Experience is Everywhere

Talk 1

In this introductory talk I want to try to convey the overall scope of what we call the imagination. I want to convey a way of seeing what our mind is and how it operates. We all know that it is not considered enough in Buddhism simply to meditate in the sense of developing skilful states of mind, in the sense of shamatha. It is not enough just to cultivate concentration of mind, dhyana, etc. In the end, that kind of meditation will not satisfy us, as Buddhists. It will not bring us peace, and it will not bring us any deep satisfaction – because it doesn’t change us. In the end, it’s a bit depressing if we have to admit that we are not being transformed by our contact with the Dharma. In fact, that kind of meditation, as we know, is not Buddhist meditation – it is what many theistic traditions also teach, in one way or another. The distinctively Buddhist meditation, as you know, is vipasyana, and it is this that offers to make a permanent transformation.

We have all practised some vipasyana meditation. In a way we know all about it. But do you feel you are really developing it in your practice? If you are, in what way are you taking it further? To answer these questions, we need to have some ongoing experience of the vipashyana aspect of our practice.

Some Tibetan Buddhist traditions speak of View, Meditation and Activity as the main overview of spiritual practice, and you start with the View. It’s the same as Vision and Transformation – the basic principle of the Eightfold Path. You start with the View: to the extent that you have right View, you can Transform yourself through the other seven aspects of the Eightfold Path – the various aspects of ethics, meditation and wisdom. We go astray when we forget the View – we forget what it is we are trying to do.

So this is a very important principle for meditation. Our meditation needs to be informed by right view. We need to have some kind of vision of what we are trying to do. When we have that, we feel confident, we have faith, and we make progress. I think this is especially the case in deeper meditation, in pursuing insight or vipasyana meditation or whatever we are going to call it. So this talk, and to some extent this whole event, is an exploration of the View of meditation, especially for Order members, that is for more experienced, committed Buddhists.

Today I’m exploring it from a particular point of view, the point of view of the nature of the mind. I feel that if we have a clearer view of the nature of what we are working with, what our mind is and especially what its potential is, then this will actually help us get a clearer experience. This will give us much more confidence in what we do when we sit in meditation. So, as I said before, in this introductory talk I want to try to convey the scope of the mind, or what we can also call the imagination.

Being alive necessarily involves this mind – being itself necessarily involves this mind – just being a human being necessarily involves this mind. We are having some kind of experience all the time. This – what is happening now – is an experience. Whatever enlightenment there is to unfold in us, will unfold from this – from this reality that is the mind. The fascinating thing is that we don’t understand it, and so we don’t really experience it as it is. That’s our work, to understand what we are and to live from that greater understanding. But it starts here, with our experience.

A good way to map the scope of our experience is to use the Tibetan teaching of the six bardos, and notice the way our imagination works – especially in the very familiar ones, that is in waking life and in dreams. The bardo teaching is very good because it is a framework covering the whole activity of the mind. It’s not just the conscious mind, its not just the waking state, it’s also when we enter super-conscious states, dhyana states. It’s also when we dream, and it’s also when we die. It’s also after we die.

As we know, the word bardo as used in the Tibetan Bardo Thödöl teaching means any kind of gap or space between things. Essentially it’s a reminder of the impermanence and the emptiness of space and time. All our states of mind seem to take place as it were sandwiched between two other states. The slice below is the past, and the slice on top is the future. This present state is temporary and will be replaced by something else. The present waking state that we’re in now has just replaced a previous, different, waking state. And it itself will soon be replaced by another.

So the waking state, like everything, is characterised by this kind of change. But it is also characterised by consciousness. To be awake is to be aware; to be a subject aware of an endless stream of objects. Waking is characterised by the six sense consciousnesses of seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching, and cognising. Indeed the other bardos too have pretty much these same characteristics. In dreams we see and hear, we experience touches and we recognise memories and other mental phenomena. In dhyana, too, and also in the after death state, it is said, one experiences of sights, sounds and other sensations.

At the time, these sensations are very real. In fact, it is rather difficult to pin down what is unique to the waking state. The sense experience in this waking world feels no more or less real than what is experienced in dreams, dhyana, and after death. Of course, the waking state is the one we most associate ourselves with, and where, it seems, our real life takes place. Certainly, this is where we have the most power to intervene, to exercise our will, to be responsible, to respond rather than react.

I feel that this idea of consciousness, or awareness, or wakefulness, operating continuously throughout waking, dhyana, dreaming and dying, without a break, is a very useful one. We tend to think that when we get sleepy in meditation, and start dipping ‘down’ into the world of dreams and images – we tend to think that we lose consciousness. But it isn’t really like that. The ego loses consciousness. The part of the mind we associate with as ‘me’ loses its consciousness. But actually consciousness simply continues, without a break, into the dream state. It’s just that different objects present themselves to consciousness. The mind is continually seeking out objects – this object-seeking activity is omnipresent. It never stops, life after life. It is endless. It goes on without ‘us’ having to do anything about it! – as we see when we try to meditate, or to become mindful in any way of the activity of the mind.

It’s a very useful practice to cultivate this awareness of the constant play of mental objects. For example, try observing yourself looking at things. If you really do that, you start to notice how much your thoughts and assumptions get in the way of actually seeing. This adds up to more than the simple fact that we can be walking along thinking about something and just bump into the proverbial lamp post, or fall into the proverbial ditch. It’s that we actually experience our senses much less than we think. So it’s a good practice to be aware, as another example, of sounds – sounds as they actually are; and of smells, tastes, and touches just as they are. An itch; a pleasant sensation; a painful one; one that seems neutral… The point is that they are going on all the time, and often we don’t notice. Nor do we notice thoughts and perceptions much – so again it’s good to notice thoughts as they are, and also memories. Watch the mind as it plays with its memory impressions. These memory impressions also consist of sights and of sounds. Memories, too, are of sense experiences.

In fact, in much of our mental activity, in much of our thinking and reflecting and planning, we are actually using sense memories. If I am thinking about something, for example thinking about what I am saying to you, I am simultaneously imagining it by using my former experience. And what I am saying will make sense to you largely to the extent that you can fit it in with former experiences, experiences stored in your memory. If I think about what I’ll be doing this afternoon, I use sense memories. If I think about how I feel about someone else, I use sense memories – even if I’ve never met them in the flesh. When I think about them I use images generated by subtle, imagined, senses.

The senses thus have an inner, remembered, aspect. In fact the ordinary outer senses are not really different. When you see me and I see you, it is not our physical eyes which actually do the seeing. The organ of the eye is just a receptor. Sense perception isn’t really as direct as it appears to be. Each perception is processed by the brain, and interpreted by the mind. In the end, all sensing takes place in the mind.

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So this perspective, this view of the mind, the viewpoint that sees that everything is an experience, is a very useful one for meditation practice, especially when we are trying to develop our vipashyana.

In all the worlds we inhabit, whether we are awake or asleep, or meditating, whether we are alive or in the after death state, the same things happens: the mind creates a world. A subject perceives objects. What is this world and where do its forms come from? Why do we perceive the particular forms that we do? Because in the forms we personally experience, and in the worlds we personally inhabit, we are to varying degrees different from one another. The way I perceive such and such a person is different to the way you experience them. What I like for breakfast, what I find pleasant, you may not find pleasant. What you find beautiful may repel me. We share a world, but actually it is a slightly different world for each of us. Why? What is this world? Where do its forms come from? Why do we perceive the particular forms that we do?

Well, we can take it back to pratityasamutpada and say, in dependence upon samskara arises vijnana. And samskara arises in dependence upon avidya. Our manner of consciousness is determined by the form of our unenlightened emotional complexes, by our samskaras, and these are determined by our particular flavour of un-enlightenment, by our avidya.

Or we can take the Yogacara model, and say that the forms which populate our personal world all come from the contents of the Alayavijnana. That is, the Store Consciousness of past sense impressions and deeds, the storehouse containing all the activities of the mind, going back forever into beginningless time. It won’t be obvious exactly how our moment-to-moment experiences can be a reflection of what we have built up in the Alaya. However, if we consider that idea and apply it, and even look into it as it happens, we can begin to see how it is the case. We can begin to see more clearly how our visible world is a reflection, as in a mirror, of our deeds. We need to understand this idea sensibly, for not everything we experience is the direct result of our karma. Yet it’s clear enough that we have been subject to influences from our deeds. We have certainly done particular things, and from these have arisen particular dispositions, and from this a world that consists of particular experiences.

This is of the essence of the Buddhist view of reality, and I think that view is essential for our meditation as committed practitioners. Awareness of the need to change our karmic tendencies is, properly, the reason why we meditate. It needs to be the foundation for our meditation.

This also relates very clearly to visualisation meditation. I know not all Order members do visualisation practice these days. In some cases that may be for good reason – perhaps they have found another way into vipasyana that works better for them. But it can be because they have a problem with visualisation itself. They will say, ‘I just can’t do it. I simply can’t visualise. I’m just not a visual person.’ …etc. I understand why they say this, but I think that essentially this way of thinking springs from a kind of false view. Because our life is an experience. Our life is a visualisation. If we can watch all this happening, if we can see that we ourselves actually create the world we inhabit, well what does this world consist of? It consists of experiences. It consists of images. We can see this. And if we can see how our world consists of experiences and of images, then how can we say that we do not visualise? Because we visualise all of this.

Visualisation is inherent in the most ordinary aspects of our life. We visualise what we might have for dinner, and what it might be like to meet someone. We imagine Bhante, we imagine one another. In the Metta Bhavana, we imagine one another. And actually even when we meet one another face to face, effectively, we still imagine one another. It still takes an effort of imagination to see, to any extent at all, who someone else is.

It seems to me that it is not meaningful to say that one doesn’t, or cannot, visualise. It’s reasonable to say that it’s difficult to imagine something particular, say, in meditation. But there’s no-one who doesn’t visualise. Our lives are a visualisation.

What we do when we visualise is to take the activity of consciousness, which is going on all the time, endlessly, and link it in to our spiritual life. This is what all the visualisation practices and techniques are trying to help us to do. Linking the ever-moving imagination into what we really find important, reflecting on that, dwelling on that.

So what about applying this to the visualisation practices that many of us struggle to relate to? I can understand someone having a problem visualising a Buddha or Bodhisattva figure. It’s easy to visualise an ordinary person, or ourselves – we do that continuously, all the time. But it’s much more difficult with the Buddha, because we don’t actually understand what a Buddha is. Buddha lies outside our normal experience. That is why in our sadhanas, we first create a sensory world around the Buddha. We concentrate on that; we paint a picture. Then, maybe, if we have the confidence in our own potential Buddha nature, then the real Buddha, the actual Enlightened consciousness, can come and inhabit that world we’ve created.

Maybe, once we’ve established the sensuous world of the visualisation, our imaginations can start to stretch towards that Buddha nature. But we ourselves cannot stretch it very far. We can only do our bit and imagine the sensuous world we create. In fact, at the moment, it is very important not to think that we can create the real Buddha by the sheer power of imagination. We can’t imagine a Buddha. Indeed, only a Buddha can visualise a Buddha. We can only pray, have faith, be receptive. That’s our side of the samaya or the pledge we make to the Bodhisattva in taking up their practice. The Bodhisattva themselves have the other side of the samaya. They undertake to give you their qualities in response to your practice, in response to your faith. That is their essential nature, their Buddha nature.

So there’s a bit of an overview of a way to develop a constructive view for meditation as Order members.