Those who know me know that even at the start of my spiritual life I experienced a lot of Jhana and Samadhi, and that this really guided me and was at the centre of my spiritual life.
I've attended many retreats over the years, and while I was living at Guhyaloka for six years I took part in several three-month long retreats. During one of those retreats, in 2007, I remember I decided to seriously apply myself to the Six Element practice. I had benefited from it in the past, but I started to question the way in which I'd been taught the Sixth Stage around consciousness. It seemed to lead to a very expansive experience of mind, but I still felt at core that I was still clinging on to certain elements of my-self, and that the practice was not actually getting to the nub of what I needed to look at.
So I decided to ask myself some questions: Okay, well, if there is a self, where is it? Where are you acting from? What are you clinging to in your mind? And answering as honestly as I could I came up with two things - I identified with a sense of agency and with being a centre of experience.
On that retreat we were also studying the omnipresent mental events, and I understood a way to practically use the five Skandhas and apply them in a way that would prove useful in terms of the insight inquiry. And during this investigation something just kind of broke open for me. It was significantly different from the range of experiences I'd had in Jhana. It’s difficult to describe. There wasn't really anyone I could really talk to about it. It wasn't that people were hostile, it was just there was no way to discuss it, I think. In part I didn’t feel I had the language.
What I experienced as a result was a surging confidence, and an intuitive understanding, of the Dharma that I hadn't had before. A lot of doubt went, maybe you could say existential doubt vanished, and with it a massive reduction of dukkha in my life. Of all the aspects that changed, that was the most astonishing.
I searched through many texts and scriptures to try and work out what was happening. Â Certainly I found many clues and hints, but it wasn't until people in the Order started to do Liberation Unleashed, and Satyadhana published his articles, that I found anyone clearly expressing the experience I recognised well.
Even so I skirted around the edges of it a bit, and although I took some guidance for a year or so, most of what I did was self-guided and involved only occasional discussions with people. But that tends to be how I operate – taking a small amount of teaching and running with it in a self-directed manner.
So over the years I have refined how I go about exploring insight, and for me all of this has gone hand in hand with the broader range of practices we do in Triratna (with more or less tension). Sometimes I consciously direct or guide the process and then at other times it has a momentum, or even a mind of its own, a natural unfoldment. I have come to appreciate the different phases of the process and to work in harmony with it.
During the conscious periods of insight inquiry there are three different areas I tend to look for as pointers or signs that give me an indication of where to look. In each case, when approaching them with regards to insight, I will usually be bringing anatta or sunyata to bear – note that this is not the only approach I will apply to suffering, but when consciously investigating in relation to insight, I’m likely to bring those with me.
The first sign for me, quite traditionally, is if I'm experiencing a substantial amount of dukkha. This is often a clear sign that there's something here I need to look at, perhaps a source of clinging, or a view.
The second area I use as a guide is where I get a sense relating to something within my experience as unitary or as a single functioning.
For example, as I mentioned, during the retreat at Guhyaloka, I got a sense that I was identifying with a sense of personal volition, or a centre-point of experience, as unitary phenomena in a way that defined me. Although these didn’t arise as immediate sources of suffering, I could see how in the long term they were limiting and would serve the basis of that.
The third area I’ve come to regard as extremely fruitful ground for insight enquiry was perhaps the most surprising – they were Buddhist ideas or doctrines that had often served me well for the decades I had practiced, such as the Bodhisattva Ideal, the Order, the Precepts, and so on. I found myself compelled to examine these and to deconstruct them as a result of various incidents and apparent contradictions. The results of undermining these could initially be highly confusing and disorientating, and could last for months (even years), but then in each case the result was ultimately liberating, leading to a more authentic appreciation of what lay beyond.
So, having identified an object of enquiry I would bring awareness to it, and it often felt important to kind of rest in the discomfort or the contradiction it created as a felt sense, without trying to quickly eradicate it. To feel it. Then I’d kind of look for fractures in it, or behind it, inconsistencies perhaps that revealed how the underlying views I was holding could not be true. Gazing at the experience with the eye of anatta in or sunyata.
Although I say initially the approach was conscious, it couldn’t be forced, the outcome couldn’t be predicted, and at a certain point there was the likelihood that the process would take over with a momentum or mind of its own – at which point I have learnt to let it happen.
I wanted to finish by saying that I always had a faith that there was something more, that there was always a confidence (however slight) that the outcome would go beyond what I was experiencing. I’m not sure that’s true however – I’ve inhabited some dark places during my life.
It has worked out so far, though, and for me that does give me confidence in the process.
And I think that's all I want to say about that.
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