Sangharakshita’s Advice to a Young Poet offers a fivefold path of development in observation, sensitiveness, sympathy, solitude, and reflection. Though written for aspiring poets, it is a useful guide for anyone who cultivates reflection as part of their spiritual practice.
The first stage, observation, recommends us clearly to notice everything and everybody around us. In order to reflect on life we need to intensify our awareness of its detail and even, like a true poet, be prepared to spend hours in observation of, say, a flower.
Detailed attention to external things is just the start of a reflective life, for one must also look into oneself. The second stage of sensitiveness is, in particular, the acknowledgment of emotions. To develop and refine our whole consciousness of feeling and emotion, we need to cultivate a non-reactive attitude towards pleasure and pain.[1]
Thirdly, by developing sympathy, we extend the range of our sensitiveness to include others. By consciously sharing the existence of other beings, we go ‘out,’ beyond ourselves, in a self-transcendence that is enhanced by the cultivation of the Brahmaviharas, especially of karuna and mudita.
The stages of observation, sensitiveness and sympathy can be seen as a strengthening of our basic humanity. Their establishment enables a new kind of potentiality: solitude, the fourth stage, described by Sangharakshita as ‘the crucible.’ This need not entail physical isolation, though some degree of literal solitude no doubt helps nurture the independent self-awareness which now arises, with a growing capacity to assay what seems true or otherwise.
It is out of this capacity that the fifth quality of reflection emerges. If solitude is the crucible, reflection is a fire that we ply upon it, a fire that gradually melts the ore and reveals the gold of insight; or else it refines the poem, the jewel of literature.
In this essay Sangharakshita says nothing concrete about the nature of reflection, which he describes simply as a mysterious process. Perhaps that is enough for practical purposes. Yet it may also be helpful to explore the topic from different angles and form a general picture of what it is we are trying to do.
The word ‘reflection’ suggests a reflexive self-awareness, as though for a moment we are struck at our appearance reflected in a glass. Reflection itself seems to take place in a space that opens up in moments of self-awareness. For many of us, such moments are comparatively rare. Rather than experiencing a choice as to what to think, we feel practically compelled to rehearse, over and over again, whatever happens to be ‘on our mind’. And the sheer volume and range of proliferation of this can be extraordinary. Buddhism explains that the content of our thought is powerfully conditioned by the imprints of past deeds and associations. The repetitive nature of these proliferating thoughts (prapanca) shows how deeply ingrained the patterns are.
We embark on the path of reflection when – probably through meditation – we begin to notice all this happening. Acquiring an ability to reflect is thus to some extent a matter of recognising something that already operates, albeit in the realm of distraction. We need to take hold of this lively proliferation and somehow connect it up with the Dharma, transferring our emotional involvement with relatively unwise reflections to wiser, more constructive ones. Becoming aware of our thoughts is very much aided if we can open up to our sometimes hidden feelings and emotions, since our thoughts are highly motivated and coloured by these.
It will also help if we understand its nature better. We may distinguish associative and a directed aspects of our thinking. Associative thinking is the usual way our thinking goes. Our attention moves from topic to topic by association, rather like a conversation that doesn’t stick to any particular point, but rambles from this, to that, to the other, its movements sparked by associations that have already been established, somehow, in our mind. This process of rambling from one universe of association to another is generally unconscious, though consciousness can be brought to bear upon it. Despite its subconscious and non-rational nature, this kind of thinking often seems to contain a certain directionality, a certain ‘method’ within its ‘madness.’ The conclusion of a whole train of pondering, something that has been occupying us in the small hours for weeks, is likely simply to pop up out of ‘nowhere’ – out of a long period spent underground in the obscure world of our associative ramblings. Countless great realisations and scientific breakthroughs have come about in this way. Directed thinking is the conscious, deliberate aspect of thought. One is thinking about something particular, trying to follow it through to a conclusion or ascertain its implications, ramifications, etc., and on the whole one is aware that one is doing this.
Our mental life is a play between these two kinds of thought. In our moments of self-awareness we construct, as it were, deliberate thought-forms which spark their own chains of association. Like ripples on a pond that encounter other sets of ripples, all set off by their own conditions beneath the surface, these bring to life a complex network of live ideas and images. Some of these strike us consciously, we pursue them, and as we do so, we set further associative ripples and counter-ripples into motion.
This is also how we reflect. Reflection is not different from thought, if we conceive of it in this way, as ‘rich thought.’ It is just that we give it a special significance. We direct the process in a particular way¸ and feel we are somehow pursuing depth and insight.
Thought, when we look into it, is inherently rich. It is enriched by its variety of degrees and kinds of awareness. Just to give one kind of example, one is never simply conscious or simply unconscious; one finds oneself as being relatively one or the other. Moments of full, intense consciousness are exceedingly rare in most people’s experience; thus it is only occasionally that the directed, deliberate aspect of our thinking is purely so. The process we are calling associative thinking takes place at many levels, from that of relatively conscious ratiocination to the completely unconsciousness of dreaming. We may experience some of this range for ourselves. A friend described to me recently how, during a sleepy meditation, he first noticed his awareness dipping down into the dream state, and his thought process straightaway switching into the story-telling mode that seems to continue uninterruptedly in that realm, whether ‘we’ are watching or not. After a while, however, his awareness arose out of that state (he felt a clear sense of ‘going up’), back into the realm of ordinary distracted thought, and he realised – for he was able, in yet another portion of his mind, to observe all this happening – that this relatively conscious realm was just as driven by unconscious promptings as the dream realm had been. ‘He’ wasn’t controlling any of the impulsions towards this or that object, any more than he had been able to do in the dream state.
So in reflection on the Dharma, one may choose a topic of reflection – let us say we choose the nature of the whole samsaric process as expressed in the ‘Wheel of Life.’ This, being a symbol already familiar to us, will immediately arouse associations. By allowing these associations to arise we get a kind of recall, in a general way, of our present understanding of the samsara. But then we may interrupt that associative thought process, and deliberately turn our attention to certain aspects of the Wheel, for example to the animal realm, or to a certain sequence in the nidana chain. We then dwell on this non-discursively, in other words we allow the associative thoughts to start arising again. As we do this, a kind of space opens up within which can unfold further insight into the issue.
We could also express it like this: within reflection there is a continual process of opening up to the issue, and a continual process of clarification, and re-clarification, of what the issue is. We need to direct our attention again and again to the essentials of issue as its significance unfolds more and more: this is the function of directed thought. We also need to be prepared to ‘sit with’ the issue so that that unfolding takes place. The unfolding is the function of associative thought; the ‘sitting with’ is where shamatha comes in. We need to be able to rest in the space towards which we have directed our attention. This is a living space, where thoughts and images are continually at play; we need to be able to allow these to arise, whilst remaining undistracted from our purpose in placing our attention amongst them.
Concentration is an essential support for this. Concentration may be built up to some extent through simple familiarity with shamatha meditation, but full, sustained concentration is inseparable from ones passion (chanda) for the spiritual quest. If we are to be successful, our desire for realisation needs to be borne in mind all the time, outside formal meditation practice as well. During formal practice, that quality will greatly influence our behaviour in the shrine room. For example, an absolute minimum of physical movement, and complete consideration of other practitioners in avoiding disturbances, will be the result of our concern for the task and refusal to be diverted away from it. We will be uncomfortably aware of how easily – in ritual chanting, listening to teaching, or meditation – we are diverted by secondary concerns, such as a desire to fidget or adjust ones seat. Sometimes such concerns do, of course, need to be addressed; however, if truly motivated by the spiritual quest, one will start from a position of non-reactive awareness of that concern arising in the mind, and will therefore be clear about the undesirability of breaking the connection with the practice, even for a moment.
Reflection is a process in spiritual life that begins with the initial arising of faith in the three Jewels, and continues deepening throughout the three levels of wisdom. The level of srutamayiprajna is a preparation for reflection proper, the gathering together of material for reflection. This accumulation will tend to be very general, and relatively indiscriminate, since we need to understand the basic principles of Dharma, and cannot be sure which aspects of the Dharma are most relevant to us.
Cintamayiprajna is the acquisition of understanding based on thinking, and can be started as once any quantity of material has been amassed. It is the process by which we digest a personal understanding out of the ideas we have ingested. A truly independent understanding develops over a long period –indeed, throughout our whole lives, since we constantly need to assimilate new ideas into the changing body of our understanding. It is not certainly confined to pure thinking, but includes reflection stimulated by such means as study, discussion, debate, and even public speaking and teaching. Disagreements and misunderstandings too, if pondered, will contribute towards our deepening comprehension.
One great advantage of such reflection is that we nourish the mind with these particular ideas rather than others. Occupying our attention with Dharma topics lessens its dissipation through the hundred thousand alternative avenues available. It is natural for our minds to want stimulation, but if we give ourselves something particular we can be more or less satisfied with that, and less inclined to cast around for more. We are often like children in this respect – unless we give ourselves regular nourishing meals, we will probably stuff ourselves with sweets and junk food. Another advantage is that if we reflect often on Dharma, we will tend to view our experience in terms of it. This will not only enhance our understanding, but will make it likely that we will put the Dharma into practice, and gain realisation as a result. Overall, the pursuit of reflection can become intensely and deeply satisfying.
As we continue to learn and think about different aspects of Dharma, our thoughts invest certain topics with special potency. For example, as we repeatedly encounter the Wheel of Life, the whole teaching may, as it were, come to life, so that to call to mind a single nidana may at once arouse a deeply stirring set of associations. Thus these Dharma topics become like seeds capable of sprouting into vivid life. Such Dharma seeds can assume special forms, such as mantras, myths and symbols associated with Dharma principles. The most usual type of Dharma seed is a particular topic, perhaps the lakshana of impermanence, the Buddha himself, or ‘the vicious state of samsara’. There is no end to such topics; Buddhism itself is essentially a vast collection of them. Mantras, such as om mani padme hum, become in their own symbolic way another kind of ‘topic’, a Dharma seed which increasingly evokes particular Dharma associations that accumulate over months and years of repetition. For example, the mantra of Avalokitesvara will at first be no more than a meaningless phrase, but as it becomes familiar we will gradually start to associate with it a somewhat vague idea of compassion. In time, however, after long reflection and practice, it will come to symbolise very richly the many facets of principle and activity involved with Avalokitesvara’s example of great compassion. A third type of Dharma seed is the formal visualisation of a yidam, i.e. a Buddha/Bodhisattva figure taken as a subject of meditation. The different aspects of the figure, such as the facial expression, hand gesture, colour, and implements, become charged with rich meanings which reveal themselves further as the image is reflected upon.
The acquisition of these Dharma seeds, though part of the process of cintamayiprajna, enables us to make a start on developing prajna in the full sense, at a level, that is, of bhavanamayiprajna (often simply vipasyana or ‘seeing’). This is essentially a nonconceptual form of reflection, though subtle conceptual thinking may contribute both to the content and overall direction of the reflection. This is the method outlined above, i.e. of ‘sitting with’ a Dharma topic in a concentrated state of mind, resting receptively in the space formed by our directed attention on the topic.
‘During the time of meditation,’ says Padmasambhava, ‘there is not anything: it is simply open.’ A useful approach to prajna bhavana is to cultivate an ability to be open to the awareness of reality that is obscured by our klesa and jñeya (habitual negative emotions and intellectual assumptions), yet may be revealed through reflection. According to some schools of Buddhism, openness is a quality intrinsic to all experience. The Tibetan Nyingmapa teach that it is one of three primordial qualities – qualities that are, in other words, present beyond the concept of time, irrespective of any particular mental state or content, realisation, or lack of it. These qualities thus pervade both enlightened and unenlightened minds – and provide the essential connection between the two, since though an enlightened being has realised the nature of mind, and others have not, still the minds of all beings have the same basic nature.
The qualities are space (openness), awareness (clarity), and responsiveness (sensitivity). These may perhaps appear at first to be somewhat abstract, but once identified, space, awareness and responsiveness can be seen to constitute our entire experience. Space or Openness is essentially sunyata, the ‘open dimension of reality’ as it has been called. It is the greatest degree of generality possible. Since everything is of the nature of sunyata, then openness is the manner of being of everything, which Thus the scope of openness is exceedingly vast – indeed, mind-bogglingly so. To recollect the actuality of this boundless space, and rest in it, is on the one hand a practice that can still and settle the mind, and, on the other, a way to approach the ultimate nature of things. The practice can thus be both/either shamatha, and/or vipasyana, in scope.
One may meditate on this open dimension of things with openness, that is by simply sitting relaxed with eyes open, with no intention of achieving any special state of mind. One tries to be completely natural and genuine, but this is not as easy a task as one might assume. Any distraction distorts the purity and truth of experience. To avoid falling into distraction, one must actively face and allow room for every experience. Every thought, feeling, experience, or sense-perception, however strange, incomprehensible, pleasant or painful, is to be allowed its space, and is not to be avoided.
Going further, one may explore the quality of openness inherent in all experience: the space within which all experience appears. We experience the ideas we are reading about here, for example, as ‘taking place’ ‘in’ our mind. It is natural for us to use such spatial expressions, as though our thoughts were located or being displayed somewhere specific. However, if we try to locate this display, we discover that it cannot actually be found, even though we continue to experience everything, including our very failure to find the mind, as though it were located somehow. We may also notice that the experience of ‘me’ takes place in, and in some ways is identified by us as, this imaginal space. In exploring the quality of this space, we may enquire whether or not it has any boundary or limit. Allowing the mind to relax and expand to that extent, we again rest in it, and experience it as we actually find it, becoming aware of the inevitable expectations and tendencies to manipulate and label experience. In this way, we allow the sense of infinite, boundless space to pervade both the subject, who is open, and the object, which is the open quality of the mind itself.
Openness is an effective approach to reflection in various forms of prajna-bhavana meditation, since just by being open we can stay engaged with very subtle experience. It may be seen as a form of concentration. One may be open, for example, to the impermanence, insubstantiality or unsatisfactoriness of things, to Mañjughosa’s wisdom, Padmasambhava’s compassion, or simply to the unfolding reality of things. Directing one’s subtle reflective attention towards any such Dharma seed, one is just open to reality, and to being changed by it.
Each of the three primordial qualities is associated with one of the gateways of liberation, that is the Signless, Wishless, and Openness samadhis – the quality of openness being naturally aligned with the latter. Exploring these in turn will help us recognise the qualities in our own experience, enabling us to tune into and use them in our development of prajna.
the openness samadhi
Sunyata literally means ‘emptiness,’ a metaphor indicating the open, expansive quality of reality, and to be taken poetically rather than literally (one could just as fittingly use the term ‘fullness.’) ‘Openness’ is perhaps better as a metaphorical term – but in the end, reality is beyond any description we can try. Texts like the Heart Sutra use paradox to get around the problem, saying, outrageously, that there is no eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, mind, or indeed anything, in existence – an attempt to force us to notice the inadequacy of these concepts as compared to actual experience. Life, to which we are apparently so accustomed, is immeasurably more mysterious – we have to face the fact that we do not understand at all what is going on. When we really look, standard concepts like ‘me’, ‘you’, and ‘it’ do not fit actual experience. ‘Really looking’ is the practice of openness to the actual quality of one’s experience that leads to realisation of the sunyata samadhi. In meditation, one must be open to what is actually there, noticing when one is anticipating what is happening, rather than experiencing it. It is common for a meditator supposedly to be focusing on the experience of breathing, while actually being involved merely in the idea of it. The practice of openness is to notice our tendency to conceptuality and to relax it in order to uncover the reality underneath.
the signless samadhi
Openness, however, is inseparable from a second quality, that of clarity. Within the openness is the capacity to notice differences
This is the samadhi[2] of a-nimitta, that is, beyond nimitta or characteristic.
The signless samadhi is one of three gateways to liberation or vimoksha-mukhas, and it is approached through reflection on impermanence, the fact of universal change. We can find nothing which does not change. Reflection on this is the meditation method.
Impermanence is quite easy to understand intellectually. To some, it may seem an almost trite and obvious fact. Again, it may seem a somewhat abstract idea, something quaintly disconnected from real life. However, we would realise its very immediate relevance to our ‘real life’ were we to notice the extraordinary persistence of our expectation that things will not be impermanent.
We often find change upsetting, especially when we lose what we love. But we should have known all along, that nothing stays the same, even for a moment. Of course, not all change is upsetting. Change is often a source of great pleasure. We enjoy novelty, we enjoy new events, new beginnings, spring and opportunities. Thus impermanence, in itself, is neither good nor bad. It is simply the nature of things. Yet we spend almost all our time in assumptions and expectations of permanence. These assumptions are often very hard for us to spot.
Insight is just like human maturity, taken a few steps further. A child might be inconsolably unhappy when his ice-cream melts or his sand-castle is destroyed. Things like that do not bother an adult in the slightest, because he already understands very well that such things are impermanent, so we have little emotional investment in their being somehow permanent. Yet a residue of such infantilism may still arise from time to time in most of us – we can still get surprisingly upset by little things. On the whole, though, we are liberated, temporarily at least, from those states of mind – simply through our adult experience. It is this liberation, or maturity, that Buddhist practice helps us take much deeper. Eventually it can become a permanent, enlightened, liberation.
To achieve this, we meditate on change. We observe change in every moment. We observe our changing moods, thoughts, and physical movements. The insight arises from doing this all the time, and really experiencing the changes.
But it is not easy to keep up the practice for a long time. We lose interest. The practice starts to appear dry, or abstract, or disconnected from ‘real life’. So we have to prepare the mind afresh, to make it more concentrated and receptive. We do this using shamatha practices like the mindfulness of breathing meditation. Yet even in the mindfulness of breathing, you can see the impermanence too; you can see how the mind changes all the time. So as we work in shamatha, to make the mind more stable, energised and relaxed, we can also notice ‘its’ impermanence, ‘its’ constant dynamic changeability.
[1] See Advice to a Young Poet: the ‘asceticism of art’, i.e. the renunciation of grosser forms of aesthetic enjoyment for higher. ‘Feelings are like fountains’ [p.131]: if one consciously suppresses one’s normal reaction, then emotion will find a higher expression and leap 100ft. in the air’. A ‘capacity for experiencing unknown modes of being’.
[2] The word samadhi can be used in two senses. First, it can simply mean unification of mind, that is, what we call shamatha. Second, it can be used to mean the union of that shamatha with vipashyana in a direct vision of reality, in which case the shamatha is perfected and the vipashyana has arisen within that state.