Awareness of Consciousness and Object
The only thing that can make you feel fulfilled is to get deeply in touch with your spiritual nature,
very noble nature, very beautiful nature.
We human beings have two different natures so to speak;
lower nature and higher nature. If you study Abhidhamma you’ll find that there are two different categories for the mental factors. One is ‘beautiful’, and the other is ‘not beautiful’. We have both of those qualities. Let’s say selfishness is not beautiful but generosity is very beautiful, hurting other beings is not beau-tiful, restraint is very beaubeau-tiful, unmindful is not beautiful. If you look into your mind you’ll see that, when you are unmindful the mind is very agitated, going here and there, like a homeless per-son, going around, going nowhere, living here and there, doing things that are not healthy.
When the mind is not mindful it feels like a homeless person, very insecure, very unhappy.
When you are mindful, you feel really at home, so, mindfulness is my home.
When you are mindful you are at home, when you are not mindful you are on the road going nowhere.
Get in touch with the spiritual part of your self, the beautiful part of yourself… be mindful.
If you want something badly enough there is a way to get it.
This means, if you really want to be mindful there is a way to do
it, not difficult… if you really want to be mindful…. We need to make very clear our object or goal; do you really want to be mindful? Unless we become more and more mindful there is no way to feel happy, joyous or fulfilled.
The world is a place for opportunities. Yes, it is an oppor-tunity to be here, to be in this human world as a human being.
When I read some of the stories about Bodhisattvas, I found that Bodhisattvas don’t want to live in a place which is perfect.
Why is that? I think it is quite easy to guess! You have nothing to learn. Everything is perfect. Deliberately they go to places where they face difficulties. When I read about Buddha and his cousin who gave him a lot of trouble, who was that? Devadatta, he gave a lot of trouble to Buddha. I am very grateful towards Devadatta just for doing that. It might sound very paradoxical, why is that? Because of Devadatta we know more about the good qualities of the Buddha. Otherwise how would we know?
In some ways he made it possible for Buddha to manifest and show his perfection.
This world is a very good place to learn because there are so many difficulties and imperfections.
The world is a place for opportunities and I look forward to opportunities for learning and growing. Every difficulty is an opportunity for learning and growing. If you really understand this one thing you’ll never is feel that your life is meaningless no matter what happens. Whether things are going well or whether
things are going badly, you can always learn something and grow and actually we learn and grow more when we face and over-come those difficulties properly, in a proper way. If we react to difficulties and make more unwholesome actions then we don’t learn we don’t grow.
Difficulties are opportunities to learn, to grow and to become a better person.
If you see your life as a long learning process, nothing that happens in your life will be meaningless.
Everything will be meaningful.
That is what we are doing here, to be mindful all the time, all day… seeing… hearing many things and our minds react-ing.
Just from watching how our minds react to all these experiences, just by doing that
we learn and we grow.
Start thinking about yourself as a lifetime student at a large University… your curriculum is your total relationship with the world you live in, from the moment you are born to the moment you die. It is an informal school. Each experiment is a valuable lesson to be learnt, and each experience also is a valuable expe-rience to be learnt. The trick is simply to make whatever place you are in, your educational forum.
Learn everything you can about yourself and the world around you.
Actually this is true education:
to learn about yourself and to learn about the world around you and the relationship between you and the world.
The world includes everything living and non living.
This is the highest education.
Now we know that our object of meditation is paramattha which is the natural quality of mental and physical phenomena.
Let’s take for example, seeing… everybody has sight, everybody sees but a meditator sees things very differently. What do you do when you meditate; awareness of seeing; you look at something and you are totally in touch with that without thinking about it. This is very important, without thinking about it. Thinking is not vipassanæ; it could be samatha; be very clear about these two things. Some people read about meditation and they say when you meditate you think about something. Yes, this is one type of meditation which is samatha; like mettæ-bhævanæ; you think about people and you think about your loving thoughts.
Buddhænussati-bhævanæ also, you think about Buddha and his qualities and when you get absorbed in the qualities of the Buddha, your mind automatically is in that quality, and it has that quality somehow, to a certain extent. Even with mettæ.
Sometimes when you develop mettæ, and you get used to doing that and sometimes even though you don’t think about anybody
or any thoughts you feel some sort of feelings of love. You can get into that state; that is a higher state of mettæ actually; you don’t think about it anymore but you feel it. You feel very warm, kind, soft and generous.
So, there is a kind of meditation in which you think, and there is another kind of meditation where you don’t think, and vipassanæ is not thinking. But we are so used to thinking that even when we are practicing vipassanæ, in between, thoughts come in again and again, even about vipassanæ or about other things. We comment on our experience. There is something in our mind which likes to comment, a commentator, like when you watch the news or a movie, there is somebody talking, explaining what is happening; it is like that in our mind.
Our mind is always explaining things:
this is this, this is good, and that is bad.
A commentator is always commenting in our mind.
You are meditating and things are going well and the thought comes, “Oh, it is so nice now, things are going so well.”
When we meditate, we need to know that we don’t need to think; thoughts will come, but do not encourage thinking, no matter how beautiful. Sometimes when I was a beginner medi-tating, such beautiful thoughts came into the mind, one thing after another, with very beautiful connections, very interesting connections. I got so attached to these Dhamma thoughts that I could not let them go. I loved them, I wanted to remember
these thoughts, but that became a big hindrance. When I medi-tated together with my friends, many of them are not so intel-lectual and don’t read many books, they read some Dhamma books, but they don’t read much about any other subject and they don’t think so much. And especially because when I was young, I wanted to write articles, thoughtful articles, good Dhamma articles; because of that ambition, aspiration, when I meditated beautiful Dhamma thoughts would come in my mind and I cannot let them go. I want to write them down. Because of that reason it took me much longer than all my friends, who were not very well educated, who were not intellectuals. They developed deeper samædhi and got in touch with the reality and developed very deep samædhi. Sometimes I felt very ashamed,
“these people who have no education are doing better than me”.
Competition starts coming into the mind, “he is doing better, and I am not doing as well”. When we went to see our teacher, the teacher would ask me “how is your meditation?”; “Nothing very special” I said “but I feel happy”; I didn’t have anything to say apart from feeling a little bit happier.
Once, a very simple and clear insight came into my mind, which was that I was always afraid of something. My mind became very calm and peaceful for a few moments, and after that I could remember I had never felt that peace before in my life. It was not a deep insight, not any kind of ñæ¼a (knowledge) actually; it was just calmness, mindfulness, totally mindful, calm and very much at ease, not thinking about anything, not think-ing about the future or the past, but right in the moment, very
calm and peaceful for a few moments only. When I came out of that state, I knew that I had never felt this peace before. All my life I was afraid of something. I was afraid of not becom-ing a successful person, not lovbecom-ing, not bebecom-ing loved, many fears.
Sometimes it is very vague; you cannot even talk about it but you feel it, you are carrying fear. Anyway, when we meditate, we don’t think, when a thought comes, we just acknowledge that thought and let it go. Later when you practice another kind of vipassanæ, cittænupassanæ, you can look into that, but for begin-ners, do not follow thoughts, because if you follow thoughts it will go on and on.
For example, when we are seeing something, what do we really see? We see only colours, and this colour is the reaction of our retina. Scientifically explained, it is the reaction of our retina which our brain interprets as colour. So what is it that comes into and strikes the retina? That is rþpa. Rþpa is not out there, and we don’t know what actually is really there. When we see, it is something happening in our eye, also in our brain and in our mind. They are all connected together. It is photons with different energy, different frequency to which our nerv-ous system reacts and produces different intensities of electrical impulses and that creates colour. Those who are colour blind, although you show them different colours, they cannot see all the colours, and they will see only a few shades of colour. The colours are there so to speak, but they don’t experience col-our. What we mean by colour or what we mean by seeing, is our experience, not something out there, try to understand this
idea. What we see is our experience only; we don’t really see something out there. There might be something out there, there is something out there, which is the basis for our experience but we don’t really know what that is. We experience something falling on our retina and there is a reaction, the retina produces some impulse and the nervous system carries that impulse into the brain. With the brain in connection with the mind, we interpret. It is very difficult to explain about these things. When we see a human being that is an interpretation of our mind, not of our eye; the eye does not know anything beyond colour.
The Buddha gave a very concise
meditation instruction, “when seeing only seeing”
(di¥¥he di¥¥hamattaµ bhavissati ~Udn 8);
there is only seeing, nothing added, no interpretation.
When we meditate, that is what we try to do; we try to be aware of what we see. In the beginning thoughts will be going on: this is beautiful, this in nice. After a while as you watch these thoughts coming, they will slow down, slow down and then they stop. When you stop thinking in the beginning you don’t feel like you are experiencing anything; the experience becomes very vague, without thoughts. It becomes meaningless; actually it is meaningless! We create meaning; at a certain level it is impor-tant for us to create meaning, but when we are meditating vipas-sanæ, we are trying to experience something which is beyond normal experience, not normal reality, natural but not normal.
We create meaning, we interpret, and actually we under-stand our own interpretation. When we underunder-stand something, it is our own interpretation. We agree our interpretation with many people. You interpret something in a certain way and I interpret something in a certain way. We have an agreement there, and we think ‘yes, that is it’ but actually it is just agree-ment on interpretation. We don’t really know what is out there.
We just agree on interpretation.
When we meditate, we become very simple, the mind becomes extremely simple.
Thinking is very complicated.
Without thinking, experiences, sense impulses become very simple. We go down to that simple level.
We just look at something without thinking about it.
If I look at the carpet like this, without thinking, then when thinking stops I am aware of what I see, which is colour and patterns, even the pattern is a kind of put together and I don’t think about carpet anymore. Then there is no carpet anymore.
There is only what I see. There are only different colours, no carpet anymore. When you get to that level, you are in touch with paramattha. For a beginner it is not so easy to do.
So when we see something we are aware of the object so to speak, coming in the eyes and when you stop thinking and become more and more aware of it, you become aware of this awareness which is aware of this object. There is something
which knows that something is there. You become aware of awareness! This is very important. Only then the process becomes complete. The object, you are aware of the object and you are aware of the awareness of the object: two things going on. This will happen slowly. This is what we are trying to do.
For a beginner when you see something, immediately the mind starts interpreting it “Oh, this is nice… I like this, this is beautiful.” It could be a painting or an apple, a car, a man or woman, anything. Immediately you see that you have inter-preted. What do you do when that happens? You don’t get upset.
Immediately when that thought comes you are aware of it. If we don’t like something, when the thought comes, “I don’t like this, this is terrible”, immediately you are aware of that thought, not liking, aversion, disappointment. It goes on like that, it will go on for a long time, you interpret… you react, you interpret…
you react, but if you stop interpreting you won’t react anymore.
Keep doing that for a long time until you stop reacting and interpreting.
You’ll see that there is only the object and there is the awareness.
After a while you will see that because of this object this awareness happens. You shut your eyes, you are aware of some-thing else, you can see some sort of vague image in your eyes, but you are not aware of whatever is out there. Although your memory tells you that there are a lot of people sitting there,
about sixty people sitting there, but that is your memory saying it. When you shut your eyes you are not aware of that object anymore. You open and suddenly there is awareness. This awareness is conditioned by this object: this object, this aware-ness. Also when you turn around you can see that, because of this awareness, awareness of the object happens. Without this awareness you cannot see that there is an object, you cannot know that.
You look from both sides, sometimes you look at the object and see that there is an object and this is awareness,
because of the object there is awareness and because of awareness you can tell there is an object.
You are aware of the awareness too.
How does this object affect your mind? When you see some-thing beautiful it attracts your awareness, it attracts your con-sciousness, you want to see more, you don’t want to turn away, you want to be with that object, with that sensation. You know that, these images, these rþpas (matters) attract the conscious-ness, so you turn your mind to the object. It is the mental fac-tor (which in Abhidhamma is called manasikæra) which turns your mind, gives you a direction. So you know that because of the object, the mind turns to the object. When you cannot see something clearly, you try to look…. There something there.
What is it that is making you look like this? Attraction of the object; the mind, the consciousness is attracted to the object.
You know that this object has some power. It attracts your con-sciousness.
Whatever happens in the whole process, try to be in touch with it! Try to do it again, close your eyes, there is no awareness of an object out there… you open your eyes; and if you do that a few times very mindfully, you’ll find that as soon as you open your eyes something happens in your mind, immediately the awareness appears. You experience that immediate appearance of the awareness. We are in the habit for doing it for so long that we don’t really know that. When I do that, I sit in a chair look-ing outside into the forest and the hill, keep my eyes opened and I try to get in touch with this awareness of seeing, aware of the object, aware of the colours. Then I close my eyes it disappears!
The object disappears and the awareness disappears.
We tend to believe that although we close our eyes there is somebody inside who was aware of it and who is still there. We give it continuity. When we do that very mindfully, we close our eyes, the object disappears and the consciousness disap-pears. Then another consciousness is arising there, another one, a new one. As I told you last week, everything happening in this world is always new.
All the conditioned phenomena are always new!
Nothing is old.
Always new, means always arising and passing away, because if it does not pass away
it cannot be new!
It has to be old; if something stays for a long time it becomes old.
To say that something is always new it means that it arises and passes away.
To be new means to arise and to pass away.
What happens when I keep my eyes opened? Is the con-sciousness always there? No, it is not always there, it is arising and passing away so quickly that we think that it is always there because it is the same type of consciousness. Because the type is the same, we have the feeling that it is the same. It is not the same; just the type is the same. The two things are very differ-ent. After you practice for a long time you come to experience this… this awareness itself that is arising and passing away has a gap between.
For a beginner it is not easy to do this. After you practice meditation for a long time, many days, you can experience that there is a gap always there. When you see things like ‘this’ it appears very solid, but when you become more and more mind-ful you don’t experience solidity anymore. Everything becomes shaky and moving. Our retina also is always on and off, on and off, going like that, and then you become aware of some-thing happening inside your eyes. It is like watching a televi-sion tube, dots arising and passing away. You become more and more aware of that. Some people when they get to that stage complain that there is something wrong with my eyes, “I can’t see things clearly, I cannot focus my eyes”. If that happens to