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Venerable Ajahn Sucitto -
Learning and Spirituality
Taken from a talk by Ajahn Sucitto given at the
Dhamma School Meditation Weekend, in May 1992.
We want to learn, we have an urge to know, because that knowledge serves
as a connection between ourselves and the world, the other-than-self.
This need to connect lies behind most of our seeking for knowledge,
relationship, ownership and position. To feel unconnected is to feel
insecure and unfulfilled.
However, this thirst for knowledge has built-in drawbacks: it may be
motivated by a desire for worldly gains, personal prestige or aimless
intellectual stimulation. Through such biases the ability to learn is
hampered by impatience, competitiveness, anxiety or a general lack of
true receptivity. To learn fully, to really connect, we have to return
to a state of un-knowing, where our pre-conceptions of 'What's in it for
me?' are laid aside. True inquiry can only proceed when we are willing
and free to give the attention that is needed, rather than just what we
assume is worthwhile. Only then can we fully appreciate both what is in
front of us and what is within us.
This free awareness, and the means to cultivate it, are at the heart of
Buddhist practice, most significantly the practice of insight
meditation. Actually the notion of meditation itself can bring about the
same pitfalls of desire as I mentioned before - the love of refined
pleasure, the impatience to 'get there' and the inability to attend
wisely and respond to what is actually right with us. So it's good to
re-align the concept of meditation with reflections on what is needed
for true learning, for a real union and 'merging in the Deathless' to
happen, rather than an opportunity for self-view to take over more of
the free space of the mind.
To learn, or to meditate, is not a simple, one-step activity. It is a
graduated training in attending, reflecting and responding; it requires
the movement of the mind from inquiry rather than fixation onto a
particular idea or condition. Such fixation can grant a brief sense of
security or conviction, but it also freezes the wisdom faculty and
replaces it with will-power. No, true learning has to be a fluid process
for the fullness of the mind to come alive and bring its life into what
it works with.
We seldom fully recognise the initial stage in learning. We have to
start with the sense of the unknown; at the beginning of learning there
is uncertainty, and the reaction to that is to try to get knowledge or
to see what we want to see. From that beginning, no true learning can
occur. In the way of the Buddha, the beginning of learning is an act of
faith, of trust and openness, a confidence that can't come from what we
know, but from a willingness to let things be unknown. In that
unknowing, we can get in touch with our own fundamental awareness; we
can appreciate what we are and bring that forth. This side of education
has hardly been recognised - we don't come from a position of trust to
'e-ducate' (from the Latin meaning 'to lead out') someone's wisdom, we
find ways to stuff our minds full and thereby confirm our essential
inadequacy while attempting to assuage its pangs. It's more a matter of
getting programmed quickly to avoid self-recriminations or the scorn of
others.
To stimulate faith, then, is the spiritual contribution to education. It
is the work of affirming ethical norms as qualities that uplift and
support our presence of mind and independence from success and failure.
One obvious way of stimulating this kind of faith is through presenting
(and as much as possible, being!) a living model of harmlessness,
kindness and honesty. The primary role of a teacher has to be to serve
as a source of faith, being someone who stimulates a pupil's/disciple's
self-confidence and exemplifies the benefits of learning. The teachers I
learnt best from at school and University were the ones who seemed at
ease and interested in me and who seemed to be genuinely brightened and
brought alive by their subject. Even in such an apparently 'worldly'
context as a Geography or History lesson, one is very much affected by
the teacher's spirituality.
Does the term 'spirituality' seem alien to secular activities? Here
again, we need to consider how we have defined, and refined almost out
of practical existence, such a fundamental quality of the human being.
Is it not possible to experience kindness, discernment and a zest for
truth in daily life? We may not be without blemish, but surely
spirituality is a basic pre-requisite for anyone's life. The sad truth
is that we don't commonly think in those terms. For millennia our
culture has separated the world from the spirit - heaven and hell are
characteristically not on the earth and not related to this life - and
spirituality has become a part-time hobby for the leisured, or slightly
eccentric few, hedged around by special jargon and systems. This
perception is what the Buddhist practice of mindfulness should
effectively dispel, but perversely, Buddhists have managed to make
mindfulness an esoteric attainment, with Nibbana an inconceivably remote
state at the end of it.
I suppose the crunch point for all learning, and why spirituality has
become divorced from common parlance, is that we assume that learning
has to be a steady smooth success. We're not prepared to learn from
mistakes; and spirituality is largely associated with positive states of
mind. Hence the split between God and Satan, the spirit and the flesh,
or the perceptual difficulties that people have in bringing mindfulness
to bear on negative states. Confusion, anxiety and dullness, if not
attended to with wisdom and compassion, destroy our confidence, and the
whole possibility of learning is limited. Yet to come to know what we
don't know, whether this be through the 'self-inquiry' of insight or in
the field of 'external' knowledge, is always going to bring up a certain
amount of confusion. It is just there that only true spirituality, a
self-abandonment, a willingness to be with that and let things change,
will be effective. And honestly being with that which we don't know and
haven't got a conceptual framework for is, conversely, the way to induce
a spiritual response. It strengthens the heart without the power-control
systems of the ego. It's the way a samana learns, by continually going
beyond the edge of their knowledge and security.
To encourage that, to 'lead out' someone's wisdom, to bring forth true
human beings, is a truer education than simply programming
semi-automatons who don't even know that they don't know - who have
dismissed the quickness and beauty of the mind as unproductive or
unsafe. Surely it's better that we live honestly with unfulfilled
alertness than stuff down borrowed knowledge to feel we're part of the
right team. Even if the knowledge is true, it's not real if we haven't
learnt it by taking it into ourself and working with it. We haven't made
the real connection that will help us to realise our innate wisdom. Only
that will give us the freedom to operate knowingly with the changing
circumstances of life. But such a learning requires patience, effort,
and above all faith.
Forest Sangha Newsletter: October 1992, Number 22
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