The path of insight opened up to me spontaneously and rather dramatically, thanks to reading the Diamond Sutra at Vajraloka a few weeks after I first encountered the Dharma. This meant that I never really went through a phase of practice uninformed by insight, and I don't have any first hand experience of what may be more or less effective in bringing about that initial opening, or "first insight".
However, the challenge I faced was - what, if anything, should I be doing with this insight?
The conventional wisdom at the time was roughly this: "if it really was insight, then it will mysteriously take effect without any conscious effort; if it was not insight, then it is now just a memory, and paying any attention to it will lead to disastrous ego inflation. Therefore, best forget that it ever happened… never, ever think about it again!"
I did not find this advice convincing. Intuitively, I was convinced I had to discover ways of "working with insight". Just doing the usual samatha practices wasn't enough… my psyche was a jungle of turmoil and suffering, and I knew, both theoretically and instinctually, that insight was the key to bringing about permanent healing. However, it was not very obvious what to do about it.
The only direct instruction I received in insight practice, much later, was the Six Elements Practice, which I was introduced to during my ordination course at Guhyaloka. By that time I had started to discover for myself a number of ways of working that were quite effective. I was hopeful that my introduction to formal insight practice, in the form of the Six Elements Practice, would take my practice up a notch.
However, it did not really click for me, at least as taught. For one thing, the division into elements did not feel very natural or intuitive. It was a framework I had to learn and adopt specifically for the practice, I would never categorise experience in this way normally. It was also very conceptual and reflective. Rather than taking me deeper into my actual current experience, I was distracted by the formulaic contemplations, and at worst, I was just going through a scripted imagination exercise.
Although I did eventually find a way to approach the practice that was more effective, it seemed a bit contrived and pointless, since I was just taking approaches I had discovered independently and shoehorning them into the Six Elements framework. So I didn't keep up the Six Elements practice after Guhyaloka.
On the other hand, I was gradually cobbling together some ways of "working with insight" for myself, building on what had worked over the years. Let me trace out one of these strands of development… to give it a name, I might call it "going upstream".
First a quick aside… I consider practices like these to be insight practices, even though they are not obviously similar to the usual well known vipassana techniques.
Many well known insight techniques are geared towards either "first insight", or towards deeper insight into specific aspects of experience, whereas the approaches I describe here are more about working to apply already-established insight to untransformed habits, i.e. "working with insight". This is a theme I have sometimes explored in terms of "path and fruit", eg here: http://bit.ly/3Ckn2uF
In some ways it is more psychological than metaphysical… looking into the normal everyday mental states that pester us - hangups, neurotic habits, trauma responses and so on.
Nevertheless, I consider practices like "going upstream" to be insight techniques for a few reasons. For one thing, unlike samatha practices, they result in relatively rapid and permanent changes, rather than just temporary mental states. They also seem to require insight, because you have to be able to treat experience as quite impersonal "stuff" going on. This is very difficult while still fettered by a naive self view, which makes the urge to identify with some experience and reject other experience overwhelming. You can also consider that they are actively "wielding" insight - by addressing areas of the psyche that are still ignorant, it is effectively as if the more awakened parts of the mind are "teaching" the less awake.
I first started experimenting with something like "going upstream" very early on, while I was still just becoming familiar with the conventional mindfulness of breathing practice. I was following the usual advice for dealing with distractions… When I "came to" from a distraction, and realised that I had lost awareness of the breath, I would return my focus to the breath and carry on.
This worked OK up to a point, and sometimes I could become quite concentrated.
However, it felt slightly dis-integrating too. I was young and very unintegrated at the time, so this was a bit of a theme. Sometimes there would be some persistent power behind the distraction, and I would find myself fruitlessly toggling back and forth between breath and distraction every minute or so in a way that was really quite uncomfortable.
At some point, a little bit desperate for some way out of this kind of Groundhog Day pattern, I wondered - what is happening at the point when I lose interest in the breath and shift attention elsewhere?
Of course, I knew I couldn't catch myself doing it, because if I was mindful enough to catch myself drifting off, then I wouldn't drift off. But perhaps I could remember, after the event?
So the next time I "came to", realising that I had been off daydreaming, instead of dragging my attention back to the breath, I took my attention to what, exactly, my last distracted thought had been.
This, alone, was actually quite powerful. Often it was something that I was not entirely comfortable with, something I didn't feel I fully "owned", and it was like a direct line of sight into the shadowy parts of my psyche.
Having identified the last thought, I just tried to remember the thought directly before that. This is not as hard as it might sound - in the "forward" direction, each thought triggers the next by association, and going "backwards" again, it is not normally too hard to recall the association.
It was like pulling a chain out of the water, one link at a time, until eventually arriving back at the breath, the point of departure. From which point, I could carry on with the "normal" mindfulness of breathing practice.
This way of dealing with wandering thoughts was extremely integrating. There is an enormous difference between arriving back at the breath by going back upstream, rather than by forgetting everything and just starting again. I felt completely whole, as if I had gathered my psyche all together rather than leaving bits of it scattered around the place, and dhyana proper would often follow.
This was a very welcome short term effect, but what felt more significant was that going upstream like this also had some permanent effects. While distracted, the downstream flow of associative thought to associative thought had been completely compelling, irresistible. Now, when similar thought-urges arose, they often arose naked, in full view, and if I just noted them, they disappeared without trace, my mindfulness unbroken. "I See You, Mara!". What had been unintegrated, was now integrated.
We tend to consider "integration" to be a preliminary step on the path, the first step in our fivefold system of practice. However, as I see it, the principle of integration runs very deep, extending well into the path of insight. From one point of view, the kleshas arise out of the mind split against itself, failing to understand the constructed nature of the subject / object divide, and so constantly creating internal division and tension. Insight into this is profoundly integrating. While daydreaming, as the mind flows "downstream", it keeps branching away from itself, always dis-integrating. Going back upstream, rediscovering what came before each split, may not be as profound, at least at first, but having learned the knack, I found that essentially the same process can be applied more and more deeply.
I didn't rely on this specific technique for a very long time, it was a passing phase, though now and again I would remember and apply it when it seemed particularly relevant. What was more important, though, was the general principle it embodied. I found the general idea of going backwards, against the normal flow of the mind, intriguing and full of promise. Although at first I couldn't find much traditional Dharma to support this way of thinking, it seemed significant that one of the earliest terms that the Buddha used for stream entry was to say that someone had "gone upstream", which gave me some confidence that I might be onto something.
Some years later, I was wondering: why was it, exactly, that a meditation session would sometimes develop into a profoundly creative engagement with direct experience, while other times it would be dry, fragmented, distracted and fruitless? What was the difference that was making the difference?
Theoretically, I wondered, wasn't this like asking, how did the "wheel" become the "spiral"? If so, then the answer should be found by looking at the Nidanas around that transition.
The key had to be found in the relationship between the end of the negative nidanas (dissolution and death) and the beginning of the positive nidanas (dukkha, faith etc). It seemed to come down to how I responded to suffering, dissolution and breakdown. Ignore it, push it away, turn towards distraction, and the wheel would continue. Recognise it for what it was, turn awareness towards it, face it with courage and faith, and the "spiral path" would open up - at least, that was the theory.
So, sitting down to meditate, I asked myself where, in immediate experience, was there any dukkha? Having asked the question, the answer was normally immediately apparent, often bringing to light some unresolved emotional issue or ongoing psychological pain.
This is immediately a very pointed situation.
If I was sitting down primarily with the intention to get away from the dukkha of my daily life into some "nicer" (or "more positive") mental states, then the idea of deliberately attending to the painful aspects of my current experience would seem counterproductive at best, utterly insane at worst - "anti meditation" or "misery bhavana".
However, what also became very clear quite soon was that, so long as I was not attending to my immediate dukkha, trying to attend to anything else was completely and utterly futile. Wholeness was impossible when the first thing I had done was to separate out the unacceptable aspects of my experience from the aspects I wanted to cultivate. Like an ignored child, the pain would constantly seek attention and make mischief, throwing up thoughts and distractions, and making the whole meditation session little more than a see-saw struggle between where I wanted to be and where I actually was.
So the idea of embracing whatever dukkha was going on did seem to make sense. It was immediately integrating, because of course during day to day life I would generally be pushing away unpleasant feelings, and so turning around and embracing what was going on was like finally meeting myself, having spent the day running away from myself.
However, what, beyond attending to it, was I meant to do with the dukkha? Of course, it wasn't going to help to just "wallow in it" - brooding on and amplifying it really would be anti-meditation, klesha bhavana.
Instead, I just looked at it with interest, questioned it, and felt its shape without trying to change it. Here is where I suspect, but I am not not sure, that a degree of prior insight may be necessary - it is much easier to deal with experience as impersonal "stuff" when the mind is not constantly pushing and pulling everything that arises into categories like "me", "not me", "mine", "not mine".
It also takes faith and courage to deliberately turn towards one's pain - the faith that nothing has any permanent self-nature, that all experience is confected and so changeable, and so this suffering, too, can ultimately be seen through and uprooted. Otherwise, why look into it? This kind of "unshakeable faith" that arises quite naturally out of insight.
So at first, I just paid attention to whatever was unsatisfactory in my immediate experience, without any particular goal or expectation in mind.
What I found tended to happen, quite spontaneously, was that some prior causal factor would eventually come to the fore - a thought, feeling or memory that was the immediate cause of the dukkha. Something not unfamiliar, but temporarily forgotten, while the dukkha itself receded to background.
And so this "earlier" factor became the focus of my attention… Until this, itself, resolved into an even "earlier" factor… Although they were "earlier" in the sense of being the cause, they were not "past", they were not just memories of past thoughts and feelings, they were actually alive and actively creating the next stage.
It is perhaps more normal to think of mental events as operating "horizontally"... One thought leads to another on the same level, and another, like billiard balls. In this case, when a thought has gone, it has gone, it is only accessible as a memory.
However, longer lived mental events can be more like a kind of fountain - each layer pushes up to create and sustain the next layer, until we reach the layer fully accessible to awareness. All the layers are simultaneously present and actively feeding upwards, even though we may only be aware of what is going on on the most conscious surface layer. This is why we can't generally just "switch off" a poisonous mental state.
What gradually became apparent to me was that the "layers" that were being progressively revealed were represented by the Nidana chain itself. We are normally presented with the "three lifetime" interpretation of the Nidanas, however, they can also be understood (and, I believe, should primarily be understood) as a description of the way that experience, particularly painful experience, is constantly being recreated in this life.
When the Buddha enumerated the Nidanas in reverse order, this is not just as a memory exercise, but, I concluded, the description of meditative practice in which suffering is traced backwards to its source, undoing the usual "forward" progress from ignorance to suffering.
At least, this was clearly what I was finding. It was a very organic process, not something I could wilfully "do" to myself. By patiently sitting with suffering ("death" Nidana), say, for example, a painful humiliation, and asking what lay beneath, the pain gradually abated, and the "birth" that led to it became apparent - in this example, this would be the conceit, the cherished inflated self-view, and the "world" that I had attempted to construct around this self-view. Having given birth to this world, pain was inevitable as the world dissolved in humiliation.
Sitting with the "birth" stage, i.e. with awareness of the conceited self view, what would gradually emerge would be the "becoming" that had created this world. "Becoming" is not a passive process, it is all the little bits of creative mental work we do, reaching forward to imagine and flesh out the world we want to create. Normally this is something that we do quite naturally and without deliberate conscious guidance, but it can also be done quite deliberately, and many books have been written describing how to achieve mundane ambitions through goal-oriented creative visualisation.
In my example, the “becoming” stage might be all the little conceited thoughts and fantasies about how pleasant it would be to be admired, or to vanquish foes, or achieving great things....
Having spent some time becoming thoroughly familiar with the "becoming" stage, the "grasping" that was driving the becoming would become apparent; and then, the “craving” that was driving the grasping, and so on.
This process was very engaging, concentrating, and rewarding in its own right, but what seemed more significant was the permanent freedom that resulted from uncovering the samsaric process at work. It seemed that, having gone upstream into a particular kind of suffering, I became largely immune to falling into that pattern of suffering again. Habits that previously had all the power and bluster of the Wizard of Oz became ineffectual and unconvincing after peeping behind the curtain to see how they worked.
It was very liberating, because I was taking habits, often very well established and destructive habits, and, eventually, completely dissolving them without trace. It was also very illuminating, because at every step, I was learning more about how the samsaric mind worked, which made subsequent work on other similar habits much easier.
The process worked best when there was some clear and compelling dukkha already present in experience. True, there was always something, some element of dukkha, and anything was enough to work with, but it was not always particularly compelling.
I was also aware that I was not tracking everything back "all the way", but only as far as the last few negative Nidanas. These are the most superficial, and essentially cover similar ground to the first fetters, and particularly the creation of self-view. I usually found it relatively easy to track back as far as "becoming" or "grasping", but the further back I went, the longer it took, and the less clear the experience was.
Something that also bothered me was that I knew that there were poisons that would sometimes erupt in day to day life, but which did not crop up on the cushion. I wanted to take the battle to the enemy, so to speak, but if the enemy refused to turn up during meditation, what could I do?
At some point it dawned on me that I could deliberately trigger these poisons. It's hard to give an example, because they were so irrational and intense, in a way, more like dream-consciousness than normal everyday consciousness. They seemed to be linked to trauma - intense protective reactions to threatening experiences that had been traumatising in the past. Not that I could remember the original traumatising events - recalling the historical cause of the trauma did not seem to be important - all that mattered was that I knew that if I reflected in a particular way, recalled and imagined the right things, then… Boom! Like stepping on a landmine, an intense, very disturbing reaction followed.
Of course this is rather a counter intuitive strategy - normally, we are relieved when our demons are in abeyance, and we avoid rousing them if at all possible. If anything, we kid ourselves that, perhaps, if we ignore them when they are not there, they might never arise again - perhaps new me is free of them for good!
I liked the term "asava" for these poisonous eruptions, because its literal meaning ("influx") captures their incredible power and dynamism, and the sense that they are invading in mind as if from beneath, flowing into conscious mental space.
Deliberately triggering asavas like this is not for the faint hearted. I did not find it possible to simply allow them to arise and pass without disturbing my equanimity - no, they were disintegrating and disruptive, particularly at first. However, what made it possible to do it at all, against the psyche's usually powerful instinct for self-preservation, was the absolute knowledge that there was, in reality, no "self" that could be destroyed or that needed to be protected. At the end of the day, everything going on was just impersonal psychic "stuff" that would arise and pass. I suspect that this kind of approach would be very inadvisable without a good foundation in insight.
So although I definitely wanted to destroy these asavas, and I just as surely did not welcome their disturbing eruption in day to day life, I was also not, fundamentally, scared of them.
I learned how to trigger them so that I had an opportunity to see how they worked. By going upstream with less intense painful states, I had learned that, if I could see clearly enough how the nidana chain was creating these states, then they lost their power. The question was, would a similar approach work with these extremely highly charged and disturbing asavas?
At first, it was all too quick, and too intense. After an overwhelming flurry of thoughts, feelings and reactions, I would effectively just "come to" in the aftermath, with little learned. However, I could backtrack a step or two…. Whatever state I was in when the eruption subsided, I could remember what had immediately preceded that, and how one had led to the other.
It would take some time before I would feel strong enough to try again, but eventually I would try again, but next time, I knew a little bit more about what to look out for, and I could "catch" the reaction a little earlier. And so each time, my awareness extended a little further back, closer to the trigger, and the reaction petered out a step or two earlier.
It was while working in this way that I fully saw and understood the mechanism at work in the transition from feeling to craving or aversion. This was an extremely significant shift, making it possible to work much more effectively. In fact, for a little while, it felt a bit like a new super power, like the ability to freeze time… In the midst of any erupting asava, paying attention to the feeling would simply cut off all the reactions that normally followed. The feeling itself could be extremely intense, but it wouldn't "go anywhere", it wouldn't produce the usual flurry of disturbing thoughts and feelings.
Of course I had always known the theory of the "gap", but I had not been able to make much use of it before. The difference, I think, was the incompleteness of my awareness of the nidanas that usually follow the "feeling", which meant that, even if I was consciously attending to feeling, craving and so on would leak out and grow, eventually capturing my awareness in distractions.
However, now I had arrived back at feeling by learning, over the course of years, to recognise each of the nidanas that followed craving, any "leaking" was immediately obvious and almost automatically tracked back to feeling again. This meant that my awareness of the feeling step was very stable, even when dealing with feelings that had previously been utterly intolerable and the trigger of extreme reactions.
I say "almost automatically tracked back", because I can't say that "I tracked them back". There wasn't a strong sense of "me choosing to do that" by this point - it was more like a habitual skill that kicked in automatically when I applied mindfulness to a disturbing experience.
And so I found myself back in a familiar form of practice, now sitting with feeling, and looking beneath to uncover the preceding nidanas.
The further back along the nidana chain I am discussing, the harder I find it to describe each nidana in a way that is relatable to everyday experience. The world of ordinary conscious experience is constantly being constructed and reconstructed, and we are not generally aware of the processes of construction, only the constructed "world" of experience itself. As you track back along the nidana chain, and beyond "feeling", in particular, you are dealing more and more with the processes of construction rather than the constructed world, and so it is not easy to relate back to the language and experience of our constructed world of "consensus reality”.
What this also means is that the usual way that we are taught to understand these early nidanas bears little relationship to how they appear in direct experience. This is particularly true when considering the nidanas under the "three lifetimes" interpretation - indeed, according to this interpretation, it is impossible to even experience the early nidanas, since they are part of the “past life”. For this reason, I do not consider the “three lifetimes” interpretation to be the primary way of understanding the nidanas, just one teaching method. Indeed, it cannot possibly be the last word on the matter, since early sources describe how all 12 nidanas become apparent in particular meditative contexts. The “three lifetimes” interpretation also goes very much against the drift of the Buddha’s teaching, which was overwhelmingly concerned with what could be experienced, not theoretical frameworks, so however useful it might be, I am sure it cannot be the primary meaning for the formulation.
Faced with this opacity, but wanting to navigate further back along the nidana chain, I wanted to find alternative ways of understanding the early nidanas. Fortunately I stumbled across a very useful scholarly account of the Nidanas, which went into great detail on what was traditionally meant by some of the terms. This didn't tell me exactly what to expect experientially, but at least cleared out the superficial clutter of expectations based on the "three lifetimes" interpretation.
"Contact", for example, which precedes feeling, is much more interesting than the simple idea of "sense object meets sense organ" that we are normally presented with. There is nothing much available for observation in that account.
However, traditionally "contact" is a set of processes, normally happening quite automatically, whereby a raw sense impression is compared with past experience in order to come up with an evaluated, contextualised perception. This is a process that is recognised by modern neuroscience. A conscious perception is a blend of memory and sense experience, not a pure perception of the “objective” world. Sometimes you can get a glimpse of this going on when presented with some radically unusual perception or optical illusion that you can feel yourself struggling to "parse", though this usually passes very quickly, and in normal life, it is entirely unconscious.
Backtracking from "feeling" in mediation, this process is what is revealed. Feeling is not just "given", it is created, and the way that memories, associations and sense impressions all work together to create the feeling can be clearly witnessed experientially. And, of course, the introduction of awareness at this stage changes the process. Not that "I" deliberately change "this" to "that" - it happens quite naturally. Where the blind, habitual way of linking memories to sense experiences was unjustified and destructive, new associations are made. And so, the old feelings are no longer created, even when an old trauma trigger is activated.
I continued to "track back" like this for several years. Typically, it would take a visit to Vajraloka to progress back one or two more Nidanas. Then, while off retreat, I would familiarise myself with the new territory, and work through the active kleshas at this new, deeper level.
Gradually I shifted away from deliberately triggering asavas, simply because it was harder and harder to find anything to trigger. Instead, my practice shifted to working with emerging thoughts.
Starting from a state of a fully quiet mind, thoughts would, of course, naturally arise, but very rarely would I witness the first arising of the thought - I would just notice, at some point, that thinking was underway, and my mind was no longer quiet.
This is really the whole samsaric process in a nutshell - we are driven by kleshas that are initiated outside of our normal awareness, and as they develop, they create a more and more rigid and fully-fledged "world". We do not normally get the opportunity to deal with them as they develop, we just have to deal with the aftermath. Gradually I had learned to notice the process earlier and earlier, but the very earliest stages were still mysterious.
Eventually, though, I tracked back all the way to "ignorance" itself, and could then sit for extended periods without losing awareness to arising thoughts. As they arose, so they were recognised, and petered out, with no break in awareness.
This is profoundly liberating. It is as if there is nowhere for the kleshas to hide, and so no way for them to gain a lasting hold. While distracted and busy in the world, they can still arise temporarily, but they quickly collapse in the light of mindful awareness.
Postscript
Years later, when Satyadhana presented his approach to working with the 10 fetters, I noticed a number of interesting parallels. At various points where I had stalled, taking some time before clearly seeing the previous Nidana, I recognised the same kind of realisation that Satyadhana was describing when breaking a particular fetter. So I think you can consider the fetters and the Nidanas as describing essentially the same territory, and indeed Satyadhana also recognised the essential equivalence of the two formulations. In the normal samsaric functioning of the mind, coarser and coarser illusions form, each constituting a fetter, and each forming the basis of the next, cruder illusion, culminating in the naive self-view we all grow up with. "Going upstream" involves travelling in the reverse direction, unearthing and seeing through each layer of subtler and subtler illusion, breaking the fetters and seeing the true functioning of the mind at each stage.
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