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Venerable
Ajahn Viradhammo -
Understanding, Training and Purification
Ajahn
Viradhammo, Based on a talk given at Bodhinyanarama Monastery in
September 2002.
To approach Buddhism in a way that is profitable and wholesome and
brings good results, one has to understand why we do this. It's a
statement of the obvious that if one is somewhat muddled about the whole
Buddhist project, if one doesn't clearly understand what the goal is,
what the path is, then one's efforts can be equally confused. So it's
very important to have right understanding. Buddhist practice begins and
ends with right understanding, or Right Seeing, or Right View as we say.
If I don't really understand what this business is about, then the
efforts I make, the attitudes I have are going to be warped by that
wrong understanding. They are going to be afflicted by wrong
understanding. So right understanding is terribly important. Right
understanding grows as one practises. There is a difference between what
I thought was right understanding when I started, and what I think right
understanding is now, 25 years further down the path. And I should think
in a few years' time that my understanding will become more refined and
more profound. At least I hope so, if it's working well.
Understanding the goal of Buddhist practice
So, what is the goal of this work that we do? This is important. Do you
have a goal? Why do you do this? Why do we sit here for 45 minutes? The
goal sometimes is couched in very high terms, like the realization of
nibbana, enlightenment, that kind of most deep, transcendent insight
that one can have. And that can seem pretty far away for many of us.
That's all very well, but if I'm still struggling to stay awake in my
meditation, or I still get angry at the neighbours, or I eat too many
sweets, or whatever one does, transcendent truth can seem far away.
Even so, it's still important that there's a very deep and profound
transcendent dimension to the path, that it's not just another self-help
therapy. It's not just getting your act together. Certainly that's part
of it - because if you haven't got your act together, you're not going
to have the equipment for entering more profoundly into the deeper
levels of consciousness. So it's important to keep in mind that the
Buddha did have a profound realization, that he wasn't just a skilful
therapist. Therapy is very helpful and there are elements from the
western therapeutic tradition that can enhance Buddhism. But the goal
has deeper implications.
To make the understanding of the goal more approachable, the Buddha also
said that true spiritual freedom and peace will manifest when the heart
is liberated from greed, hatred and delusion; when the heart is not
afflicted by the necessity to always be distracted by sense
consciousness; when the heart is not afflicted by anxieties and fears;
when the heart is not afflicted by resentments; is not afflicted by
aversions and angers. All of us want to be free from those afflictions.
So that's more approachable, isn't it? When I'm caught up in my own
anxieties, or in a very self-hating mode, or I am just complaining and
whining about life and suddenly notice that, when I awaken to that, I
want to be free of it. That's another way of describing the goal: to be
free from greed, hatred and delusion. And that's logical isn't it?
That's something you can do.
The other way the goal is sometimes couched is in terms of the heart,
where the heart realises what we call the brahmaviharas, where the heart
has the deep empathy of compassion, the deep empathy of joy. It has the
peacefulness of equanimity. These are the positive ways of talking about
what the goal might be like: when the heart is open, when the heart is
responsive, when the heart is not just reactive in all kinds of
unskilful ways.
So there is the negative and the positive. The negative is the
abandonment of unskilful mind states, the suffering of the inner
conflicts we feel. The positive is the beauty of the heart, the
liberated heart - the compassion and joy of non-affliction. It is
sometimes described as the end of suffering, the cessation of suffering,
the abandonment of suffering.
These teachings are reflective or contemplative tools that help us
deepen our understanding of the way things are. 'How do they relate to
me? How do they mirror my life? And what might they mean in terms of my
own aspirations? How do my aspirations fit the goal? Do I even have any
aspirations? What are my aspirations, what are my goals?' The teachings
help me inquire into the nature of my own spiritual quest.
The goal in Buddhism is not realised by wilfully or egotistically trying
to become enlightened. It's far more subtle than that. It's not simply a
matter of bashing away at all the negativities and somehow wilfully
creating positive energies. It's not an ego trip. Effort in Buddhism is
often very subtle. It's hard to understand because we tend to make
effort, (I did, especially when I began), in a very wilful way. Wilfully
trying to become enlightened, or wilfully trying to get rid of my anger,
or wilfully trying to be loving, or whatever it might be. When I say
Buddhism has a goal, there is the idea that I'm here, and I'm going to
go there and get my goal. In this way it can seem a selfish endeavour of
getting something. The realisation of the goal is, however, accomplished
in two parts. It is realised by training, and by abandonment.
Abandonment is conjoined with the idea of purification. Training is the
way of development.
Training - the development of stillness and skilful attention
Consider training - if you are meditating, and you're using the breath,
or you're using a heart practice, or you're using a mantra - how does it
work? How do you make the mind calm? If you just wilfully try to make
yourself calm, you'll get tense. If you don't put any effort forth,
you'll fall asleep. Those are the extremes of practice. But if one has
the sensitivity, and the right understanding of how to apply attention
to the object of meditation, without any ego desire, without any
aversion, without trying to get rid of something, but simply applying
attention and holding attention as a training, then one moment of
awareness, one moment of stillness, one moment of training in stillness,
creates two moments. If I can train my attention to be with just one
out-breath, without desire, without striving, but with sensitivity then
my mind tends to become that. Meditation has a very fine quality, it is
quite beautiful. If I can just train my attention to be with one
out-breath, then I tend to be more composed for that out-breath. And if
I can do it for two moments, then that builds on itself. If I can do it
for three moments, and so on.
It's training in skilfulness, a kind of mental dexterity, a subtle skill
that strengthens and grows until one becomes more and more adept at
stillness. If you want to build up your arms or your shoulders and do
some weightlifting - you just do the weightlifting, don't you? You lift
the weights and you train yourself and your upper body becomes stronger.
If you want to develop the ability to play the piano, then you develop
exercises to make the fingers more flexible - or whatever you need to
do. And by doing it, by doing it, by doing it, you eventually know how
to do it, don't you? So that's training. To build up my upper body with
weights, I just have to do that, and then the strength comes by itself.
I don't wilfully get the strength, do I? 'I'm going to get the strength
right now.' It's not that, it's just by training in the proper way you
get the right results. Put in the right conditions and you get the right
results.
This is the idea of training in Buddhism. It's not just a belief system
that one accepts or rejects. That's not enough. It's a deliberate
training of the heart and mind. And that requires tremendous patience
and determination. One has to be quite committed to that. It doesn't
happen for free. For most people, training the mind is very difficult.
Some small proportion of the population of meditators fall into quiet
states of mind easily. We would say they have a lot of accumulated
virtue. One reads about such spiritual adepts. For the great majority of
people I've met, however, it's hard, it's quite difficult. Thus there is
a necessity of persevering in the training.
How does one move from the reality of a mind which gets anxious easily,
a mind which is quite greedy, or a mind which is very averse - from that
to a heart that is open and compassionate? How does the transformation
take place? All of us suffer from a certain amount of habitual
negativity, don't we? And all of us are concerned about that
transformation, otherwise we wouldn't be here. So what is the process?
How does one go from A to B? Well, the process involves both training
and purification.
Purification needs to be understood in the context of kamma. Strictly
speaking, vipakka kamma is the term we use to describe the results of
kamma - the results of the ways that I have thought, acted and spoken in
this or previous lives. And this vipakka kamma conditions the arising in
consciousness of both positive and negative things. This I experience
various kinds of fears, depressions and states of suffering coming up
into consciousness. I don't wilfully wish them to come into my mind.
They just arrive without my invitation. None of us wake up in the
morning and think 'At three o'clock I'm going to be fearful.' We don't
make such intentions. We just find ourselves afraid, or angry, or
restless, or whatever it is.
What does that mean? That means our consciousness is involved with
negative kamma. It is neither right nor wrong, it is just the way the
stream of consciousness has been conditioned. If I, as a child, didn't
understand the mind and got caught up in all kinds of negative habits
for a couple of decades then that is what I will have to work with. When
I finally wake up to these negative patterns and take responsibility for
my inner world and have the good intention to go beyond such habits, I
will still suffer from these tendencies. The habits have a momentum that
takes time to reverse and abandon. And I think this is very important
because that's what gives us compassion for our own predicament. You
need compassion. For awareness to function you need compassion. You need
to really care for yourself. Not in a narcissistic way or in a
self-obsessed way. You really need to care for the way things are
because it is only in caring that you can understand. The only way I can
understand a child who is suffering is by listening to the child. If I
have some opinion about the child, and I don't really listen, I can
never understand the child - the same with our own minds.
Purification - the abandoning of our unskilful habits of mind
To understand how purification works we need to remember that the
results of negative actions and intentions will pop up into
consciousness. We are going to feel these things, and there's nothing
right or wrong about them. We are not guilty of feeling fearful, or
guilty of getting uptight in a traffic jam, or whatever. It's just when
the buttons get pressed, those things arise. So, the more we are aware
of those manifestations, the more attentive we are to these things then
the less we will get caught up with them. We notice these as objects of
consciousness and rather than reacting we watch them fade. In this we
experience the purification of negative habits.
I was once at the airport, in Vancouver, and my luggage got searched. I
noticed that people were getting very irritated that their luggage was
getting rifled through. I noticed the people behind me getting really
uptight about this and grumbling and complaining. Now that grumbling and
complaining arose because they did not get what they wanted. What they
wanted was just to get into the line, get through the hassle, and get on
the plane. Now, because they didn't get what they wanted, they projected
it onto the two poor Indian ladies who had to do this awful job. But
those people didn't take responsibility for their aversion. Their
buttons got pressed, because they didn't get what they wanted. The
aversion arose, and rather than taking responsibility for that, they
indulged in their aversion. And the kammic result was that aversion in
their mind, in their stream of consciousness, was strengthened.
We can certainly understand this kind of annoyance and even feel
sympathetic. The law of kamma is, nevertheless relentless. When we
believe in anger, then anger will become stronger in our minds, no
matter how justified we feel in our anger. At some point those people
might one day be in a similar situation but will take responsibility for
their anger. But their anger will still come up. But now when they have
taken responsibility, they will be able to witness to their irritation
and as they witness to their irritation - it still feels like
irritation, but now they are seeing it objectively - 'ah, this is
irritation, this is aversion'. And rather than dumping onto the two
Indian ladies, or hating themselves for having their anger they might
say; 'this is vipakka kamma, this is resultant kamma, this is
purification'.
Purification is uncomfortable. Who wants that stuff coming into
consciousness? The skill of the contemplative is to not take it
personally, but to still take responsibility for it. By taking it
personally, I would either feel guilty for having that feeling, or I'd
dump it on those two Indian ladies. But, when we say 'don't take it
personally', we say 'ah, this has arisen in consciousness because of
causes and conditions. If I can hang in there, know it objectively, not
attach to it, allow myself to feel it in my body, not pursue the story
line, not pursue the narrative, just be very patient with it, then it
will cease. It will come up, it will last for a while, and cease.' And
that's purification. What that does in the stream of consciousness (the
tendency towards aversion, in this particular case) is to lessen the
negative habit. To weaken it. The next time the person is in the line,
the next time it happens, aversion may come up, but the tendency to
believe in that is less, it is seen more objectively, there is
responsibility for it and there is a practice to deal with it - patient
and insightful observation. There is a training to be done. So, then,
purification and training go together, don't they?
As the negativities, the negative kamma come up, there is purification,
but there is also training. And what training? Training in patience,
training in awareness, training in right thought. The mind wants to go
into the story-line - 'those fools, why don't they leave us alone - blah
blah blah'. No, that's aversion, that's wrong view, that's wrong
thought. I'll train in right thought.....patience.....the negative
energy comes up.....ahhh, just breathe, just breathe, just
breathe......patience... that's training. That's the path to the goal.
In Buddhist practice we talk about the cultivation of the wholesome and
the abandonment of the unwholesome, bringing up that which is skilful,
training in that which is skilful, and abandonment of that which is
unskilful. It is very rational, yet the feelings associated with
purification can be very emotional. For instance, the feeling of fear is
a very emotional thing. The feeling of anger is very emotional. But the
approach is very clear.
The more clearly you understand the goal of practice, the more you
understand the project itself and the less confused you get. The less
you understand the goal, the practice, and how to work with it, the more
you fall into doubt. Those areas in our hearts and minds where we do get
confused, where we do get ‘blown away’ as it were – those are the areas
where we really need to do a lot of homework. And we all have areas like
that. There will be some parts of our psyche, of our history, of our
vipaka kamma (inherited or resultant kamma), which we understand quite
easily – some aspects of aversion, or some aspects of fear which we are
quite clear with. But other aspects may truly confuse and overwhelm us –
like doubt.
I’ve met people who suffer a lot from doubt. They’re meditating and they
think ‘Should I do breath or should I do something else?’. They’re just
doubting. ‘Am I too angry or should I do some metta?’ But they’re just
doubting. They don’t see. They don’t see it as a hindrance. This is
often what happens. Or maybe someone just complains a lot. The mind just
complains. They don’t see the complaint itself as the problem. They see
it as a reality. Or another person might be seriously into self hatred.
They really get on their own case all the time. Always self-critical,
self-judging and they think this is an ultimate truth – that it really
is true at some level.
And all these are delusions of the mind, which fool the mind. So what is
the litmus test? What is the test of reality? How do you really know?
Well you just touch this moment. That’s the basic training. It’s to be
here now – very obvious, but very difficult. What does this moment feel
like? What does it really feel like before the extra commentary? Peace
is the feeling you have before the commentary. Peace is the feeling of
the way things are without the comments. This is the problem with
delusion. It’s a kind of endless commentary isn’t it? ‘Too big, too
small, shouldn’t be here, shouldn’t be there...’. And much of that
commentary is a reflection from the past projected into the future. It’s
all old tapes and rehearsals. If you can just take that simple training
of knowing the tendency to replay tapes and project all kinds of
rehearsals into the future, then you can also just know that as
delusion. That’s a huge step in consciousness. It’s a huge step in being
here now. And in training the mind this is what you do. You take simple
themes like that, and you just do things like: ‘OK, this week – present
moment awareness’. You just make that statement to yourself and it’s
marvellous how you wake up. It really is.
This is the idea of training. You want to make that transformation. You
want to move from the heart that is afflicted to the heart which is
free. You realise the value of that. But you also realise that you don’t
just do it as an act of will. It doesn’t happen overnight. It’s
something that takes place both in time and in the present moment. It’s
a kind of paradox. Because you are not trying to ‘become pure’. But in
the present moment you’re letting go, you’re letting go – and
purification takes place. The fruit falls by itself if you keep putting
in the right causes. If you understand what the causes for peace are,
then peace comes – even though your mind might be confused now.
So what are the causes now which will condition peace in the future?
That’s all you really have to know. No matter how confused the mind is,
no matter how difficult it is. Sometimes our defilements arise in
consciousness in very minor ways. You might be slightly irritated or
just in a bad mood. Sometimes the defilements come up really strong –
panic attacks or whatever it might be. The intensity, the volume of it
doesn’t really matter. The practice remains the same. And you’ll notice
that in present moment awareness without commentary, you won’t have much
of a narrative. When it is a very strong narrative, it will be about the
past or the future – and that narrative will have a strong sense of
self, a strong sense of ego.
That strong sense of ego is a strong sense of delusion.
Those are the kinds of signs that can be very deluding. So if you are
listening, if you are training in inner awareness, and you’re really
listening to your mind, you will see more and more that any form of ‘I
hate you’ or ‘I hate myself’ is delusion. It’s just a thought. And you
put it down. Any form of worry about the future is just a thought. You
put it down. You come back to the moment. Any form of resentment or
remorse, or guilt about the past. You feel it – it’s just a thought, and
you just put it down. You keep coming back to the moment, coming back to
the moment, training in inner listening, in present moment awareness.
The rest takes care of itself.
So you need faith. You need a lot of trust in this, because usually we
just want to get rid of things. But in purification you need a lot of
faith. If something comes up which is quite unpleasant or difficult –
fear or anger or greed, you need to have the faith to say ‘It’s OK as
long as I’m not pursuing thoughts about it’. There is nothing wrong with
feeling anger, there’s nothing wrong with fear, there’s nothing wrong
with guilt, as long as you know it objectively. If you don’t know it
objectively you become the subject. If you become the subject you get
caught, and tend to make the whole problem deeper. But the arising of
aversion is not a problem. The arising of fear is not a problem. The
arising of greed is just that. It’s not a real problem. The problem is
when we don’t know it as an object of mind and we don’t have the faith
to just witness to it. We either feel guilty about it or we try to get
rid of it, or we distract from it.
One of the things that I notice in people is the difficulty when it
comes to ‘stopping’. But stopping has a particular power. This is why we
meditate. It’s not just about getting tranquil. Hopefully we do get
tranquil. That’s part of the beauty of meditation. But more profoundly
than that maybe, is that in stopping you don’t have any distractions.
When you don’t have any distractions things have a chance to become
conscious. When they become conscious, and they’re negative, it’s quite
a good thing because that’s part of the act of purification.
Like these retreats that we do – longer retreats. First of all you have
no distractions, or very few distractions, and you don’t have to ‘be a
person’. You don’t have to be a personality. You don’t have to be mum or
dad or whatever role one plays in life. It’s interesting how much
freedom is given to the heart to just feel, when you don’t have that
need to be a person. Quite often what prevents us from witnessing what’s
going on in our psyche is the need to project an image – the need to
look efficient or look happy or serve other people. These are OK things,
but it can become a constant going out. And what we want to do in the
spiritual life is to allow things to become conscious and to learn to
relax – just relax with the way things are. Not just to try and control
everything and be ‘good’ in some way, to make sure the bad guys get out.
We want to learn how to relax because the spiritual life isn’t a
programme of endless control and repression and struggle and fight.
That’s not it. If the final goal involves a sense of relaxation then the
steps towards that must involve a similar sense of relaxation. And the
skill of the meditator is to learn to relax with the negativities, to
actually allow fear to become conscious and to let go. To allow anger to
become conscious and to let go. It’s a kind of open, relaxed, receptive
process.
But our habits tend to come from a need to control and get rid of. It
almost seems counter intuitive to allow yourself to feel anger. When you
have the patience to witness to it, you can see it objectively and it’s
no longer a threat. These things are no longer a threat – they are just
the way they are. And when they are no longer a threat the way they are,
you begin to find your real home. Because your real home is in that
witnessing consciousness. It’s not in that which is always moving and
changing. That which moves and changes moves and changes according to
causes and conditions. But our goal in the Buddhist practice is to find
that which doesn’t move, that which is stable, that which is still. That
which is silent. That which is free.
As long as I am busy being a person, busy distracting and so on, that
kind of busyness prevents things from manifesting, prevents that sense
of relaxation. So stopping is very very important. Stopping filling the
mind, stopping distracting. The consumer experience is always to try to
find some situation, emotion, relationship, thing, object, experience,
to fulfil you. Right? So there is this movement to either control sense
experience or control the situation. There’s an endless going out. But
the religious impulse, I think, is to no longer seek your fulfilment in
that which changes. It is to look for fulfilment in a different way.
This is very, very radical actually. That’s why our teaching emphasises
so much that if anything begins it ends – and that the spiritual insight
is that which is not bound by change. That’s where you find your peace.
Not in the movement to always judge yourself – ‘I shouldn’t have this or
I shouldn’t be like that, I should get rid of this’, and then to
distract. That kind of movement is endless. And when you look at your
life, ‘if it’s not one thing it’s another thing’, right? Family life, or
the body, or . . . You just get so tired of it don’t you? I do. So how
do you get off the wheel?
The Buddha’s teaching is saying: just watch change, stop trying to
change. Watch the movement rather than trying to change the movement.
Witness to the movement rather than always trying to rearrange the
movement. Watch the experience rather than trying to change the
experience. Witness to it. And the beauty of that is that it’s not
requiring us to have a particular kind of experience. That’s the marvel
of it. Freedom is not a particular kind of experience. It’s the knowing
of experience. So even if you feel a bit wonky or you don’t feel good,
the witnessing of that is where your freedom lies.
What we look at a lot in Buddhism is the desire to get the perfect
experience or to get rid of the ugly experience. Purification is to do
with this desire. When fear comes up into consciousness, to witness to
fear means I am going against desire because my desire wants to have no
fear. I want to have no fear. So then when I do have fear I either
create an ego so that I will look confident, or I hit the Scotch, watch
Sky TV or say something clever or cynical. Or I try to avoid the fear,
right? I run away. And that desire actually perpetuates fear, because my
attention is getting engaged with fear all the time.
But when I can just sit back and witness to something like fear – or it
could be anything – and I watch that desire not to have it, that’s the
trick of purification. As that desire to get rid of the fear decreases,
my heart realises a different kind of peace. And it is the peace that is
OK with fear. Fear comes and goes, comes and goes. This is when
renunciation starts to happen. Renunciation not as rejection, but
looking in a different way, in a different space, in a different
direction. And that is back to your heart, back to awareness, back to
the knowing, back to being, back to presence.
And that’s the mystery of consciousness isn’t it? Sense experience isn’t
very mysterious. It comes and goes, doesn’t it? But what’s mysterious is
that there is this sense of presence, this very sense of being which is
ineffable. And that is where the religious impulse is: to investigate
that. If we are always enthralled with sense experience or distracted by
sense experience, including our own emotions and thoughts, then we can
never turn back and investigate this sense of being, because we’re
looking in the wrong place.
And the more that witnessing consciousness becomes one’s home, the more
one realises how still that is. It has a kind of vibrant beauty. And
it’s always there. We don’t see it or hear it or notice it because we
are not really looking in the right place. So the spiritual life is very
refined. It is a different approach to life. That’s why I said that the
Buddha wasn’t just teaching a therapy where you kind of maximise your
emotional potential. But Buddhism does say that you might need therapy
to get your head together enough to be still, right? So a prerequisite
of going to the stillness of the mind is getting beyond our neuroses.
But it is more than just getting beyond our neuroses. Sometimes we may
need therapy or body work –we need all kinds of good tools to help
settle the mind, to make the mind calm, to go beyond our various kinds
of problems. But then it has to be deeper than that. It’s not just about
feeling good in some kind of therapeutic way, but feeling good is a
basis of it. The Buddha would say that happiness is a kind of
prerequisite to liberation. This is nice. You won’t do it through
depression.
So the things that we do, the moral life that we live, the generous
impulses that we try to develop, the cultivation of compassion – these
bring a lot of joy and happiness to one’s heart. And that happiness is a
basis for going deeply into the stillness of the mind. As we say: it is
good in the beginning, good in the middle, and good in the end. All
right. I’ll leave that for tonight.
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