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Venerable Ajahn Sucitto -
Bright Kamma: Support for Attention
In the last few weeks, a
Buddha-image has been created in this monastery by Ajahn Nonti. He’s a
sculptor from Thailand who came here to do this as an act of generosity.
It’s been a lovely occasion, because the Buddha-image is being made in a
friendly and enjoyable way. Many people have been able to help with it.
Yesterday there were nine people sanding the Buddha-image. It’s not that
big, yet nine people were scrubbing away on it, not colliding with each
other, and enjoying doing that together.
Bright and dark kamma arise in the heart
Nine people working together in a friendly enjoyable way is a pretty
good thing to have happening. Moreover, it was all voluntary, and came
about not through prior arrangement: people got interested in the
project and gathered around it. It’s because of what the Buddha
represents, and because people love to participate in good causes.
That’s the magic of good kamma. It arises around doing something which
will have long-term significance, and also from acting in a way that
feels happy rather than intense or compulsive. Kamma, intentional or
volitional action, always has a result or residue, and here it’s obvious
that the good kamma is having good results. There’s an immediate result
– people are feeling happy through working together. And there’s a
long-term result – they are doing something that will bring benefit to
others.
In a few days we hope to install the Buddha-image in the meditation
Hall. It is an image that makes me feel good when I look at it. It has a
soft, inviting quality that brings up a sense of feeling welcome and
relaxed. This is a very good reminder for meditation. Sometimes people
can get quite tense about ‘enlightenment,’ and that brings up worries,
needs, and demands; but often what we really need is to feel welcomed
and blessed. This is quite a turn-around from our normal mind-set; but
when we are sitting somewhere where we feel trusted, where there’s
benevolence around us, we can let ourselves open up. And as we open our
hearts, we can sense the clarity of presence and firm up around that.
This firmness arising from gentleness is what the Buddha-image stands
for. It reminds us that there was an historical Buddha whose Awakening
is still glowing through the ages – but it's when this is presented as a
heart-impression rather than just a piece of history, it carries more
resonance. Then the image serves as a direct reflection on what good
kamma feels like.
Good kamma in the scriptures
is generally called ‘bright kamma’ as opposed to ‘dark kamma.’ ‘Bright’
means you feel bright and uplifted. It’s not just an idea. Brightness is
a felt tone rather than a judgment – good or bad, right or wrong. It has
beauty. The word ‘bright’ has the sense of something opening, of
softness and joy; it has these tones to it. While ‘dark’ implies being
shut down, contracted and hopeless. So this is something to check
inwardly: the quality of the actions that we do and the context that we
generate around ourselves – is it bright? Even if we own up to some
painful truth about our actions, isn’t there a brightness, a certain
dignity, when we do that willingly? Look for brightness in occasions
when we come forth like that, rather than in terms of superficial ease
or of being dutifully good: the attitude behind what we say and think –
is it bright or dark? That tone, rather than charm or obedience, is the
setting, the abiding place of our hearts.
Mind-organ and mind-base
The energy of kamma moves through three channels. The first is the body:
physically we do things. The second is the faculty of speaking (which
includes the ‘internal speech’ of thinking). The third is through the
mind, the sense of being affected and responding. In English, the word
‘mind’ straddles both conceptual activity and the affective sense which
gives the mind an overall state or mood. But in the Pali language, there
are two words. ‘Mano’ refers to the mind-organ that focuses on
the input of any of the senses. This function is called ‘attention' (manasikara).
The mind-organ can also define and articulate; it brings things to mind
and produces concepts. Tonally, it’s quite neutral. It’s not happy or
sad; it is the rationality that defines: ‘That’s that.’ ‘Citta’
on the other hand refers to the mind as ‘heart,’ the base that receives
the impressions that attention has brought to it. It is affected in
terms of pleasure and pain, and these affects become mind-states of
varying degrees of happiness and unhappiness. Citta also forms
signs, perceptions or ‘felt meanings’ (sañña) of the impressions
it has received and is moved by. Then we can judge new input by
referring to the signs that are already established: an orange-coloured
globe of a certain size and texture is probably an orange. At least it’s
not a tiger or a person. This meaning carries nuances that then
determine another mental function, intention – the mind moves towards
the object willingly or with an interest in eating. Intention or
volition occurs as a response to being affected, and this is how mental
kamma arises.
The way that mind-base and mind-organ operate is that
when citta is affected, its organ, mano, may then produce
a verbal concept to fit, so having recognized an object we can then say,
‘This is a dog; this is a bell.’ The mind-organ may also scan the
affective mind-base and define its states. All this is the action of
mano. The problem is that people can think just about anything,
based on seeing, hearing and ideas, without necessarily
reflecting on how the heart has been affected. There are plenty of
quarrels over truth, peace, love and freedom and other great ideals,
because passions or fears get mixed up with those notions. However, up
there in the mano faculty you don’t feel a thing. Therefore this
non-acknowledgement of subjective bias is called ‘objective truth.’(!)
But to know fully, not just think or have somebody tell you, but to
really feel the quality of goodness, love and so on, you have to
enter into and purify this heart. Hence the most important kamma for
deepening our truth, peace and freedom begins with turning the mind
around; with having mano scan the citta.
Felt meanings
When we look at what causes our impulses and actions, it’s clear that
they arise from feelings and inclinations in the heart. These
mental feelings and inclinations are bound up with perceptions or ‘felt
meanings,’ such as ‘feeling lonely’ or ‘feeling welcome;’ based on that
we ‘feel like taking a walk,’ or ‘feel like visiting so-and-so’: there
is an inclination. Somebody says something to us and we might say, ‘Oh,
that sounded really hostile to me.’ That’s a ‘felt meaning,’ a mental
perception. There’s an emotive interpretation of the words that somebody
uttered; and it’s likely that that will be the basis for intention: our
inclinations, actions and reactions. The ‘feel’ in that, the perception,
is a heart-impression (called ‘designation-contact,’
adhivacana-phassa). Although it is based upon external contact,
this designation contact, rather than contact with something external,
is the significant formulator of the impressions that move us. Some
intention is based on the body’s reflexes, but mostly it’s the
heart-impression of whatever is seen, heard, smelt, touched, tasted, or
thought that gets us going – for good or bad.
The felt meaning gets more powerful if we ‘feel’ that someone did
something to us on purpose, rather than if it was done by accident or
out of coincidence. Imagine the case where a person’s been rude to you
fourteen times this year. If they’d done it once, you’d have thought it
was just a mistake, but fourteen times? The present action was felt more
intensely because of the previous actions that had occurred. The ‘felt
meaning’ develops some weight dependent on an emotive inference. We can
infer deliberation: ‘He did that on purpose.’ Or fatalism: ‘I always
have to put up with careless people.’ We can react psychologically,
verbally or physically in accordance. This is how prior impressions,
attitudes and life-statements mould the heart-impression. In this way,
the impressions and attitudes we carry from the past become a base for
intention, a base for further kamma.
Also the more we focus on and attend to our impressions, or view the
world and others through old impressions, the more potent and firmly
established those impressions can get. But you can’t rely upon
heart-impressions. This is because we tend to notice what we’ve become
accustomed to notice: her gracious demeanour, his irritating mannerisms,
etc. And as we revisit the world in that way, we add more
interpretations. Then I ‘feel’ that ‘he’s always this way;’ or I ‘see’
you in a certain way; or I only notice my bad habits. Thus my focus, my
attention, gets set to look out for old impressions. And I bring those
to mind, mull them over, get affected by them and act in accordance. So
the scanning mind can keep selecting impressions in accordance with
biases of the heart and thereby build up and intensify those biases.
Attention is therefore also bound up with intention, and in generating
kamma. What all this means is that you can’t just rely on heart alone or on attention alone. You have to
cultivate skilful attention, attention to the heart, to get to the end
of biases.
Fathoming, mindfulness and full awareness
Considering all this, how can we scan, and respond, more skilfully? How
do we acknowledge feeling dumped on or abused and not just react or
suppress? Maybe we need to say a few things to a few people…or maybe
it’s a matter of correcting our own misperceptions….In any case, the
best way to start is by scanning the heart. This process begins with
‘fathoming attention’ (yoniso manasikara) – which itself is
attention backed up by the intention to consider experience in terms of
how it affects you. It is a heartful approach, whereby rather than just
going along with the topic of a thought, you listen to it deeply; you
sift through the flood of interpretations or digressions around topics
with an inquiring sense that asks: ‘What’s the meaning behind this
thought or attitude? What is the assumption, and how realistic is it?
How am I with my mind being like that?’ This is a sympathetic, not a
critical, survey. And it asks you to get an accurate feel for the
psychologies that direct your life. Then: ‘Is this stressful or not?’
This process reveals underlying impulses and heart impressions – whether
these are feelings of being threatened or alienated, or of uplift and
confidence. This underlying stuff is what powers how we think and what
we think about. It's important to know what's making you tick in any
situation. So putting a check on this process isn't a suppression, it's
more about allowing us to survey our inner territory. It helps us to see
beyond the boundaries of our self-image. But we put analysis and
further action on hold; we don’t try to fix things; we don’t go spasming
into an opinion about ourselves based on that survey. And the simple
beauty of this process is that when we suspend the reactions of what we
should and shouldn’t be feeling, there is clarity and spaciousness.
With that we reconnect with our innate ethical sensitivity, the good
kamma which supports clarity and compassion.
These, thankfully, are the basic qualities that we all have as human
beings. But because our way of attending is often superficial, or
goal-oriented, those qualities aren't always accessible to us. So they
surface dependent on a ‘selfless’ regard, a regard that is without
pressure, opinions and judgements. This regard is fathoming attention.
It just looks out for what is stressful and what is to be let go of.
And this simple internal directness is often all we really need – we can
generally figure out the details of what to do, and how, or whether to
do nothing at all, once we have got this point of view straight.
A
further development of attention is mindfulness (sati) the
ability to bear a theme, mood, thought or sensation in mind. It’s a
skilful use of mano, the mind-organ. Whereas fathoming is
an active attention that sifts through the topics of the mind,
mindfulness holds attention on a point – such as a thought or sensation
– in order to look into the nature of that as a phenomenon. For example
mindfulness attends to an emotion as an emotion and doesn’t let it
harden into an attitude or an action. It holds the boundary of the
present moment so that we can really discern what a feeling is, and what
a mood is, rather than act upon or explain or suppress them.
Mindfulness is vital because in the feeling sense there are no
boundaries; mental feeling goes everywhere. And if that felt sense
starts to proliferate, it becomes ‘I am. I always will be. People don’t
like me. I’m terrible...’ – and goes on reverberating. Even in the case
of a positive mood, if mindfulness is absent we may assume that
everything’s great and be quite insensitive to the moods of others. So
it’s always skilful to steady the domain of citta with
mindfulness. Then we don’t attach to the perception and feeling and
proliferate around the heart-impression or mind-states that may
subsequently arise.
A
complement to mindfulness is ‘full awareness’ (sampajañña). Full
awareness is the capacity to be alert and receptive, the ability to feel
out what we’re sensitive to. It is citta-based. Mindfulness holds
a boundary so that we don’t get overwhelmed, shut down or react to the
feelings that we have, then with full awareness, we get the whole of it,
how that impression arises and what it does. We may then understand:
‘this feeling or impression is based upon this perception and thought,
and it subsides when that thought or perception is removed.’ ‘This
negative impression arises with that perception or that memory and it
subsides when I practise loving-kindness, or even when I can just sit
with it and let it subside.’ Together mindfulness and full awareness
acknowledge what is going on, and where it stops. They don’t bring ‘I
am,’ ‘I should be’ into it.
If we establish these skills of attention, they free the mind
from acting on or reacting to the results of the past. If we attend to
the present impressions, the present moods and sensations, and cut off
the proliferations and projections, we’re not living in the fog of
resentment, fantasy, romance, or other biases. This means that our
attention, and consequently, our moods, actions and speech, are going to
be clearer and brighter. Because of this, we can get freer from our
habitual action – or inaction. (Withdrawing from action is still an
action – and that gets to be a habit too!) But if there is skilful
attention to the heart, we can speak of how things seem, what incidents
give rise to the ‘feeling’ of being mistreated, and have a sense that,
whether anyone else listens or responds, at least we have brought some
clarity into our lives. We don’t have to keep creating fresh
kamma based upon old habits – skilful attention is kamma that
leads to the end of kamma.
Guarding and collecting attention
To establish mindfulness and full awareness in daily life relies on a
skilful filtering of the input of stuff coming at us from all
directions, because the sheer deluge of contact can overwhelm them.
Contact is a source for kamma: what we give attention to receives our
energy and enters our hearts, and there it stimulates action and
reaction.
Because we consequently build up bright or dark habits, we need to be responsible
about what we give attention to. Part of cultivation is therefore about
turning away from input and actions that just pull the mind out into
craving or aversion or distraction. So another function of fathoming is
to be discriminative; it has intention, it checks, sifts through,
discards the dross, and retains the gold.
In fact, rather than have the mind absorb into whatever is being pumped
out by the media, there are themes that it’s good to give attention to. Fathoming
is also about recollection. Recollections vary, but you can do them
throughout the day. First of all, there’s mortality. If you consider the
fact of death carefully and coolly, it helps to calm and steady the
mind; you don’t get reckless or greedy, and don’t hold grudges. The
perception of mortality causes some of the sticky stuff to lose its
grip. Where’s the pressure to get, or to be, something when everything
you get, you lose? What is really worthwhile giving time and attention
to? The recollection of mortality also reminds us that our resources,
our energy, mental agility and health are finite and dwindling. We can
use our resources in a way that will enhance or free our lives, or we
can waste the time in fantasies and frustrations. Used wisely then, the
recollection of death keeps the mind in shape, clean and present. It
tells us it’s time to put down the load.
Another positive quality that comes out of recollecting mortality is
empathy. One of the greatest sources of affliction, and basis for
negative kamma, is a loss of empathy with others. In modern urban life,
we may experience many people through media stereotypes, or in the
no-man’s land of busy streets and public places. People then become
‘other’ – other nationalities, other religions etc – and we may feel
either nothing, or mistrust, for them. In an emotional field with such a
bias, indifference, and even brutality, finds room to breed. But if we
consider our common ground – that like us, others have to endure stress,
illness, bereavement and death – that helps to generate empathy. For
example, one of the monks was telling me he has a picture of famine
victims and people with terrible afflictions and deformities, and
whenever life was getting tense and tight and he was starting to feel
irritable or losing perspective, he would look at these. Then he’d
experience a sense of compassion for the human realm, as well as
gratitude for the enormous blessing of being healthy, free from
punishment, well-fed and looked after. Recollection evokes a tone that,
with sustained mindfulness, can become a steady abiding place for the
heart. Then harshness, indifference and self-pity don’t take over.
We can also broaden empathy to recollect that ‘others too have joy and
despair, humour and fear, birth, families, and their kamma….Then why
don’t I relate to others in the way that I’d like them to relate to me.’
Morality is really only empathy put into forms of behaviour.
I
find it really useful to meditate on ‘others’ and what they bring up for
me. And to notice that any effect that comes up is in my own affective
mind; because I’m the one who has to live with that indifference,
harshness or empathy. When the heart is defensive or dismissive, it is
tight, constricted – and it can’t access the energy that supports me.
And the more I feel heavy and tight about others, the heavier and
tighter my life gets. Sure, opening the heart often entails feeling all
kinds of conditioned irritations and fears – but, if there is fathoming
attention, the heart also finds access to the courage and the compassion
that is its potential. And as I tune into the theme of the good kamma
of being human, I can really enjoy and taste the nourishment of
kindness, the protective care of compassion, the joy of appreciation,
and the equanimity to hold the space that allows emotions to move.
Empathy gives me access to my innate sanity.
Images of Awakening
In order to gladden the heart, it’s good to bring an image or topic to
mind. What is generally most useful is to recollect the qualities of
people who are part of our life, because we learn a lot about bright
kamma from contemplating the actions of others. Therefore, one of the
greatest supports for Awakening is to have meaningful relationships with
other people. This can include our parents, friends or peers, who
represent or invoke our sense of gratitude, uprightness,
compassion...value. Without human reference-points, alive or deceased,
the mind deals in abstractions: even towards itself. Isolated people get
locked into unreal notions of themselves, or into hobbies, plans,
gadgets or various forms of showmanship. Then there’s no sense of being
held by or part of something larger than oneself. That’s an enormous
loss.
To work against this, the recollection of Sangha brings us to the
humanity of the practice; it’s not just a text-book and ideas thing.
One of the main benefits of a lineage and tradition is to awaken us to
this larger sense of ourselves, as sharing companionship of the spirit
with good people, over the entire world, throughout time. We can also
recollect sharing a value-system that gives great significance to kamma:
this is the recollection of Dhamma. So we recollect aspiration and
Awakening as our common touchstone, and suffering, and dis-ease as our
common challenge. Then we no longer feel so alone with our difficult
mind-states, and we can handle them in a more open and aware way.
Recollection of Dhamma and Sangha reminds us that although there is
greed, anger, and confusion, there is a way to handle them which leads
out of that. And there are people who have come along this way.
The very context of the practice can be uplifted by using shrines,
making offerings to a Buddha image and chanting. This is puja:
the act of honouring the Buddha, bringing to mind the miracle of
Awakening in an embodied form. But it's not about worshipping an image.
We use ritual means because it is allows for acting out, rather than
thinking, and we can do it together through body, thought and heart.
Group enactment heightens the sense of participation in the meaning of
Awakening. Fully tuning in, and participating, brings us out of
ourselves and into a deep resonance. This is about making recollection
feel good.
That’s why in a monastery, we have a tangible, manifest Buddha-image.
It’s something that we can hold with respect – physically clean it,
illuminate it with lights, offer flowers to it. Soft light, flowers and
gestures of offering encourage the attention to dwell in the
heart-impression of the shrine, and so the mind gets touched by the
sense of stability, or of peacefulness or of radiance and can dwell in
that. If these impressions and felt meanings are established regularly,
it gets so that just seeing a Buddha-image lifts the spirits or steadies
the mind.
Chanting, particularly in a group, can have a harmonizing, settling
effect: sonorous and unhurried, it really helps one to appreciate one’s
fellow practitioners. Here we are, for once without our names and
histories, human beings intent on being fully aware. Then we sense our
own presence within a broader perspective. In some ways it’s
still just your body/mind with all its stuff – but recollection opens an
empathic knowing of all that.
Non-involvement needs support
Fathoming attention then is an action that causes us to pause, and takes
us into our minds and hearts more deeply. This prepares us for
meditation. If you start meditating from a dark or muddled place,
mindfulness and full awareness are weak. We might tell ourselves that
being dark or muddled is being authentic and we should just be mindful
of that. Which has some truth in it. However, memories, plans,
worries and grudges generally have a lot of power in them, so rather
than being mindful of them, they capture attention, and get obsessive.
So it’s important to establish a focus with right view – that we bear in
mind how we're being affected by what we give attention to. There's no
point in spending time with attention held captive by some
pre-occupation. Sitting with no resources for the heart isn't
meditation. It's more useful to enter meditation through fathoming, even
pondering and considering how the mind is being affected by things. That
is, we handle the mind heartfully; we scan, and discern: ‘What brings
suffering and stress? What releases that?’ This intention brings around
a mindfulness that supports the wisdom of Awakening: to look into dis-ease
and the release from dis-ease. Mindfulness just bears things in mind; so
for Awakening, the heart-base, it needs to be backed up by right
intention – which is what fathoming attention and full awareness
do.
The practice isn’t going to go far if the mind isn’t
acting from a committed, ethical and skilful base. But if we do
cultivate the mind along these lines, they support fathoming,
mindfulness and full awareness. Then we can handle positive states,
negative states or just ‘nothing special’ states, and find wisdom and
release. Because what is essential in all cases is that there’s a
mindful stepping back from the pull of a habit or spin of a mood. That
brings around a drop in the intensity and momentum of the mind-state, so
there is a momentary weakening or ending of kamma. This shift happens
when we're clear and honest: it doesn’t happen if we’re trying to hide
something or trying to make something happen – even if we’re trying to
be non-attached! This is because the shift is away from trying to find
something or be something, and towards being upright and clear in the
presence of our stuff. And the good we have done, the patience, the
honesty, all contribute towards strengthening the mind-base to make that
stepping back possible.
Then when there is darkness in the heart, we know how to attend to it
wisely. We don’t have to figure out where it comes from and whose fault
it is. Maybe it’s from some past action, or maybe it’s a critical,
negative habit creating a memory or interpretation right now. But all we
have to know is that this is dark vipaka, and where that gets
cleared. I’d say the process is almost like putting a piece of dirty
laundry into a lake. The cleaning is done both by the action of placing
the laundry in the lake, and without action – because the water does the
cleaning. You take that dark residue and put it into whatever clarity or
purity there is, and though you may have to swish and really massage the
grubby bits, basically it’s our basic sanity that washes the dirt out.
We establish mindfulness, and then full awareness keeps feeling it, and
sensing it, and letting go of what comes up. Whenever some of the dark
residues get cleared, full awareness senses the lightness, or
brightness. And we can tune in to that. Over time as we cultivate, there
develops an increasing ground of well-being, a brightness that we can
abide in. But because there isn’t the sense that ‘I’ve done this,’ or
‘I’m going to get this,’ the mind doesn’t get puffed up; it remains
quiet and receptive.
In fact any kind of self-view just confuses things. Because, as you
witness in meditation, getting caught up in thoughts and moods isn’t a
personal decision. And it’s not that ‘I am not attached’ either. The
mind was spacious and steady, then thoughts about your future, or
someone who’s giving you a hard time comes up, and suddenly, you’re in
there, tightening up and speeding up and proliferating about it all; and
the view comes in as to whose fault…and what you should do…and why
me….It starts with a bias, moves into an action, and then it becomes a
person. So getting free can’t be done through an apparent self who is,
or should be, in control. Instead it requires the skills of an
attention that has the capacity to handle old kamma as it comes to the
surface.
Our practice then is led by Dhamma rather than driven by self-view; and
it inclines towards stopping the old rather than becoming something new.
It’s a cultivation that frees up, protects, and gathers us into a free
space at the centre of life. It's the kamma that leads to the end of
kamma – and it tastes of freedom.
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