is just a random peek through the kaleidoscope; you turn the particles of memory around and ‘you could say this, you could say that.’ You can draw all kinds of inferences and conclusions, but it is the mood with which you are turning the kaleidoscope that creates the memories. If you look with a worried mind then you tend to see things that substantiate that particular way of looking at things.

The manifest reality is therefore a relative one based on an unexamined requirement; its ‘sign’ is relativity: relatively pleasant, experienced by a subject that is a process that varies in accordance with a changing context. Things (dhamma) arise dependently on a range of factors, such as the appearance of a sense-object, the quality of attention and the motive or ‘intent’ of the mind. It comes down to a triad of object, subject and relating consciousness – neither of which can exist independent of the others. Most crucial in terms of liberation is the quality of intention (cetana), which is where the requiring and relating come in. When intention is biased by that wrong-seeing (avijja) it has requirements: to imagine signs of permanence, substantiality and pleasurability where they are not. It doesn’t see these signs as dependently arisen on attitudes and intentions. So one gets confused and disappointed that the ‘constants’ change.

To enter into the Dhamma is to really look into co-dependency (idappaccayata). Try and remember things in this light: ‘What does this depend upon?’ ‘How does this external reality depend on my mind-state? How does my mind-state depend upon the external reality?’ What’s it like when there’s blue sky and clear space, what’s your mind-state then? What’s it like when there’s seven of you working in the kitchen? What’s it like when it’s silent? What’s it like when my intention is to serve? This is investigating co-dependency in a very simple way.

Co-dependency describes the interconnectedness of experience. In terms of understanding the dependent arising and ceasing of suffering and stress, it has a two-fold and inter-connected modality. One mode is the process of present activity, whereby dependently-arisen factors give rise to the impression of ‘I,’ at a point of becoming something in the future. The other is resultant and potential: this mode concerns the sense of a dependently-arisen awareness in the present that inherits effects: ‘my self.’

The mode that is easiest to recognize is the one which is to do with our present actions: that we are a point moving towards a future point. This process is triggered off by sense impingement, contact impressions (phassa). Contact impressions within a sense sphere give rise to pleasantness and unpleasantness, which gives rise to inclination or disinclination. Then, because of that, the mind latches on, and because of that, a psychological ‘pattern’ is formed which inclines towards some result in the future.

For example, out of the flux of sense-impressions arising in the present, the eye recognizes a favourite fruit: perception and pleasant mental feeling. That fruit becomes the focus for the eye and pleasant associations, and how to obtain the fruit become the principle concerns (cetana) of the mind – so there is a latching on, and the attractive notion of what will occur when ‘I’ obtain the fruit stimulates a process of activity aimed at arriving at that point. This is the process of becoming and further becoming, but its only immediate and seemingly inevitable results is the ‘field’ of these very effects. We may or may not obtain the fruit, and it might or might not be a pleasant as we imagined it. Arrival at the desired point is uncertain and temporary. And the result is an unsatisfied ‘field’: ‘my (insatiable) self.’

In Dhamma practice, we can work with this experience of impingement. Sense-restraint, meditation, quiet, calm, orderliness, cleanliness, gentleness – all these things have an effect. Calmer impingement calms the process and makes it more easy to see through. This is the process of samatha. When one’s inclination is towards that calm, then mindfulness is established in order to bring around those signs that gladden and settle the mind. In this instance, the activity of wise attention (yoniso manasikara) is to regard and conceive things thus: ‘Which is the way that I can do this that is contented, calm, or benevolent?’ If it’s not calm and quiet then can one do it in a way that is at least good-hearted? One can’t expect a kitchen scene to be idyllically tranquil but it can be good-hearted because it’s a place of nourishment and of helping each other. So that characteristic is to be focussed on, rather than ‘I don’t like the sound of pots and pans.’ Then if one focuses on the good-heartedness, the mind can settle on a gladdening object. In this way, wise attention picks up a particular skilful facet or feature for mindfulness to incline towards and attend to. Skilful one-pointedness gives rise to a skilful, though not completely liberated, field of awareness.

Of course, you could focus on the defilements of other people: people getting it wrong, people turning up late, or people making unfortunate remarks on odd occasions. You can notice these things in yourself and in others. But there’s no samatha in that. So if you keep getting irritated, then try to focus in a way that inclines towards calm and happy states. Try to see other people in terms of what it would be like to be in their position: ‘Have I never done anything wrong? Have I never been late? Have I never said silly things?’ This way is more spacious and compassionate. Train yourself to do this instead of following the worldly way which sees things in terms of efficiency or desirability, or who’s better or quicker. The worldly way always breaks everything up; it tends towards diffusion and separateness rather than unification and harmony. But if you work with dependent arising in the way of samatha, you can actually bring around a beneficial future arising at this moment. And in terms of further liberation: it is only when the mind has a sense of ease that it will ever settle so that you can clearly review the process of ‘I am.’

Now with the second modality of dependent arising – that of being a field of effects – the focus is on consciousness, viññana. Consciousness is the activity of awareness which is programmed through birth and inherited kammic tendencies. Its fundamental activity is to define reality through the six senses. It establishes a six-fold ‘field.’ Secondarily, mind-consciousness infers a self that is separate from, but associated with, the senses. Consciousness refers to a particular object and describes it in a particular way. Then out of that experience of an object and a description, arises the sense of being somebody seeing something, being somebody hearing something, or being somebody thinking something, etc. An object arises with the eye seeing it, the ear hearing it, the mind thinking it; what is thus detected, that is called rupa – ‘form’ or ‘shape.’ Rupa is then described in terms of memories, associations, or perceptions; and described dependent upon impression, dependent upon attending to it, and dependent on particular feelings; all this is nama – the naming or describing of things.

Visual consciousness describes things in terms of distance and shape. It differentiates between foreground and background, between an object and a field within which an object stands. Mind consciousness discriminates between an ‘in here’ and ‘out there.’ Ear consciousness discriminates between silence and sound, so you get the experience of rhythm and pitch. When these activities are known, when one puts aside involvement with their objects, the consciousness can stop.

Before I went to Thailand I’d been very fond of music, I listened to it all the time. For the first year or so when I was living in the monastery every time I’d sit down I’d hear music in my head – continually – until I hated it. But I couldn’t make it go away. Eventually after about a year and a half of non-stop noise in my head and fighting with it, and gradually cooling down about it all, it began to die away. By the time I came to England, my mind had cleared out, like a squeezed sponge. But then one day I was walking down a street and there was some music playing and my ear picked it up. I could feel the experience of consciousness dancing around the music, so much that it was difficult not to start physically dancing. The mind was gyrating, stimulated by this auditory experience and the consciousness fluctuating with it. So I explored; I listened deliberately and tried to go to what the sound really was – and when I focussed very strongly on the sound, the music and the listener stopped!

The music was dependent on a particular mode of attention whereby consciousness wasn’t held clearly, firmly or incisively onto an object, it was allowed to play on it. The experience of music was this playing: not an external experience nor an internal experience but the two coming together. And I really saw that what one could do something about was the stirring of consciousness, the stirring of the mind and moods – when that stopped, the music stopped. There was still the sound but it was empty, it was hollow. That was very significant for me because then that was it as far as music went. I could see that the music was just the movement of the mind. We can allow that movement to happen if we want to, but its reality, its ability to grip, fades.

Similarly with visual things, art, paintings and so on: now I experience it more often as that willingness to allow oneself to be moved by something; there has to be permission to be stimulated. If one withholds that permission, things are neither beautiful nor ugly – that doesn’t enter in. Of course there can be that allowing, that permission, if it seems suitable: ‘This is a very beautiful flower arrangement’ or whatever.

The activity of consciousness on rupa is nama: this is the arising of the world. The naming, the playing, the movement of impressions, the movement of attention, intention, perception, and feeling – it’s that play that makes things what they are, gives them their colour and tone. It can be stopped. If you really hold your attention onto a visual form, as visual form, and keep relinquishing and letting-go of things other than the form, then you find that the form empties. You’re not getting rid of it, but it doesn’t enter into you. The experience of ‘myself,’ that depends on an ‘external’ object, stops.

For freedom, for liberation from the experience of being grabbed by everything, this is good news. It means we don’t have to run away from things. The more specifically, clearly and fully we can focus on what is happening then the more we can be free from it. That’s a paradox. It’s only through the experience of mind-cultivation that you’d arrive at that conclusion because you’d think exactly the opposite. But if the mind can be trained and sustained, then there’s that possibility for freedom within things – by experiencing their relativity. The quality of becoming that establishes substantiality in the present can therefore be stopped. Contact impressions, the apparent root cause of the kamma-active modality of dependent arising, are themselves dependent on consciousness and form. It is the link of nama that is most significant: the impressionability of consciousness is the hinge point.

When we have experienced and cultivated the stopping of apparent object and subject, the grosser forms of aversion and need can be checked. What remains as the focus for practice is the subtler need – that of consciousness to proclaim itself as ‘myself.’ A self dependent on an internal sense.

The area of work with this is in the impressionability that we call ‘mind.’ That is where the attitudes, the assumptions, and the proclivities manifest that make us susceptible or resistant, and give sense-impression its ‘signs.’ These signs are the basis for our attempts to seek, or to shield ourselves. And dependent on these signs of what we experience ourselves as receiving are our activities towards a future. Although one can calm this future, this on-going, and even temporarily halt it, that tendency persists unless what one has become, the mind state at this particular moment, is also understood and seen through. So this matrix of nama-rupa-viññana (name, form and consciousness) is the focus. It is where both modalities of dependent arising play.

Consider the structure of this matrix. The set up is: ‘I’m in here, these are my thoughts and the sensed-world is out there.’ With that, there is the inner world and the outer world; already that’s suffering, isn’t it? Because there is self-consciousness and anxiety over what ‘that or those out there’ might do to ‘this one in here,’ and the discrepancies between the internal world of thoughts and feelings and then the programmed social reactions of what one should be thinking or feeling about ‘them out there,’ then the self-consciousness about being looked at or noted by other people, by things ‘out there.’ ‘Are you the same as me? Are you different from me? Are you better than me? How do I relate to you?’ This kind of thing keeps going on. This is suffering, isn’t it? And this is a continuing experience that occurs for us. But, if you look through your eyes, if you look at what the eye sees there is nothing ‘in here,’ it’s all ‘out there,’ there is only one dimension on that level. Even with thoughts, there is the thought and then something watching the thought, isn’t there? Just as the eye must see things in terms of distance and outlines, the mind sees things in terms of ‘here’ and ‘there.’ The mind operating in its habitual way can’t cognize in any other way.

This mind-field of consciousness continually fragments: there is a border between the ‘here’ and the ‘there’ that moves in and out, dependent on where and how attention is placed. Focussed on thoughts, one has attitudes towards one’s thoughts, then one may have attitudes about one’s attitudes toward thoughts; it’s attitude all the way down the line! We can spend a lifetime with this particular kaleidoscope, shifting the patterns around; but in terms of meditation or mind cultivation – we focus on the matrix of consciousness: ‘this here is mind-consciousness.’ The proliferating diffusion effect is then checked. It’s not ‘here and there,’ it’s all here. The good, the bad and the lovely, ‘It’s all here.’ The defiled, the wise, the profound, the foolish, ‘It’s all here.’

Sometimes we don’t even enter into the mind properly, we just look through the fence. We never get to know what those creatures in the mind are about; naming some of them as ‘dangerous animal!’, we poke them with a stick and they get annoyed. So we can splutter: ‘There goes my dread, my neurotic behaviour patterns’, reacting towards those mental experiences without realising that they are dependently arisen, and that they are intensified by this process of naming them as such. Just try to attend to the energy of fear, because as soon as you think of it as fear then it’s something you shouldn’t have, so the fence goes up and that thing is left really ‘out there.’ And some of those creatures are pleasant ones that longing throttles by grasping at them.

In meditation we can experience a mind-object as a pattern and explore the way we react and move around it. What one begins to realize is that the confused impressibility of consciousness is the seed-point for the arising of conditions. If one is uptight about one’s nervousness then it gets worse. If we see things in negative ways, then they will increasingly be negative and we’ll continue to see the negative side. If we are a little more generous, a little more allowing, a little more dispassionate about the things that we habitually don’t favour, or lighter and cooler about what we favour, then the quality of dispassion is engendered. Because of dispassion there is more ease and the mind doesn’t go into those twisted states which are the source and sustenance of afflicted energies. Just as things dependently arise based on wrong-seeing, they dependently cease dependent upon wisdom, upon wise attention, mindfulness and looking at things in the way of good heart. Ultimately we don’t have to get rid of things, their shape changes under the influence of wisdom.

With doubt, for example, there is a good side to it; doubt has scrupulousness. If you always regard doubt with a negative attention, then of course that impression pertains and it goes along that way. ‘Snap out of it! Make your mind up!’ But just barking out orders, or any psychological action that is just a reaction, cannot introduce the healing condition of wisdom. On the other hand, when you can regard doubt more dispassionately, you can note that is just an imbalance of a scrupulousness to know what is right and wrong. The imbalance comes through not knowing the relativity of the choices that one is conjuring with. But when you go to the state in itself, rather than the object of doubt then doubt will tend towards scrupulousness, hiri-ottappa, which is a support for the ending of stress and suffering. If you go into that then your heart feels steady, and because of that steadying of the heart, the shaking, the wavering and the doubt disappears.

Anger cuts off things, pushes things away. There is something good about its ability to determine quickly and decisively. Greed collects the mind to one point. Restlessness investigates. Dullness can be purified into equanimity. Try looking at these energies in this way rather than absorb into their objects, blindly react or create attitudes around them.

So even with afflicted energies, recognize that they’re impermanent and they are relative: that is, their manifestation is dependent on how we respond to and handle them. If we penetrate the perceptions that they manifest and the activities that they engender, they don’t mean anything really. Look at the very vibration of mind-consciousness as a wavering that re-establishes perceptions of, ‘I should be this’ or ‘He’s always doing that.’ If you go to the thing itself and drop the perceptions, it can be transformed.

It is through experiencing the relativity of whatever field has come to ‘be’ that the activity ‘to be’ ceases. So we have to let everything good and bad change; to not hang on to who we were, good or bad. Don’t dismiss it, but don’t hang on to it. We will habitually hang onto things because we don’t want to let go, we don’t want to be insecure; so very stubborn patterns get laid down: ‘that’s the way I am,’ ‘being myself,’ ‘just an ordinary bloke.’ Therefore renunciation is essential – to abandon the impressions of the past. We have to acknowledge the personality habits, but we don’t need to be them, we don’t need to be the star, or the loser, any more. Be very flexible about the changes and the roles you go through. In Sangha life, we have conventional forms and performance – duties and relationships and so on; make use of those in order to see through the habits of being independent or being dependent, being junior or being senior. Come out of these niches.

It’s almost comfortable to be able to feel inadequate – in our little burrow of inadequacy we can tunnel down and pull the wool over our heads. We go down into that musty little burrow rather than come out. But living in Dhamma is about stopping. It’s about stopping feigning and perpetuating ignorance. It is about coming out into a place where the only horizons, the only limitations are the ones we create, the ones that are dependently arisen.

However when we can abandon perceptions of the future – what we will be or where we are going to be and so on, then the present formation is seen just as a process. Consciousness is not a fixed or fixing thing, it’s a tendency to keep forming. Which is OK when we let it keep forming out of a context and a situation rather than be something that enters into situations with a pre-cast mould of who we are and how things are going to be. We can let the person be the result of a wise context rather than something that intrudes into it. We can allow wisdom and compassion to flow into the events of our lives, rather than react out of wrong-seeing. So our responsibility is literally the ability to respond. This is the beauty of the Dhamma as it appears in the manifest world.

CONTENTS