Mark Cooper

Right view

2026-05-17T00:00:00Z

After graduating from the Community Dharma Leader programme, I have entered into a new phase of learning and reflection about meditation and Buddhism. It was confusing and contradictory at first, but I am starting to find my way in the dark. This post is about how my understanding continues to develop, and as such I think it comes broadly under the heading of "right view". As a starting point, I think it's useful to ask ourselves...

What is fundamental to the Buddhist project?

There are many things we could say, but what I want to suggest could work as a point of orientation is perhaps this.

The dhamma is a project of improving our understanding of ourselves and the world. This begins with correcting our most coarse misunderstandings and becomes increasingly refined and subtle.

When we see it like this, we can see what the dhamma has in common with CBT, Socratic thought, stoicism, and the brain as a Bayesian system making predictions. All of these models share an interest in sorting beliefs, perceptions, cognitions, understandings in terms of their accuracy, fitness for a purpose, helpfulness, alignment with values, and so on. In the case of CBT and stoicism this process of reframing is probably what gives them therapeutic value.

One of the key axes along which the dhamma promotes or demotes ways of being is that of wholesome/unwholesome.

The dhamma asks us to understand which of our ideas, actions, impulses serve the good and which do not.

But what is the good? In a Buddhist context, something is said to be wholesome to the degree it is not affected by craving, aversion, or delusion. This is what the second noble truth tells us. As we gradually make progress in fielding our various behaviours, thoughts, and acts into these buckets--which we might also understand as helpful or unhelpful, skilful or unskilful, appropriate and inappropriate, even noble and ignoble--we begin to experience periods of ease and peacefulness. This process is also reflective. We understand what is wholesome and we really see it for ourselves. We know, "This isn't made up. It has an effect on my mind and happiness." We see the effects of our thoughts and actions.

One one level, this may seem obvious and trivial, "we are correcting misperceptions, sure, sure". But that really is a profound task and is a deep structural feature of the dhamma, not a surface level artifact. This is basically what the eightfold path tells us by prefacing each of its limbs with samma (appropriate). We practice appropriate speech, for example. It's also seen in the teaching on right effort which describes the path as cultivating and maintaining wholesome states of mind; and abandoning and preventing unwholesome states of mind. It's having the discernment to see what is proper. We're recognising the push of the mind to act in unwholesome ways and dropping it. Similarly, what we are doing when we reflect on the three characteristics of impermanence, unsatisfactoriness, and not self? We are correcting a tendency to misperceive the nature of things. Part of what the dhamma gives us is a massive set of skilful and consistent propositions.

At bottom, this all has to do with the way one views the world. Human beings hold many beliefs and notions that are inconsistent with the truth and often with each other. So we need to engage in a process of seeing clearly, reflection, and self honesty. In one way of speaking, we become alert to faulty cognitions, cognitive dissonance, subpar decisions, wrong moves, common traps. As we shed unhelpful views and replace them hopefully with better ideas, we experience greater harmonisation of mind. We begin to see clearly is ways of being that lead to peace, and ways that do not. Seeing those ways of being that lead to strife, there comes a point at which we are ready to drop them.

One of our key interests, then, is in developing a continuity of wholesome mind states. To do this, we must be alert to unskilful ways of seeing, thinking, speaking, acting.

But what does it mean to select for wholesome ways of being during meditation? Well, it's a kind of balance, non-clinging, as it says in the Satipatthana refrain.

They meditate independent, not grasping at anything in the world. --Mahāsatipaṭṭhāna Sutta, MN 10, Bhikkhu Sujato

We're not seizing the breath (or another object) in hopes of gaining something but neither are we allowing the mind to range over all sorts of preoccupations.

We're using the breath to steady ourselves as the mind gradually balances itself without grabbing onto things or pushing them away.

This can be supported by following the breath in meditation, or metta, for example, because the scope of these objects produces a continuity of the wholesome in which the mind coalesces.

Now, it's not the case that the whole project is a bust if unwholesome impulses arise. It's in allowing these to arise and pass in awareness that healing takes place, that we see their impermanent nature and disidentify with them. This allowing and interest is itself wholesome. It's not resisting what is but neither is it indulging in problematic patterns.

We can see this process as the mind coming to know itself, coming to know that it does not need to grasp and cling to things outside itself. Ever more at peace, it begins to settle and to see itself all the more clearly.

Of course, it is easier to keep the mind on a wholesome trajectory when conditions are easy and simple but progress on the path can’t be constrained to this. Difficult conditions can sometimes teach us more than an easy life. The goal--through skilful understanding of our own minds and judicious reflection and application of techniques--is for the mind to be at ease, centred, content in an increasing range of situations. The mind, the heart, is assured in knowing what is skilful and has little to no interest in what is not. This is the eighth path factor of samadhi, a unification of mind that isn’t fixated on objects of sensory pleasure. It is a unification of mind that leads onward into letting go, stillness and peace.

Hurt me plenty

2026-04-05T00:00:00Z

One way we can think about lay life is akin to a hardcore difficulty mode in a computer game. When we ratchet up the difficulty in a trial, it shows us our weaknesses. Each failure prunes the tree of our possible responses—if we are careful to keep track—until only the optimal paths remain, within the limitations of a situation. When the kids are screaming in the car, when there is strife at work, and loss, and exhaustion, and despair, then perhaps the hidden enemies of lobha, dosa, and moha (greed, hostility, and delusion) are goaded out into the open. After the test, if we don’t simply try to distract ourselves, if we're awake in the middle watch of the night and look within, we see these tendencies, these hostile urges, and by holding them in simple awareness they are gradually healed.

In Indian traditions, this is spoken of as an army within an impregnable fortress that rushes out in battalions to attack those without. Each time it does so, the battalion is surrounded and destroyed. Slowly, over time, the host within the garrison is diminished until none remain. In a way...

It is when we are weakest that the battle is won.

In computer science, solutions to problems are often judged on their worst-case performance rather than their best. Perhaps it is the same with us. Rather than our highest potential we should first look to raise our lowest. When we think of this in terms of the Buddha’s second noble truth—dukkhasamudayaariyasacca—on the arising of suffering. This states that when there is craving for pleasant experiences, craving not to have unpleasant experiences, and craving to become (to be a certain way, to have status for example), then there is suffering. But perhaps we can also reverse engineer this to see that when there is suffering that’s when the underlying problem—the vestiges of greed, hostility, and our unwillingness to acknowledge these—can finally be seen and healed.

What can we have faith in?

2026-03-24T00:00:00Z

I read Bhikkhu Anālayo's critique of Rob Burbea's Seeing That Frees with interest. It raises questions about when we can trust that a teaching is valid, and on what grounds. The sense I sometimes have is of walking over a wooden platform high above the ground. Many of the planks are sound and will take your weight, but a few are rotten and if you place your full weight on them they will break. This leads to a conundrum...

How do you know which planks are compromised and which are sound?

Scholarship is one route. You have to study a little. You have to listen to experts who understand the languages and history and philosophy. Without any scholarship, it's clear we would be lost. You can't expect to understand the world of early Buddhism without reading the suttas. Scholarship is not always conclusive, and it doesn't always make contact with practice. But over the decades, we can make progress and gain clarity about some aspects of philosophy and practice, though perhaps not all.

What about authority? Surely we'll be fine as long as we listen to "the best teachers"? Many teachers have reputations that lend weight to their teachings... but this is not a reliable guide to true ways of practice in and of itself. Celebrated teachers can be mistaken, or worse. Seeing the problem with relying on authority, we might think it's better to use reason to discern what's right. That appeals to the "rational" Western mind. Except that some teachings will be well-reasoned and yet still be erroneous or otherwise miss the point.

What about if we combine these factors? We can ask what is likely to be true given what we already know: a kind of Bayesian inference. What is likely to be true, given the reputation of the teacher, their reasoning, and what the consensus already says? But, of course, there are mind states available in meditation that no normie would think probable from the outside. Yet experience proves otherwise. Improbable things turn out to be true all the time. So probability by itself doesn't really help us in establishing what's true, either, though it can right-size our guesses and with a Bayesian kind of mindset we can at least update our prior probabilities as new information comes along. As you feel a bit more calm and peace, you put a little more stock in the possibilities of meditation. Then one day you melt into bliss and the calibration changes again.

What this begins to look like is a long process of exploring widely and deeply and checking what we experience against consensus, against traditions, against trusted teachers. But we should also check to see if our most cherished ideas are internally consistent, and reliably putting them to the sword when they are not. The challenge of consistency is a high bar. It was central to Socrates' approach. Consistency doesn't mean that a doctrine is true, but it can sometimes tell us that one is suspect. It requires a willingness to examine our beliefs and perhaps some philosophical training.

It's possible, of course, to overthink it. The Buddha said that any true teaching would contain the eightfold path. So if a teaching makes a reasonable stab at the eightfold path, perhaps it's good enough. Teachings will vary widely as to how well they express the eightfold path—and interpretations of things like samādhi will vary—but if they have it basically right, then maybe it's fine.

There is one more approach. If you can find a living tradition that has a long history, ideally at least a few centuries, then what you have has been roadtested by practitioners over generations. The idea is that...

The wisdom born of trial and error shapes practice traditions like a river shapes the riverbank.

Such a tradition may follow the spirit but not the letter of the teachings but hopefully people in that tradition have faced the same kinds of problems you will encounter and found solutions. In the right circumstances, a living practice tradition will tend to converge on something useful. It will be a path that one can live. This is not to be dismissed lightly. Perhaps it is the best we can hope for.

It may be that the fledgling Insight Meditation tradition will one day get to this point of generational wisdom. Until it does, we might do well to keep reading and reflecting on what can be learned from older traditions. These things take time. This is how they start.

No suffering without craving

2025-06-07T00:00:00Z

The farmer cannot make the crops grow. The farmer can only provide the conditions for the crops to grow

The four noble truths are arguably the central teaching of Buddhism. They are not intended as laws beyond investigation, as though they were commandments written on free-standing stone obelisks.

The noble truths are actually an expression of conditionality, of dependent arising (paṭiccasamuppāda).

Dependent arising is the philosophical bedrock of Buddhism. It basically says nothing arises on its own, it always has the support of other conditions which are themselves supported by other conditions.

Truths of co-arising

We can think of the four noble truths as:

There is suffering in life.
When there is suffering there is also craving.
There can be a cessation of suffering.
When there is a cessation of suffering, there is the noble eightfold path.

This may be a different way of phrasing the truths than you're used to but I've done that deliberately to emphasise how mind states such as suffering/peace depend on other conditions. This interpretation is influenced by Bhikkhi Akiñcano, who I think would say that dependent arising doesn't so much imply that "craving causes suffering" but that these two arise together. You can't have one without the other. They lean on each other. Like two sheaves of wheat leaning against each other, take one away and the other vanishes too. (Apologies to Bhante if I have misinterpreted his position.)

A path without craving

If you look carefully, my translation of the four noble truths implies that a key feature of the eightfold path is an absence of craving.

The cessation of suffering co-arises with the noble eightfold path. Craving always accompanies suffering, and the eightfold path diminishes suffering. Therefore the eightfold path must be about diminishing craving in some way.

Note that craving (tanhā, literally "thirst") also includes aversion, resistance to experience as well as a lusting after the worldly. For me, it isn't limited to the craving that we associate with addictions—however mild or serious—but indicates a resistance to life and an insistence that experience be different to how it is. Here, I often think of the guidance around "set and setting" that one receives before a psychedelic trip not to resist the experience. "If you see a door, go through it."

Fundamentally, "craving" is a metaphor for a limitation of view. When we crave something, our view is narrowed to that one thing. Craving constrains our experience to narrow interests and outcomes, usually of a worldly nature. It is a non-acceptance, a preferencing. Remember also, for our purposes here, that craving is nearly synonymous with suffering. They arise together. The presence of one indicates the presence of the other.

What makes something right?

So, if this eightfold path is the negative image of suffering, we should be really interested in it. One thing to know about the eightfold path Each limb of the noble eightfold path is prefixed by the word "sammā". This word is a qualifier, usually translated as "right", "wise", or "appropriate". Martine Batchelor understands it to mean "caring and careful", which seems pragmatic.

But what determines whether something is sammā (appropriate) or not?

What if the absence of craving defined each limb of the eightfold path?

If we interpret the direction of the eightfold path as being fundamentally opposed to craving we would have:

Views that diminsh craving, the view that actions have consequences.
Intentions that are free of craving: to give up harming, to no longer crave posessions, power, status, etc.
Speech that restrains and abandons the compulsion to deceive and upset and create suffering and craving in others.
Actions not taken on the basis of craving, actions that diminsh suffering.
Livelihood that does not stimulate craving or suffering in oneself or others.
An effort to cultivate wholesome qualities and to abandon qualities associated with craving.
Mindfulness that guards against craving, free from insistence that experience be other than it is.
Gatheredness of mind such that the mind and heart are contented, present, safe from craving, safe from suffering.

I'm not saying this works perfectly, but perhaps it drives home the point that ending suffering means ending craving. They rise and fall together.

The term noble path also implies an absence of craving to me: the nobility of not being dependent on what may be coarse or unethical.

How do we practise non-craving?

So, if we find this a useful way of looking at the four noble truths and the noble eightfold path, what are the implications for how we practice and meditate? This is probably something we will have to explore deeply for ourselves but the Buddha had a progressive way of relaxing tension and stress. As his practice deepened he would ask himself now where he was suffering and progressively let go of the increasingly subtle tensions and preoccupations and limiting views he was experiencing until fully at peace. This is something Ajahn Thanissaro speaks about in his essay, Jhāna Not by the Numbers.

An ideal state of concentration for giving rise to insight is one that you can analyze in terms of stress and the absence of stress even while you’re in it.—Ajahn Thanissaro

When we see that experiences arise with suffering as a necessary part of them, we become dispassionate towards them. There is a cooling, a wise equanimity towards life. If all of the sights, sounds, touches, tastes, and smells of the world arise of a piece with suffering—with impermanence, imperfection, and impersonality—then we will hold them more lightly, and in doing so we grasp less, in grasping less what we fabricate, what co-arises with less grasping, experience itself becomes lighter. We experience states of less fabrication and this feels freeing.

I want to leave you with an image from Sarah Shaw that I think points to a good attitude:

This mindfulness—a subtle sense of the feeling of something growing, that one looks after but with which one does not try to interfere too much and allows to gestate—lies at the heart of a samatha breathing mindfulness...

We observe, we support, we understand, we nourish, we protect. But we also leave wholesome qualities to grow. We don't bring the attitude of craving and insistence and suffering and angst into practice, as far as we can. That would be walking the path in the wrong direction. So we're patient. We let awareness work and, slowly, that which is seen is understood and that which is understood is released.

The utility of doubt

2025-06-04T00:00:00Z

In Zen Buddhism, the greater your doubt, the greater will be your enlightenment. That is why doubt can be a good thing. If you are too sure, if you always have conviction, then you may be caught in your wrong perception for a long time. —Thich Nhat Hanh

Doubt is one of the major hindrances to the Buddhist way of life. This kind of doubt isn't a healthy questioning—everything can be questioned—but more of an indecision, a lack of conviction, a dithering that prevents one from practising wholeheartedly. Imagine you had to cross from one side of the country to the other. You could fly or drive or take the train but you can't decide which would be the best method, so you procastinate. Weeks go by and soon you could have crossed the country by walking if you had just set out in a timely way.

Confessions of a flip-flopper

So instead of doubting excessively, traits like decisiveness, confidence, and faith are helpful. But it's not hard to understand why people—myself included—struggle with the bewildering range of traditions, practices, and interpretations that come under the heading of "Buddhism". It's even worse than that, since many of these practices denounce others and put forward logical reasons as to why their interpretations are correct. It can be the case that we end up agreeing with the last teacher we hear or the last book we read. Then we pick up the next book and suddenly our perspective flips. "Jhāna is not necessary", "Jhāna is essential", "Jhāna doesn't mean what people think it means", "Mahasi noting is the way", "Actually, maybe I should go back to shikantaza".

On and on it can go. Sometimes I look at Buddhism and think, "This is a mess!" There are so many beautiful ideas but how do you prioritise them, why do contemporary teachers contradict each other, how exactly should it be practised? For some of us, this takes a lot of consideration. But maybe flip-flopping is preferable to becoming one of the true believers who push all (reasonable) doubts and forge on with the one and true way, decrying the false paths of others. Initially, I thought my propensity to cast around between practices was THE BAD KIND OF DOUBT but more than one dharma teacher has said that actually, maybe I'm just curious, and it can be helpful to have a broad foundation for one's explorations.

The need for plurality

What I'm getting at is that we need a plurality of voices and views. We need people trying different things. Buddhist scholar Sarah Shaw compares this to a forest in her book, Breathing Mindfulness: we need all kinds of plants, trees, and creatures for the ecosystem to be healthy. It is the same with dharma practice. There is room for scholars and yogis of all stripes.

Furthermore, the fact is that we cannot say with certainty what kinds of practices and techniques were used by the Buddha and his followers. The texts often describe principles rather than specific techniques, although there are exceptions such as the Ānapānāsati Sutta (Discourse on Mindfulness of Breathing). Buddhism might be a broader and more general system of ideas than people imagine from their silos.

By the time I was halfway through reading the Majjhima Nikaya (The Middle Length Discourses), I was surprised at how little discussion of meditation technique there was. Instead of technical, most of the Buddha's wisdom seemed attitudinal. It was about bringing care and wisdom to life, particularly, I thought, it was about responding from a position of equanimity: neither getting lost in the pleasant or caught up in aversion and resistance to the unpleasant. As an aside, that seems reminiscent of the Stoics, but it also leaves room for a multiplicity of practices.

The trouble with overly specific systems

And it occurs to me that...

The more specialised and specific any interpretation of Buddhism is, the more likely it is to veer from what the Buddha taught in those details.

Now, that's fine. A practice doesn't have to have been taught directly by the Buddha to be useful or to be Buddhist. But it also cannot then be the ONE TRUE PRACTICE. Zen practitioners are conceive of Buddhism in terms of radical doubt: doubt your perceptions, your value judgments, doubt your tradition, the stories you tell yourself... because what can you really know? Question your views, don't get fixed in any particular way of seeing. Buddhism is primarily, perhaps, about understanding more than any particular technique or experience.

WWSD: What Would Socrates Do?

Self-doubt is part of the Socratic method, too. We are to examine our beliefs and see whether they contradict each other. If they do, then it is up to us to ascertain which beliefs are dissonant. Socrates views this as a kind of therapy, as care for the psyche, and as vitally important work. I feel like this is very important generally, but also as a useful compass for integrating Buddhist ideas into our lives, and for the Buddhist community as a whole.

Socrates was very clear that we should see it as a great generosity when someone challenges our views because it just might help us correct an internal contradiction, and this would be of great long-term benefit.

People often feel that their way of doing things, seeing things is necessarily right. But we all operate from different frames of reference. If you grew up in the Great Depression, you would likely have a different attitude towards money than someone who grew up in the 1980s. But that's not to say that everyone is right and no one is wrong, only that most of the things we argue about are highly subjective. Which interpretations of Buddhism can we really say are the true Buddhism? Is that ultimately a question worth answering?

Perhaps we finally move beyond the unhelpful kind of doubt not when we have certainty but when we realise that we can never have certainty and that our best hope is to put one foot in front of the other, wholeheartedly, intelligently, and with faith.

The three imps

2025-06-04T00:00:00Z

Next time you're berating other drivers or complaining about the weather, reflect on whether your distress is the result of misguided expectations about life

The previous post hinted at the relationship between dependent arising and emptiness. That is, the teaching of how phenomena arise in dependence on other phenomena, which means that they are "empty of inherent existence" as the tradition phrases it. A thing cannot absolutely be itself if it depends on external conditions.

Today I want to talk about how we experience emptiness on a day-to-day basis in terms of the three characteristics. I think this would be a useful perspective for many people to have. In Buddhist traditions, the three characteristics of conditioned existence are said to be:

Dukkha (suffering, unsatisfactoriness, imperfection)
Anicca (impermanence, inconstancy)
Anattā (Not self, impersonality).

The three imps

I like to call these the three imps: imperfection, impermanence, and impersonality. It's often explained that everything is impermanent and what is impermanent cannot ultimately satisfy, nor can it constitute a sovereign self that is independent from the conditions of the world. We can argue whether these really are true descriptions of reality across all times and places, but what is undeniable is that they broadly characterise many of our experiences in life—especially if our expectations are unrealistic.

These three are all consequences of emptiness: the fact that conditions are always changing and are "empty" of any fixed way of being. Nothing is quite dependable, nothing is quite certain. If our happiness depends on good weather, or a stock market rally, we might be disappointed. And even if luck is with us, we may be anxious because we know that good fortune can be reversed.

This might seem like a pessimistic way of looking at life, but in fact it frees us from a lot of negativity. The ancient Stoics, for example, recommended envisaging hardships as a way of pricing them in, rehearsing for them, and appreciating what we have. However optmistic our view of life, we all know that sickness, old age, and death are realities. This life is provisional. It is conditional, and we are not in control of these conditions. The conditions of life are indifferent to us.

But reflecting on these three characteristics can save us a lot of trouble and heartache. We're less likely to be taken in by the promises of marketers and more likely to seek quiet pleasures, contemplation, and to serve others where we can. Meditating and being mindful of these aspects of life is also said to bring profound insights and freedom. In many ways, noticing stress, impermanence, and impersonality is the subtext of many forms of mindfulness practice.

Are there exceptions to the three characteristics?

Interestingly, the Buddha described nibbāna (the end of suffering) as being anattā, impersonal, but the other two characteristics of suffering and impermanence do not apply. The reason for this is said to be that nibbāna is not a conditioned phenomenon. To say that something is conditioned is to say that it depends on, consists of, or is influenced by external factors. There are objections to this understanding of nibbāna as "the unconditioned", however.

The Buddha also stated that virtue, one's good karma, follows one from life to life, which I read as agreeing with the Stoic assessment that virtue is the only good: the one thing really worth possessing. I'm not an expert on this but I feel that when the Buddha said conditioned phenomena are unsatisfactory and impermanent, his intended targets were material posessions, wealth, power, and status: those kinds of conditions are vulnerable to change and don't necessarily create virtue or nobility of character.

I am sure that the Buddha also viewed virtue as conditioned, too, but it's also clear that virtue is a worthwhile good. Buddhism isn't a nihilistic teaching that "everything is suffering, nothing matters". It is actually trying to direct us towards those things that do matter, that are good: virtue, a peaceful and healthy mind, and wisdom.

Inside the hall of mirrors

2025-06-04T00:00:00Z

Imagine realising that what you had always thought to be yourself was only a reflection in a mirror. This post is about a way of looking at the elements of human experience as mutually dependent on each other, like a hall of mirrors.

The analogy of a mysterious machine

Imagine you are on a beautiful deserted island and you find a machine not far from the beach, nestled in a grove of palm trees. The machine is in pieces and it's hard to tell what its intended effect is. Some of the pieces you recognise. There's a funnel, a flask, some kind of heating apparatus, levers and dials, various pipes. But you can't figure out the process, what goes where, what depends on what, what has an effect on what.

As you make your way further into the island, you find a cave, and in that cave is another machine. This one has the same pieces as the first, but it's intact. Now you can see that there is a receptacle for water, you can see that dependent on sea water entering the system steam can be created and cooled, and dependent on cooling the steam, fresh water is produced. It's a desalination device.

Understanding the human experience

The Buddha described human experience with a list of five "aggregates", five key features of our experience we can recognise: form, feeling tone, perception, mental formations, and consciousness. Like the machine on the desert island, they are parts of a complex system.

This teaching on the aggregates is often given as a list, and the instruction is to relate to each of the five things in that list as not constituting an unchanging self. But I think that doesn't really capture the dynamic, systemic nature of Buddhist thought. One of the Buddha's key insights was that of dependent arising: that everything depends on at least one other condition for its existence. For example, the sight of a flower arises dependent on the eye, the light, the flower, and consciousness.

It recently struck me that we can see the aggregates as a chain of dependencies. This was very much how the Buddha thought. Each of these is not a self because it depends on the other aggregates, which also do not constitute a self in the way that we imagine. And when we say that these elements of our experience do not add up to a self, it's like saying that experience is mutable, and empty of thingness. Things change. There is no label on atoms and molecules declaring them to be inherently part of a lamppost or a coffee mug. But we forget this. We see in conceptual categories and not the reality as it is.

The aggregates as dependencies

Let's take a look at the aggregates through the lens of dependent arising. Even though they are all mutually dependent, I think it can be helpful to run through them in order as part of our meditation practice.

Form is not self. For example, think of the hardness of your teeth: they are physical matter, bone. But what does our experience of form depend on? Consciousness: we need to be aware to experience this perception of form.
Dependent on form (and other factors) there are feeling tones.
Dependent on feeling tones we make all kinds of perceptions.
Dependent on the perceptions we have, all kinds of thoughts, feelings, views, mental models arise.
Dependent on these mental formations—and all of the above—we experience consciousness. Consciousness depends on something to be conscious of, therefore consciousness cannot be a self. It is another dependently arisen phenomenon.

And then we might ask what depends on consciousness? One answer might be our experience of form. So the whole thing is circular, a snake eating its own tail.

When we look at the constituent parts of our experience we find a hall of mirrors. Each mirror is dependent on the image in another mirror, and when you take that away the whole illusion collapses.

This is the same circularity we find in the teaching on dependent arising, in which consciousness and nama-rupa (name and form) are mutually dependent. And what is mutually dependent is a kind of magic trick. There isn't a foundational reality to it.

I feel that this is the heart of the Buddha's teaching, and what has historically been unique to Buddhism. In practising this way, meditating and reflecting on it, we experience a kind of coolness and peace. It is a state of less fabrication. Instead of our usual habit of creating a self out of our thoughts, feelings, and perceptions we see the machine at work fabricating its conceptual illusions. The reality is more open and alive.

True rest

2025-05-07T00:00:00Z

Restlessness is one of the hindrances. We need to rest.

It’s interesting that an always-on culture has interpreted restlessness as being purely a mental agitation, a habit to be corrected instead of being an actual need to rest, physically and mentally. This is a cultural blind spot for us. If we hear the dhamma filtered through our cultural conditioning, we will hear something like, "Keep striving. Keep inhaling dhamma. Keep working. Keep practising. Be more productive. Can you fit in more meditation here? What about if you got up earlier? You could listen to a dhamma talk while doing that. If you are more efficient your practice would go further." With such a mindset, we don’t prioritise rest. Rest should be the default state.

Rest supports virtue. We are most likely to be irritable, short-tempered when lacking rest. Rest gives us the energy to do good works. Rest supports the ability to focus the mind. If you want to focus, you will need periods of rest and relaxed attention. It has been shown that periods of open, uncontrolled attention and mind-wandering support the mind to focus. It's very natural for the mind to switch between these two modes. And we might think of the jhānas as progressively deeper states of rest.

Rest is itself an act of wisdom, of letting go, of recognising our limits. We can reflect that rest is free from craving. This goes to the heart of the four noble truths. We put down our ambitions and obligations. We come back to the moment and just be. We're not using objects to produce pleasure. I think this is key. We often get caught in the trap, in this entertainment age, of constantly looking for stimulation, using our digital tools to sequence continual hits of dopamine until we forget what true rest is. We forget how to rest in unperturbed awareness, how awareness can rest in itself. We are always doing, always seeking, always craving.

What does it mean to truly rest?

Creating space: inclusion in the dharma

2025-04-02T00:00:00Z

Who is the dharma for?

If the dharma isn't for everyone who shows an interest, then something has gone astray. Fundamentally, a teaching about the emptiness of all phenomena—about the lack of a fixed reality to any distinctions we make—should not be in the business of harmful discrimination. To discriminate on the grounds of a person's characteristics is clearly harmful and against the ethical precepts. This is to say nothing of the intention to have mettā towards all beings. Inclusion should have been baked into the dharma since the Buddha's decisions to ordain women, and to include members of all castes equally in the sangha. Sadly, this has not always been borne out in the history of Buddhism and the structures in which we encounter the dharma today.

Though I don't necessarily have the temperament of an activist, I've felt a sense of justice since my teenage years. It seems ugly to me that people should be excluded or overlooked because of personal characteristics. However, I recognise that unconscious bias does exist. We also live in societies that are shaped by history and power structures that perpetuate systemic biases. We may not always see systemic oppression because it's systemic; it's part of the water that we swim in. What do we mean by that? Look around you. These realities are present in the dharma hall, in the meditation group, in who gets a voice, in who gets published, in whose books get promoted, in whose books sell, and ultimately in who sees themselves reflected in the teacher, who feels the path is relevant to them.

For example, it may be very daunting for an autistic person to attend a meditation group and to speak up whilst there. Imagine a feeling of sensory overwhelm as chairs scrape, lights flicker, and people catch-up. Compounding this, the intentions and emotions of the people around you seem mysterious to you. The group has unspoken rules, too, about when to talk, when to be quiet, the kinds of things you share and don't share. There may be some traumatic associations around, too. Yet for this person, the group may be a relatively safe source of connection and community. We can be sensitive to the different needs of others, and hold things lightly when they don't accord to our views about conduct, etiquette, and practice. We can let go of "the right way" and explore what is needed in the moment to support kindness and awareness.

Empathy

This is not always easy. We may have a limited understanding of others' experience depending on our own life story. I'm not usually one to espouse the benefits of social media but it has created a space where we are exposed to lives that are different to our own, and this can help to broaden all of our horizons. Mastodon has diverse and wonderfully niche communities, without the algorithmically generated binfires of commercial social media. When we have the opportunity to meet with those who have a different experience to our own, especially in real life, we should treat that as valuable.

We also have to recognise that people may feel less comfortable in social groups where their characteristics are not widely represented, or represented at all. It's on us to create a space in which people feel welcome and valued, and that their voice is valid. This can be a workout for our empathy muscle: "How would I feel if the situation were inverted?"—but even this isn't quite enough, a better question isn't how I would feel, but...

How might they feel?

For example, I haven't had much contact with transgender and non-binary people, and so I have to be careful about presuming what their experience is like. I can extend a friendly openness and be willing to listen and learn. This is itself a practice.

Can we be fully present?
Can we put down our own perspective and see things from another's perspective?
Can we show an interest, show empathy, and not just interpret everything that's being said through our own mental models and pet theories?
Can we be careful around giving advice when it hasn't been asked for?

Freedom from views about self and other

Our practice of inclusion can't be about about a victim/rescuer dynamic either. This applies to other dharma contexts too, such as the student/teacher relationship. For a teacher, it's presumably quite tempting sometimes to reach over and try to rescue the student—"You need to do it my way"—and so inadvertently reinforce a power dynamic. I'm not sure what the answer is but I feel that in both cases it has something to do with creating space: space for others to step into their power, space for receptivity, space for emptiness, space for the dharma. We don't rush to fill the space with answers, with expertise, with advice, with self.

Of course, we can step forward when our expertise are called for. But we also want to recognise where others are the experts and we are not, or when others have a different perspective to share. We can be aware of our social location and recognise when someone else could take a turn. Unfortunately, all of us—even men!—likely know the experience of being "mansplained" to. Sometimes people—myself included—have a need to eat up all the space in a relationship, to be seen as the expert, to be the one who has it together, to be the rescuer, to know how things are. This often comes from a place of insecurity and is, of course, the activity of selfing. We don't have to judge that but it's something to relax and let go of. And then what do we find? Peace: "Ah, I don't need to do that. I don't need to be seen that way." Freedom. A pleasant coolness.

When we exclude someone on the basis of who they are, there is implicitly a puffed up sense of "Who I am" and "Why I deserve better treatment". The sense of self is never quite secure because it can't be: it's a house of cards. So one way in which it attempts to find security is in placing itself above others. This is something to be wise to. It doesn't end well. Self-aggrandisement may be conscious or unconscious but it's exactly the kind of blind spot that the dharma should be brought to bear on.

So, it’s good to challenge ourselves: are we really being inclusive? Ignorance by its nature conceals itself. And since prejudice is a form of ignorance, we don’t necessarily know it is there or see the harm of it. We may believe we are inclusive... but of course, we would, wouldn’t we? So questioning this—and seeing how we can stretch ourselves—is one way of developing a greater awareness of the self sense and our sense of others. This goes right to the heart of the dharma and is a practice rooted in awareness and compassion.

Refuge in wakefulness

2025-03-25T00:00:00Z

What do we take refuge in? What is it wise to take refuge in?

In Buddhism, it is said that there are three refuges we could rely on: buddha, dhamma, and sangha. We can understand these as:

The wakeful mind (Buddha)
The teachings that lead to a wakeful mind (dhamma)
The community of practitioners that value and help each other to develop wakefulness (sangha).

So, what do I take refuge in? It's true that, on a deep and sometimes abstract level, I take refuge in Buddha, dhamma, and sangha. The wakeful, nonclinging mind is something I really appreciate when it's here.

I dive into these ancient teachings with fascination, though recently I have wondered if reading and thinking less about the teachings—obsessing less—would help. My old poetry professor swore that he couldn't write poetry during the six months of the year when he was teaching poetry. To teach, he felt, meant taking the poetry mechanism apart to probe its workings, whereby it could no longer function. He said it was the same for every poet–teacher he knew. Maybe the same applies to the dharma.

Finally, the community of practitioners can be a great resource when it's functioning well, and I love my dhamma friends and having people to talk about and practice these ideas with.

Here it comes...

If I'm honest though, I do take refuge in a few things that I know aren't reliable and perhaps take energy away from places where it would be better used. I like tinkering with computers. I like playing video games with my friends. I probably put too much time into little projects like this website or making videos. I like the intellectual stimulation of these activities. Some of this I feel is in the process of relaxing. The compulsion and drivenness are weaker and there is more awareness, more space around what I'm doing.

There is also the momentary kind of refuge we try to take in sensory pleasure. When I'm tired of sitting down and squeezing my brain at the laptop, it's easy to wander over to the snack cupboard for a boost in energy and stimulation. But these days I find I don't get that much from a nice taste. Coffee is about the only thing that does it, and it has to be good coffee. I used to get a lot from alcohol-free beer and chocolate increasingly feel indifferent. I enjoy a good meal with fresh veg, a curry, a nice sandwich, but the pleasure from this is fleeting and not a basis for obsession or meaning. On the other hand, maybe I could try to savour and appreciate these experiences more.

Disenchantment is actually quite nice

This may seem like a diminishment but I see it as a disenchantment, a loss of interest in the trivial and temporary, and less suffering and preoccupation. When we hear the word "disenchantment", life may seem glum or prosaic. But actually, it's a freedom from all the crazy investments we make, the ideas and insistences that will never pay off. It's freedom from getting snagged in the reeds again. Life and awareness flow smoothly downriver, for a time at least.

Furthermore, preoccupation with the senses is replaced, often, by a coolness and a peace and contentment that is more healing and pleasant than obsession—whether with food, games, drama, doomscrolling. These things have their value, but they are not a refuge. They cannot solve your existential problems and, if mishandled, drain energy from the reflections and deepening in stillness that actually helps.

So I do feel that Buddha, dhamma, sangha are a truer refuge, a better place to look for happiness, than optimising all the ever–changing boring details of the world. Of course we still care, we still act, but we don't look for refuge in the world being a certain way.

The hindrances are the lever; the obstacle is the way

2025-03-12T00:00:00Z

There is no wisdom in attacking a well-defended king if you are only moves away from being checkmated yourself. In game theory, a minimax strategy seeks to rule out your worst outcome. It means minimising the maximum you can lose. It's an inverted way of approaching our goals. Instead of reaching for the highest, we protect ourselves from the most unwanted outcomes first. Game theorists von Neumann and Morgenstern showed that this strategy is optimal for zero-sum games.

If we take a minimax approach to meditation, then the best path to take is minimising the hindrances and defilements (greed, hatred, and delusion). It's interesting that many disparate interpretations of Buddhism share this emphasis. Interesting, too, that the absence of the hindrances is one of the significant marks of access concentration and jhāna.

So rather than aiming directly for the highest results in practice, the minimax strategy would ask us to we close the door on the hindrances and work our way upwards in a stepwise fashion. The question to ask, then, over and over is...

Where am I stuck?

Then we resolve that stuckness, which may include bringing in an obstacle’s beautiful opposite.

I think looking at things this way also reconciles proactive and passive approaches to the path. Those that emphasise not clinging and grasping may be pointing in the same direction to those more direct practices—but the way of getting there is to take care of, and clean up, the hindrances—those tendencies that are most holding us back. I think of it like a ship: there's no point having the finest sails if you're holed below the waterline. And, when we apply this to meditation, it seems that healing the hindrances in some senses is not just a prerequisite for deeper practice but itself is deeper practice.

Finally, when you think about it, this via negativa method is often explicit in the Pali texts. We are told that non-greed, non-hatred is the way. Progress is often stated in the terms of the absence of the unwholesome. The four noble truths, even, are framed in terms of a minimax strategy: resolving the problem of suffering.

The impediment to action advances action.
—Marcus Aurelius

Ideas on how to work with hindrances

Having agreed that it's a good idea to prioritise your liabilities, it's going to take some reflection and mindfulness to know what these are and when they are present. When hindrances arise the first step is to be aware of it. We might then reflect on the gratification we get, and the drawbacks of this problem. We might also reflect on what conditions this mind state and what is conditioned by it.

This being, that becomes;
from the arising of this, that arises.
This not being, that does not become;
from the ceasing of this, that ceases.

This formulation of conditionality is said to be the essence of the dharma. So, what condition causes aversion to arise in its presence and cease in its absence? What does aversion, in turn, cause to arise? What ceases when aversion is no longer present? In this way, the heart learns about the emptiness of the hindrance and its undesirable effects.

The great game

But hold on, you say, meditation is not a zero-sum game. Do you remember image of the knight playing chess against Death in Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal? Is that not similar to the Buddha's struggle against Mara? There is a concept in game theory known as "move by nature", which encompasses the way it can often feel like the world responds to our actions with countermoves. Perhaps we are in a kind of game where we move a step higher before Mara pushes us two steps backwards. But perhaps with our vulnerabilities healed, it will eventually be Mara who struggles to protect his king.

Three functions of the citta

2025-02-19T00:00:00Z

I recently came across some notes I had made on the three functions of the citta, what translators refer to as "the heart-mind". I'm not sure where this teaching comes from, but I suspect it's linked to the Thai Forest tradition. The three main functions of the citta are described as:

Feeling sensory impingement.
Responding to sensory impingement.
Understanding.

Now, the interesting piece is that when the citta is occupied with the first two functions there is less capacity for the third, understanding. So by cultivating renunciation and samadhi, we increase the capacity for insight and letting go.

I suppose there is a limit to what I can do about sensory impingement, living a busy family life, with friends, in an overstimulated world. But I can have some control over how I respond to sensory impacts. Seeing sensations come and go without getting involved is more restful for the citta than fighting against them or craving after them. I have a lot of work I can do there.

There is also the thought that although meditating in a remote cave is no doubt conducive to deep practice, it is presumably leaning heavily into reducing sensory impingement. In that case, we might still need to learn the skill of letting go in busy sensory environments. As someone who is quite probably neurodivergent, I can see the benefits in both reducing sensory impacts and learning to ride the waves.

A meditation on the Brahmaviharas

2025-02-17T00:00:00Z

I recently led a meditation on the four Brahmaviharas, tuning into their boundless aspect particularly. This is a style of Brahmavihara meditation that's based on the suttas, in which you don't find the stock phrases about sending metta to various categories of beings.

Radiating the Brahamaviharas in the six directions.

Let's ground ourselves by feeling the contact between our body and the seat, or our feet on the floor.

We're going to meditate for about 20 minutes, progressing through each of the four Brahmaviharas. These are four qualities of the heart often known as "the divine abodes". They are:

goodwill or friendliness
compassion
joy, particularly joy for the wellbeing of others
equanimity.

We're going to imagine the heart as a lamp. This lamp has six glass sides with six shutters, and we can open each of these shutters one at a time to let the light radiate outwards in that direction:

in front of us
to the left of us
behind us
to the left of us
above us
below us.

As we do this, beginning with goodwill, we may feel that the heart wants to shift into the next Brahmavihara quality. This can be viewed as part of a natural progression.

Goodwill, friendliness

We start by bringing to mind a feeling of goodwill, letting that radiate from the heart in front of us. We then move through each of the six directions, allowing the quality to move out into the vast expanse around us.

Compassion

At some point the feeling of goodwill may wish to turn into compassion. Because we wish others well, we feel compassion when they suffer. We now radiate compassion in the six directions, one at a time. If the heart wishes to stay with the feeling of goodwill, this is fine.

Joy

Eventually, we may feel a sense of beauty in caring for others. The heart may feel uplifted. By opening to suffering we also open to the possibility of happiness, of joy. We can't close down to just one thing, so when we push suffering away, we also push joy away. Now we radiate joy in the six directions.

Equanimity

Having felt joy, and with the subsidence of that joy, the predominant feeling of the heart is one of peace. Coolness. Equanimity. A wise, loving awareness. We now reflect this in the six directions. And then, for the final part of this meditation, we radiate equanimity in all six directions at once.

Ending reflection

Open your eyes, come back to the room, to the feeling of the body sitting. And if you felt blocked at any part of that meditation—like there was a specific distraction, or you couldn't resonate with one of the heart qualities—then make a note of that, maybe write it down and reflect on how, if you return to this meditation in the future you might approach this difficulty.

Feedback I received from participants

Language of space and spaciousness might have helped to name that dimension of this meditation for people.
Spend more time grounding the body.
Reassure people that if they're not feeling the quality it's OK.
Might help to spend more time introducing compassion.
Well-timed and well-paced.
People seemed to enjoy the feel of it.
Thinking of the Brahmaviharas as flowing into each other was new and revelatory to people.

Searching for the essence

2025-01-29T00:00:00Z

As to methods, there may be a million and then some, but principles are few. Whoever grasps principles can successfully select their own methods. Those who try methods, ignoring principles, are sure to have trouble.

—Harrington Emerson.

What is the essence of Buddhism? What is the point of it? We could say, "nibbāna", but how do we understand that?

Kindness?
Being present?
Taking care of the heart?
Taming the heart?
Seeing emptiness?
Letting go?
Absorption?
Seeing impermanence, not self, dukkha?
Awareness?
Not clinging?

Which of these is the core aim? Which are principles? Which are methods? It's not always clear.

I was asking myself these questions this morning. Later, listening to Ajahn Amaro, there came a helpful reply:

The various practices we use—sitting meditation, walking meditation, restraining the senses, inner listening to the nada sound—these are all ways and means to sustain this quality of knowing, of wakefulness... awareness of this very citta (heart-mind).

—Ajahn Amaro.

Mindfulness as remembering to apply the teachings

2025-01-27T00:00:00Z

The word sati, which we translate as "mindfulness" can be understood as present-moment recollection. We remember to be in the present, yes, but sati also implies that we remember Buddhist teachings and bring them to bear on our current experience.

Sati means, for example, remembering the teaching on dependent arising to see how our perceptions are constructed, fabricated.

In this view, the important thing is, for example, to see that experience is fabricated through sensory contact and our interpretations of this. We remember to see that the sense of self—these thoughts about who I am, what I'm going to do—is secondary, not primary. It arises in dependence on conditions such as the body, consciousness, the senses, perceptions, and feelings. We remember to see that phenomena are conditioned and impermanent, and to regard them with a wholesome dispassion, without clinging, whether these phenomena are thoughts, an itch, an ice cream sundae, a volition to check social media (don't), a sunset, or the unpleasant feeling tone when we feel slighted. Mindfulness is to remember to bring wisdom to bear on all aspects of experience.

Healing the mind

2025-01-22T00:00:00Z

What are we trying to do in Buddhist practice?

One way to think about the Buddhist path is of taking care of the heart and mind. Socrates said that he was concerned with taking care of the psyche. Rob Burbea described so much of the practice as being concerned with taking care of the heart. Other traditions might talk about taking care of the soul... how does that phrase sit with you?

In Buddhism we talk about the citta, the heart-mind. We could say that when we crave after things or reject experience, we lose contact with the citta. We become absorbed in something that is not the citta. When we let go, when we are relaxed and present, we may sometimes feel the citta shining through our embodied experience. It is no longer occluded.

But in order for this to be perceptible, the mind needs to be in good condition. When we get wrapped up in things, when we insist, when we cling, when we push away, there is a subtle distortion of our perception. We're preoccupied. We're identified with things that obscure this relationship to our hearts. And that's OK, that's what it is to be in a body that has needs, that has an evolutionary history. But there is a way in which, as our understanding develops, we learn how to stay in this experience of the citta more and more.

One metaphor we can use to describe our minds is that of a mirror. We know that if a mirror is tarnished, if it has cracks or stains, it will reflect light imperfectly. It will distort. So we care about the condition of the mirror. And one way we can take care of the condition of our minds is by following the five precepts for lay people. These are explicitly said to be a rule of training. So they're not just nice to haves. They are the training.

The five lay precepts

I undertake a rule of training to refrain from:

Killing beings, or causing avoidable harm to them.
Taking what is not freely given.
Sexual misconduct.
False, harsh, malicious speech.
Intoxicants that cloud the mind.

We could unpack what each of these might mean in contemporary life, but many teachers already do this well, and I want to talk about how I see the context of these teachings.

So often we think of meditation techniques and nothing else, but these five precepts are the first and perhaps most important stage in taking care of the condition of our minds. If you imagine the Buddhist path as a pipeline, this is the very first stage of that pipeline. If the condition of the mind is already good at this beginning stage, it's likely to pay dividends as you progress through contemplation and meditation. If the mind is remorseful and untamed at this stage, you might have your work cut out if you attempt to work with other parts of the path: it will be a limiting factor, a bottleneck.

So by observing the precepts we heal our minds from these gross distortions, these big problems that are going to make it very difficult to feel the citta, the heart-mind, shining happily and brightly and equanimously. We've mended the big cracks in the mirror. But there is further to go, we can get more subtle... and that's where another list comes in.

The hindrances

The hindrances are a list of five distortions that we can be aware of and protect the mind from. To do so requires mindfulness of mind. We need to be aware of what is arising in experience and whether we are fusing with the contents of our minds, which will obscure the citta. The hindrances are:

Sensual desire
Ill will
Restlessness and worry
Sloth and torpor
Doubt.

In a way, these are obsessive patterns. And we could consider working with the hindrances as a refinement of the precepts. OK, so you aren't stealing things that you lust after... but are you still thinking thoughts of sensual desire? OK, so you aren't killing beings or speaking inappropriately to them... but are you harbouring ill will towards them in your heart and mind? If so, then your mind is perhaps not in the kind of condition where it will feel and perceive the freedom and ease of a well-tamed citta.

What about meditation then?

It can be easy to relate to the hindrances simply as technical obstacles to meditation: that one learns the recipe for working with and then your meditation will finally take off. No, we can think of working with the hindrances as the practice itself. We perceive when the hindrances are present (mindfulness of mind again) and work skillfully with them (with kindness, awareness, interest but also not letting them run the show). For example, we can contemplate the drawbacks of sensual desire. Eventually, we can turn away from the hindrances.

As we turn away from the hindrances, the mind is now in a very good condition. We are relaxed, feeling whole, responsive, kind, aware. The phrase that is used is that we are "secluded from the hindrances", but this can happen in the middle of a social situation. It is an internal seclusion (though outward seclusion can help in developing this understanding, of course).

Perhaps when we feel this way on a meditation retreat, it is because the external conditions of the retreat have helped to heal our mind by removing the kinds of objects that lead to precepts being broken and hindrances arising. When the container of the retreat is taken away, if the mind is allowed to wander in unhelpful pastures, without sense restraint, then the occlusions and distortions return. We fall out of contact with the citta. But if we understand what is good for the mind and what is not, we won't be so ready to fall into the old grooves of ill will or preoccupation with sensual desires. And if we become familiar with the joy and equanimity of a healthy mind and heart, we probably won't be so interested in those objects anymore.

So this is a different picture to the one we often pick up: the picture of meditation as a technique of locking onto the breath, or clearing away all thoughts. Those things might provide a temporary relief because they temporarily put the mind into a condition where it isn't troubled by distortions and preoccupations that affect its clarity. And maybe developing that kind of clarity does help us to see that things can be different, and to appreciate the citta and the pleasure of an untroubled mind. But the key thing is: have we understood what makes the mind healthy and whole? Because if we haven't really understood, then we're going to struggle in situations where we're not able to produce these effects through focusing on breathing, for example.

It's beyond the scope of this piece to then define what meditation is or should be, but I think it becomes about right effort. We are mindful of what's happening, particularly the condition of our minds, and what's going on with the world of sense contact and feeling tone (dependent arising). We perceive unskillful patterns and bring in wholesome qualities instead. And we do this with a consistency that develops wholeness and clarity. And yes, absolutely, it may be that we rest with the breath to support this and to steady the mind, so that we can rest with the citta, so we can feel what is needed. But all this is taking place on the foundation of caring for the mind across the whole of our lives using the precepts and working with the hindrances. Otherwise, it's like respraying a car with a cracked engine block. We need to take care of the engine first.

But it's interesting to consider the implications of this, too, that the jhāna of the suttas might not be exclusively about a technique of absorbing the mind in an object but could refer to a broad range states in which the mind is in a good condition and able to dwell in the pīti and sukha (rapture and happiness) of the citta. This would perhaps explain a few things, such as the following statement:

If, mendicants, a mendicant develops a mind of love for even as long as a finger-snap, they’re called a mendicant who does not lack [jhāna], who follows the Teacher’s instructions, who responds to advice, and who does not eat the country’s alms in vain. How much more so those who make much of it!

—AN 1:53, translated by Bhikkhu Sujato (I left jhāna untranslated).

How does this look in lay life?

Now, you are probably a lay person, I'm a lay person, and so the question arises that perhaps we can't avoid certain kinds of sensual pleasure or difficult people, for example. But the key thing for us is the internal attitude. The way I square this is that we may spend time cooking a lovely meal that's going to taste really nice. That's fine in many ways. It may be even better to cook this meal to bring joy to others, to keep our bodies healthy, to sustain ourselves etc. We don't have too heavy on this but it's probably going to feel better than being preoccupied by the taste and allowing an obsession with the pleasure of that to strongly influence the mind. You can extrapolate this example to other forms of sensual pleasure: we may be wise to bring in awareness, and this will help a wise relationship emerge. Through the process of maturation and practice, we naturally come to appreciate more refined pleasures like peacefulness. Likewise, it's going to feel better to address problems with difficult people pragmatically, rather than polluting the mind with fulminations and grief.

A good way of understanding the path?

This is a way of thinking about Buddhist practice that seems to work for me. It's influenced by the Thai Forest tradition, my experiences on retreat and in life and, recently, the teachings of Nyanamoli Thero. There are other ways to conceive of practice, for sure, but I do find this one internally consistent and borne out in experience so far. It also seems quite consistent with the suttas (early texts) to me. When I read the Majjhima Nikaya, I see a lot about receiving experience with equanimity, not letting the pleasant and unpleasant overwhelm your mind, and a lot about conduct. We read of a gradual training in which a practitioner's understanding of what makes the mind healthy and whole, and what does not, grows dramatically until they finally know the highest happiness of peace.

Addendum: sense restraint in lay life

It can be tricky trying to translate Buddhist monastic guidance into lay life. Lay life can be filled with all kinds of pressures, it isn't just a feast of sensory pleasures. If you're a parent and have a job, you may spend all but a tiny fraction of the day serving the needs of others and not really finding a moment to relax let alone for indulgent pleasures. So I think that this are needs careful consideration.

Sense restraint needs to be a process of inquiry that is kept alive. If we make a hard and fast rule and never think about what we're doing, is the heart really learning anything? On the other hand, if we indulge in every sense pleasure we will equally not be learning anything and we will get into trouble. The sweet spot is the place where we are in touch with our hearts and able to see what is needed. If we squeeze too tightly we may become dejected and depressed, joyless; if we don't exert any reason or control or see the danger in sense pleasures the heart will become wild and greedy and life will go off the rails. If there isn't greed present, if there is moderation and restraint, perhaps this is the middle way. I feel like this might be part of what the Buddha discovered when reflecting on his experience as a boy under the rose apple tree.

Not too tight, not too loose, enjoying the present moment without grasping or clinging.

In terms of working with the hindrances, I am probably less about applying techniques to "get rid of" them and more about being aware of what's present, reflecting on the drawback or benefits of that state, supporting the wholesome and not relenting to the unwholesome until it dissipates. And sometimes reflection can really help when we need something to dissipate. We see its drawback, we see its emptiness, its insubstantiality. And we let go. The hindrances are in many ways our teachers and exactly the place where we need to work. From this point of view, there is no shortcut, no ignoring them, no skipping past them.

By way of example, here are some notes I made on a retreat in 2023, in the process of discovering this relationship to the citta, and how I'd worked with drowsiness and doubt.

My practice is listening to the citta: what is the mind state like right now? Not telling the citta what it has to be like. Not trying to create states. Giving the citta attention and letting it respond to that, however it is. That’s what works for me. Just now was drowsy for ages, kept checking in periodically, then staying with the heart state. Mindfulness of heart.

Befriending the citta, listening to the citta, having a relationship to the citta. When I realised I would have this relationship to the citta forever, there was a lot of happiness.

In a way, this retreat has removed doubt about how to practice. I've tried a lot of practices. What ultimately worked was listening to the citta, not manipulating it. The greatest gift is to be in touch with your heart.

Not clinging to anything in the world: understanding the Satipatthana refrain

2025-01-21T00:00:00Z

The Satipatthana Sutta is perhaps the central meditation text in the Insight Meditation tradition. It outlines four domains in which we can be mindful:

body
feeling tone
mind
dhammas / frameworks.

Each of these has subcategories. But today I want to focus on how we interpret and practice the sutta’s instructions, particularly in the refrain. We're asking the question: what is samma sati—appropriate or skilful mindfulness—as the Buddha envisaged it?

Assumptions we might have about satipatthana

It's worth examining what we think these instructions are telling us. This is clearly a practice of knowing what we experience as we experience it. But why?

If we don’t think too much about it, we can read satipatthana as an instruction simply to really watch these objects really closely, as if the magic is in the object. Like if we’re mindful enough of the breath we’ll find a secret hidden in it, or at least find some respite in the present moment.
We can also see these as a series of contemplations to run through systematically. But as we’ll see, there are specific ways in which we are asked to contemplate.
Or we relate to these lists as objects of concentration. Sometimes we might feel as though the point is purely to gather the mind and experience a bit of stillness before heading back into the busy world.
We can also see this as a list of categories from which experience is constructed, supporting insight.

These are all fine and valid perspectives. Yet I feel there is an essential point of satipatthana which, if overlooked, I feel we'll be missing the point of the practice: not clinging, or we could say letting go.

A unique text

The Buddha is described as naming Satipatthana as a the direct path to realisation, and the sutta ends with an emphatic encouragement that practising this continuously for seven days results in full awakening. So clearly the sutta warrants a careful look to make sure we’re not just practicing from our assumptions about it. What is special about this sutta that warrants this kind of description? What does it say about the essence of Buddhism?

The refrain

To answer these questions, I want to look in particular at the refrain that occurs 13 times at key junctures throughout the Sutta. In many ways it is the heart of the text because it tells us what to do with the objects listed by the sutta.

Here is the refrain as it appears in relation to mindfulness of mind. I've broken it up into bullet points.

In this way, in regard to the mind we abide contemplating the mind internally ... externally ... internally and externally.

One abides contemplating the nature of arising... of passing away ... of both arising and passing away in regard to the mind.

Mindfulness that 'there is a mind' is established in oneself to the extent necessary for bare knowledge and continuous mindfulness.

And we abide independent, not clinging to anything in the world.

That is how in regard to the mind we abide contemplating the mind.

—Bhikkhu Analayo, Satipatthana: the Direct Path to Realisation, p. 8.

And again, in a translation by Bhikkhu Sujato.

And so they meditate observing an aspect of the body internally, externally, and both internally and externally. They meditate observing the body as liable to originate, as liable to vanish, and as liable to both originate and vanish. Or mindfulness is established that the body exists, to the extent necessary for knowledge and mindfulness. They meditate independent, not grasping at anything in the world.

—Bhikkhu Sujato, MN 10.

Let's unpack this refrain. In the following, X refers to whichever domain of mindfulness we are referring to. It could be body, feeling tones, mind, dhammas, or some subcategory of these.

Contemplating X internally, externally, and both internally and externally

What do we think this means? This refers to contemplating our topic in ourselves, in others, and both in ourselves and others--presumably at the same time.

Contemplating the nature of arising, passing away, and both arising and passing away in regard to X

Fairly self explanatory, I think. Notice how contemplating impermanence is actually central to satipatthana practice but it often gets somewhat sidelined as it's so easy to focus on the object and forget how we're being asked to attend to that object, what we are supposed to be noticing. We'll come back to this.

It also seems to me that of all the pieces in the refrain this is the most active task. The others are somewhat fulfilled by virtue of us practicing. This is something we can very much choose to do. It’s not presented as a passive result of practice but as a contemplation, a task to be performed.

Mindfulness that there is X to the extent necessary for bare knowledge and continuous mindfulness

It seems like we have a middle way here: enough mindfulness is present to keep us in this state of knowing, non-clinging, and of letting things arise and pass - but it doesn't seem to be about fixating on an object or knowing every detail about that object.

I want to say a bit more about bare awareness here using two quotes from the monk and scholar, Nyanaponika Thera, that are found in Bhikkhu Analayo's book, The Signless and the Deathless.

Bare Attention is the clear and single-minded awareness of what actually happens to us and in us, at the successive moments of perception. It is called "bare", because it attends just to the bare facts of a perception as presented either through the five physical senses or through the mind which, for Buddhist thought, constitutes the sixth sense. When attending to that six-fold sense impression, attention or mindfulness is kept to a bare registering of the facts observed, without reacting to them by deed, speech or by mental comment, which may be one of self-reference (like, dislike, etc.), judgement or reflection. If during the time, short or long, given to the practice of Bare Attention, any such comments arise in one's mind, they themselves are made objects of Bare Attention.

—Nyanaponika Thera (1962/1992, 30) in Analayo, The Signless and the Deathless.

Particularly in an age like ours, with its superstitious worship of ceaseless external activity, there will be those who ask: "How can such a passive attitude of mind as that of bare attention possibly lead to the great results claimed for it?" In reply, one may be inclined to suggest to the questioner not to rely on the words of others, but to put these assertions... to the test of personal experience.

—Nanaponika Thera (1968/1986, 4) in Analayo, The Signless and the Deathless.

I feel like bare awareness might often be a more useful term to use than “mindfulness”, although the two are not interchangeable and bare awareness is an aspect of the latter. Yet ”be mindful” is actually not a very specific instruction at all, it’s more than a little vague and is intended differently by different teachers even within the same traditions. If we know what is meant by bare awareness, that’s a pretty specific task and one that will satisfy many of the requirements I think we’re looking to fulfill.

We are also asked to be mindful with a certain continuity, which we can interpret as a steady and persistent inclination to be aware of what is happening at the level of bare awareness: not proliferating but being present to experience. Noticing, "Ah, there is a strong feeling tone here," for example.

Abiding independent, not clinging to anything in the world

Again, this seems to be saying that we are mindful of the object but not grasping it. We are riding the waves of experience, knowing them, but letting them pass through. We are not trying to fix attention on them. There is no refuge in any of these conditioned experiences. We are independent from them.

Perhaps we are beginning to see the difference here between the fixed concentration-only ascetic practices that the Buddha learned as a seeker, and his experience under the rose apple tree in which he discovered a samadhi that was based on a relaxed mindful awareness.

What does this mean in practice?

To summarise what the refrain may be telling us, the purpose of mindfulness of these domains seems to be to:

stabilise the mind so that we don't drift off into fantasy.
familiarise ourselves with the constituents of experience.
provide the experience of arising and passing so that we can understand impermanence (and unsatisfactoriness and not self) but, ultimately...
these are objects not to be clung to because the essence of Buddhist meditation is letting go, of not making a self from any of object of experience. We abide independent of the object. Not clinging. Not identifying. In other words, letting go.

The Anapanasati Sutta (MN 118) gives us a model of how this works in practice.

4 x lines on body
4 x lines on feeling tones
4 x lines on mind
4 x dhammas, starting with impermanence, culminating in letting go.

The heart of the path is quite easy. There's no need to explain anything at length. Let go of love and hate and let things be. That's all that I do in my own practice.

—Ajahn Chah.

What are we letting go of?

In brief, we're letting go our insistence that life accords to our preferences. And we are also letting go of the idea that any of these subcategories could be a refuge. They are impermanent, ultimately unsatisfactory, and not self. There is an interesting and somewhat niche word in the texts, atammayatā, which translates as "Not made of that." And I think it applies here.

So we are not clinging to any of these experiences listed in the sutta. We are allowing them to arise and pass, we are not made of that. There may be an unsurpassed mind, for example, but I am “not made of that.” In other words, we can’t cling to it and make a self out of it.

We are staying with experience but not necessarily a single object

Although the attitude is one of letting go, we are not using that as a bypass to avoid feeling difficulty. Sometimes it may be beneficial to stay with an experience even though it is uncomfortable. We are staying with our experience as it is, with some leeway tuning into various aspects of that experience as intuitive and helpful. The objects in that experience may change, but we are staying present to the flow of experience with bare awareness.

If we stay with a single object, cultivating a seemingly permanent perception of that object, we will get a certain kind of concentration. For some of these objects it would be a case of staying with the absence of that object.
If we take an attitude of letting go, it seems to me that we are closer to fulfilling the conditions of the satipatthana refrain.

When we are with the flow of experience:

We are not making a self out of our experience or that of others’.
We are in a position of acceptance to what comes.
We aren’t clinging or trying to control or create experiences, though we may influence the flow.

I think we can see that there is a difference of intention between the idea that we glue our attention to these objects—fixation, concentration—versus a non-clinging awareness that knows objects to an appropriate extent, knows their transience, and releases them effortlessly. We can see what is helpful in the moment.

If you let go a little you will have a little happiness. If you let go a lot you will have a lot of happiness. If you let go completely you will be free.

—Ajahn Chah.

Not clinging is the ideal, not necessarily always the reality

We may not be able to experience this ideal in this particular sitting or moment. It’s also something that will likely become more available as practice matures. When we can’t access non-clinging it may become accessible if we ground ourselves in the body; work with feeling tone, especially the pleasant; and observe the condition of the mind. We can also work with the dhamma frameworks to this end.

How might this look on the cushion?

In my own practice, I currently like to work through the satipatthanas broadly at the top level: body, feeling tone, mind—noticing whatever is prominent within these domains—and then bring in a dhamma theme.

I steady the mind by grounding in the body, and perhaps observing whichever aspects of the body feel prominent.
I bring awareness to feeling tone. It doesn't hurt to notice pleasant feeling tones if they are around, to counteract the mind's negativity bias and help soothe the mind and relax the body.
I notice the condition of the mind, where it is pulled, how fragmented or gathered it is, what it needs to settle further etc, and the impermanence and conditioned nature of mind states.

And the attitude we can have as we do this is itself a dhamma perspective. This is demonstrated in the texts as follows:

such is material form, such its arising, such its passing away.
such is feeling tone, such its arising, such its passing away.
such are mental states, such their arising, such their passing away.

We notice the "signs" of objects arising and we let go. We allow phenomena to arise and pass without clinging.

It's probably a good idea when starting out, or from time to time, to familiarise ourselves somewhat with most or all of these satipatthana subcategories. They might not appear prominently in our experience unless we are at least a little familiar with them.

The forest is peaceful, why aren’t you? You hold on to things causing your confusion. Let nature teach you. Hear the bird’s song then let go. If you know nature, you’ll know truth. If you know truth, you’ll know nature.

—Ajahn Chah.

How might this look in daily life?

Perhaps as above but with more emphasis on being relaxed and aware and working with what presents itself most prominently.

We practice to learn how to let go, not how to increase our holding on to things. Awakening appears when you stop wanting anything.

—Ajahn Chah.

As always, I offer this as a record of my own process of contemplation. Please forgive any errors or misinterpretations.

Ward Farnsworth's lead-pipe theory of the internet

2024-11-06T00:00:00Z

Ward Farnsworth has a beautiful analogy for how we got to this point in his book, The Socratic Method: A Practitioner's Handbook.

The ancient Romans built elaborate networks of pipes to deliver water where they wanted it to go. The networks were a marvel. But many of the pipes were made of lead, and the water carried the lead along with it. One school of thought regards this as part of the reason for the decline and fall of Rome: lead poisoning gradually took its toll, impairing the thought and judgment of many Romans, especially at the top. The theory is much disputed; perhaps it contains no truth. But as a metaphor it is irresistible. We have built networks for the delivery of information—the internet, and especially social media. These networks, too, are a marvel. But they also carry a kind of poison with them. The mind fed from those sources learns to subsist happily on quick reactions, easy certainties, one-liners, and rage. It craves confirmation and resents contradiction. Attention spans collapse; imbecility propagates, then seems normal, then is celebrated. The capacity for rational discourse between people who disagree gradually rots. I have a good deal more confidence in the lead-pipe theory of the internet, and its effect on our culture, than in the lead-pipe theory of the fall of Rome.

The Socratic method is a corrective. Before viewing it as a technique, consider it an ethic of patience, inquiry, humility, and doubt—in other words, of every good attitude discouraged by social media and disappearing from our political and cultural life. It means asking hard questions without fear and receiving them without offense; indeed, it means treating challenge and refutation as acts of friendship. Socrates, as we shall see, sometimes likes to define an elusive concept by asking for the name of its opposite. That approach can help us here, too. If I were pressed for a one-word opposite of the Socratic method, a strong candidate would be Twitter.

How the world needs a Socrates now. The Socratic Practitioner is a wonderful book, and I highly recommend it for self inquiry. Perhaps if more of us applied critical thinking to ourselves, we would all be in much better shape:

What do I really know?
Am I really an expert on this?
Do I really know what I'm talking about?
What if I am wrong?
And perhaps most importantly, are my beliefs consistent with each other?

Most people will never take the trouble to do this but, as Socrates warned us, that kind of life is not to be lived, and perhaps even not worth living.

Advice to beginners on the Buddhist path

2024-10-04T00:00:00Z

Be gently aware as you go through your day. Try to be present, and notice when the mind is pulled away from the present moment.

Be aware of that pull and what is happening in the mind.

When it's possible to let go of these distractions, you may wish to let them go and come back into a full experience of 1) what's happening, and, 2) how the mind is relating to that.

In formal practice especially, you may notice that your mind can settle on the breath--or another object--and become even more relaxed, wakeful, and peaceful. We're not trying to force the mind to do this. Rather, by letting go of distractions as they arise we're allowing the mind to settle. The attitude is one of kindness and interest, always.

A fork in the road

At a certain point, you may notice that the mind is no longer restless or tempted away from the present moment. The mind is content to be with experience, in the present moment, just as it is. This is known as "access concentration" (although gatheredness might be a better term). It's a state in which the mind is at ease and independent. At this point you have some choices.

You can continue to abide in and enjoy this gathered way of being, during which time it might deepen into bright and refreshing states of mind.
Or you can open awareness to observe the arising and passing of phenomena such as feelings, thoughts, sounds, emotions, sights, all kinds of experience. This is contemplating impermanence, a major theme of Buddhist insight practice.
You might also wish to investigate your experience in the light of another dharmic theme, such as noticing the arising and passing of the aggregates, or exploring emptiness, if your interest takes you there.

The important thing is to keep that subtle awareness throughout your day, to the extent that you can. This enables you to learn from experience, and not become fully lost in the thoughts, fantasies, grudges, fears, and other patterns that arise for all of us.

The perfect way is not difficult;
Just avoid getting caught up in preferences.
When you are free from aversion and craving,
It reveals itself fully and without disguise.
—Jianzhi Sengcan, Third Patriarch of Chan.

My understanding of Buddhist practice and the four noble truths

2024-09-19T00:00:00Z

I found myself trying to neatly summarise how my thinking about Buddhist practice has developed recently, and my thoughts seemed to take the rough shape of the four noble truths.

The uncultivated mind will tend to get entangled in the messiness of life. This is painful or at least unsatisfying in a deep way.
It is craving and aversion that lead the mind to become entangled.
The mind can learn to let go of craving and aversion, and experience peace, freedom, and wellbeing far beyond what we might imagine possible... even an end to distress and the entanglement that produces distress. When the mind is disentangled, there is a gatheredness and clarity that enables deeper and deeper understanding, letting go, and peace.
The path to this seeing clearly is a wholesome, appreciative way of living that prioritises ethical living, truth, clarity, and care and nourishment of the heart and psyche*. We are encouraged to live nobly, with self-respect and respect for others, and without acting on craving, in eight areas of life. As we develop this beautiful way of living, the heart and mind become increasingly peaceful and content to rest within. Craving and aversion diminish.

*This was also Socrates' aim, interestingly. Compare with Rob Burbea: "So much about this practice is really about taking care of your heart. At every level and every direction. What does it mean to take care of your heart?" (From the orientation talk of his Practising the Jhanas retreat.)

How to practise in line with these aims

So, with all this in mind, how should we practise? To be brief, our goal is care of the heart, so any approach that cultivates the wholesome and abandons the unwholesome ought to be worthwhile. And we are looking to practise letting go and to diminish craving. If our aim is to have a disentangled mind an anchor—like the breath or the presence of lovingkindness—can be a way of letting us know that the mind is present, nourished, and disentangled. This is very different from trying to nail our mind to an anchor.

Openness of heart, openness of being easily outweighs focus and concentration.—Rob Burbea

Ajahn Amaro's simple guidance for practice

I often find these words from Ajahn Amaro helpful, from his free ebook The Breakthrough.

With meditation, when there's a substantial quality of calmness and focus, when the mind is stable and can rest in the present moment, when it can stay with the breath for extended periods of time and attend to the present reality without drifting; when you find that your mind has arrived at that kind of stability, there's no need to pay particular attention to the breathing. You use the breath as an anchor to help fix the attention on the present moment. The breath acts simply as a marker, a reference point for the present. But if the attention is resting easily in the present, you don't need to provide such an anchor. You don't need to fix the attention in place because it's already stable, attending to the present moment. When you find that the mind has arrived at that kind of steadiness - not drifting off into abstractions about past and future or distracted by sounds you hear or feelings in the body - whenever the attention rests easily in the present moment, allow the breath to become part of the general field of experience. Open up the awareness to all experience, to know the sounds you hear around you, the feelings in the body, the thoughts that come and go - broaden the point of attention to encompass the whole of the present moment, to include all aspects of experience.

Then whatever arises, whether it's a thought, a sound, a sensation, the way to maintain the quality of clarity, of non-entanglement, is to apply the reflections on change, unsatisfactoriness and not-self. If we hear the sound of a plane going overhead, we maintain objectivity and clarity by reflecting that the sound is changing. Likewise with a feeling in the body - whether we like it or don't like it or it's neutral, just notice that the feeling is changing. The same with a thought in the mind, a mood or a memory. We use these reflections on anicca, dukkha, anattā to maintain that quality of non-entanglement. We are able simply to attend to the flow of experience. We watch the process of experience itself, rather than getting caught up with the content of what's being experienced. We therefore deliberately let go of the content in order to observe the process of experiencing, to watch the flowing of the river of our consciousness. There are rivers of perceptions and feelings. Thoughts come and go. Feelings come and go. Sounds and sensations come and go.

As we develop the practice, the heart can simply rest in that awareness, rest in that knowing, be that very knowing which receives all experience, participates in it, knows it fully without confusion, without adding anything to it.

Ajahn Dune Atulo's formulation of the four noble truths

Finally, my interpretation of the four noble truths is also influenced by Ajahn Dune Atulo, who stated them like this:

The mind going outward to satisfy its moods is the cause of suffering (samudaya, the second noble truth)
The result of the mind going outward to satisfy its moods is suffering (dukkha, the first noble truth)
The mind seeing the mind clearly is the path leading to the cessation of suffering (magga, the fourth noble truth)
The result of the mind seeing the mind clearly is the cessation of suffering (nirodha, the third noble truth).

Final thoughts

I suppose I'm interested in a path that feels right and works effectively rather than has complete textual accuracy. I'm not sure we can reverse engineer meditation from the texts. We have to be informed by them, absolutely, but we also have to feel our way forward in our own experience and according to the principles we find in the texts.

A primer on dependent arising

2024-09-01T00:00:00Z

Here's a talk I gave recently as a short introduction to the 12-link model of dependent arising. It carries an example throughout each stage, something I've borrowed from the insight meditation teacher, John Peacock. Soon, I want to write about a different model of dependent arising that I have found very helpful and insightful.

Introduction

I'm going to talk about dependent arising today, also known as dependent origination. That's quite a mouthful, isn't it? This can be quite a daunting topic but today we're just going to breeze through the traditional 12-link model to get an overview.

If there's nothing else that you take away from this, the key idea here is conditionality. This is the idea that our experience is shaped by events and mind states. Don't worry if it doesn't click this time. Just keep that idea of conditionality in mind.

The example of the red jumper

To keep this simple, we're going to be using the example of walking down the high street and seeing a red pair of trousers in a shop window.

Background

Let's take a look at the twelve links. As we move through these, be aware that there are connections between all of the links. It isn't just a linear process of A determines B determines C, although those connections are strong, too. Some of them happen in clusters, simultaneously, and very quickly.

In the early Buddhist tradition, it's important to note that this list was not given as cyclical, and it didn't always include twelve links. What's important is the notion of conditionality itself, and the general dynamics between elements of mind that we see here.

We'll do questions at the end, just to ensure there is time to complete a first pass through the list.

1. Ignorance (avijjā)

The first link in this chain is said to be ignorance. Ignorance of what? One way we can understand this is as an ignorance of conditionality.

It's kind of the opposite of Right View in the 8FP. We don't understand dependent arising. We don't understand how certain mental states or actions influence our wellbeing and those of others.
Or we may understand but we don't walk the walk. We're not mindful. We think that external things are solid, dependable, lasting, and the answer to our problems if we could just get things the way we want them.

In terms of our example, let's say that there is an absence of wisdom into the impermanent, unsatisfactory, and impersonal nature of phenomena. Craving or aversion towards red trousers could arise in such a mindset!

2. Volitions, habits, mental conditioning (sankhāras)

There is conditioning in the mind that is dormant but ready to be activated by certain experiences and situations. These are predilections, habit patterns, psychological structures.

I feel like we don’t have to get too hung up on the order of the next few links.

When we are ignorant, we are more likely to act from an automatic place of habit. Those tendencies that we are predisposed to come to the fore. This lays the groundwork for how we perceive a situation.

Example: you might have a habit of impulse purchasing. Or a penchant for brightly coloured trousers!

3. Consciousness (viññāna)

This is typically defined as sense consciousness, meaning the knowing that happens in conjunction with seeing a form, hearing a sound.

The next few links all work together to describe how we build a self around sensory experiences.

Example: when the eye makes contact with photons reflected by a pair of red trousers in a shop window, there is a consciousness which registers this sensation.

4. Name and form (nāmarūpa)

This refers to mental objects and the physical forms that we perceive. There is a kind of feedback loop between name and form and consciousness where they feed each other. We see a form, perhaps a family member, and a self comes into being in relation to that form.

Example: seeing the red trousers, we construct a mental representation of the trousers and ourselves in relation to the red trousers.

5. The six sense spheres (salāyatana)

These are our six senses: sight, hearing, touch, smell, taste, and the mind.

The mind is traditionally seen as a sensory organ, one which perceives thoughts and mental experiences as well as being the place where the other senses are registered.
These senses mediate between consciousness and the forms we contact through the senses.

Example: the eye is a sense organ that can detect the colour red and the form "trousers" in shop windows!

6. Contact (phassa)

This is simply the contact that our senses make with forms. It is the sound wave of birdsong hitting the eardrum.

Importantly, this is the first major leverage point where we can make a difference before suffering arises. We can be mindful of our senses, and so this is a very early place at which we might be able to bring in awareness and wisdom, and so preempt craving.

Example: When the eye meets the red trouser photons, there is contact!

7. Feeling tone (vedanā)

Every sensory contact is accompanied by an immediate categorisation as pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral. By default, we tend to want more of the pleasant, less of the unpleasant, and we don't give a blind bit of notice to the neutral. That leads us to wander through the world trying to satisfy our preferences and the requirements of our self image.

Being mindful of feeling tone is one of the most famously effective leverage points where we can apply mindfulness. If we aren't mindful at this point, it is still possible to turn the ship around later but this becomes increasingly difficult.

Example: depending on our conditioning around red trousers, there will either be a pleasant sensation, an unpleasant sensation, or an absence of these.

8. Craving (tanhā)

Dependent on feeling tone a subtle or strong insistence arises. We want that. We don't want that. Left unchecked, this craving will shape the mind, create attachment, and a sense of self that will lead to problems. Besides which, the feeling of craving itself isn't fun.

But, we can turn things around. We can be mindful of craving and let go of it.

Example: if a pleasant sensation has arisen in connection with the red trousers, we may begin to crave the red trousers. If unpleasant, we may become aversive towards them. If neither of these have arisen, we will probably be indifferent to the fate of the red trousers.

9. Clinging (upādāna)

This is the last chance saloon. The craving has solidified into clinging, which is sometimes described as involving a lot of repetitive thinking. This object, this wish, whatever it is, now dominates your thoughts. You are building a self image around it in your mind. You're obsessed. It is difficult to let go and be mindful. You keep diving back in. But there is still the possibility of letting go until...

Example: Left unchecked, craving for the red trousers becomes clinging. We can't stop thinking about them. We need to go into that shop right away! What if they sell out of red trousers!?

10. Becoming (bhava)

Now we've bought the ticket and we have to take the ride. We now see ourselves in terms that have been shaped by clinging. We are moving towards the actualisation of our clinging.

We have the red trousers and we're walking towards the till, credit card in hand!

11. Birth (jāti)

Oops. Now you've done it. You bought the expensive graphics card. You said the naughty words to the well-meaning person. You've agreed to the thing that in hindsight was not the right thing. You're thinking of yourself as someone who... and the consequences of this action, good or bad, are now in train. Something new is coming into being, and will have its effects.

Example: This is the moment where the credit card is charged and we are now in possession of red trousers.

12. Decline and death, dukkha (jarāmarana)

What goes up must come down. What is born must die. When the conditions supporting that which has been brought into being falter, that which has been brought into being will fade.

If we are still attached to things remaining a certain way, we will suffer. That great project we set in motion is subject to conditions and, if we insist on it working out in a certain way, disappointment will follow.

We may feel somewhat deflated. Owning red trousers may not be all that we promised ourselves it would be. And even if we like them, the red soon fades, we soon no longer find any thrill in wearing them. They are just red trousers. But what about green trousers? Green trousers would be incredible! And so we move on to the next thing.

An upward spiral?

This may not be the end of the story, though. As there is a cluster of teachings that speak of transcendent dependent arising, also known as the spiral path. Here, the experience of decline and dukkha gives rise to faith and a search that leads through beautiful states of mind to dispassion and letting go. But that's for another time.

The effort to be aware

2024-07-18T00:00:00Z

So, what's been happening? A few weeks ago I felt as though I'd fallen in love with simple mindfulness again. It seemed so natural to be present with moment-to-moment experience. When sitting on the cushion, I didn't really long for anything else to happen outside of this quiet contentment. No longing to get anywhere or trying to create a special feeling.

It's hard to know what creates these movements in our practice but I feel like one factor was a question I was asking myself. The question is not "Am I mindful?" or "I need to be more mindful, how can I be more mindful." The question is...

How much effort am I making to be mindful right now?

If the answer is, "none"--as it often is--then I can just make a little more effort than that.
If the answer is, "too much"--as it sometimes is, perhaps more so on the cushion--then I can relax.

A reinforcing feedback loop

Since I've been reading a lot about systems thinking lately, here's a diagram showing how this practice builds on itself. As we dial in the level of effort and become more grounded and aware in the present moment, there is more awareness available to keep an appropriate effort going.

How does this work?

Well, firstly, I feel like any effort greater than "none" creates a little momentum that can gradually build. This is very much the idea of Sayadaw U Tejaniya, who often points out that it only takes very little effort to be aware. He's looking for a level of effort that we can maintain all of the time.

Too much effort, on the other hand, can easily become too much to maintain for very long. Awareness is here while we're making a big effort and then drops away as soon as we forget. There's no subtlety. Then it becomes a struggle, we're not actually being relaxed and mindful anymore, we're starting to push on experience, there's an insistence, a craving.

The final point I want to make here is that we are not necessarily in control of the result. In this sense, mindfulness is the result we'd like. But we it's maybe not so helpful to say, "I'm going to be mindful... now." That's trying to force things. But we can put forward an intention and a little effort that, if consistent, can have wonderful results.

So where am I now with this?

Work and family life have been quite busy lately, and I've been messing around with computers quite a bit too. So this thread was somewhat submerged in the daily tumult. One of the nice things about writing a blog like this is that when something is working, I make a note to write a post about it. That in turn tends to surface and remind me to pick the thread back up again. I have done so in the course of writing this, and it's certainly helpful.

Finally, my daughter came up with a joke that struck me as plausibly Buddhist. What do you call a fruit that clings to things? A graspberry!

Creating a practice plan for the day

2024-06-22T00:00:00Z

Just this week, I've started being a bit more formal about my intentions for practice in the day ahead. I've started looking at the specifics of the day ahead and planning how I will bring mindfulness and other aspects of Buddhist practice into that situation and how I intend to negotiate any obstacles. The idea came to me when I realised I don't necessarily have to have the perfect approach to practice mapped out for the next year or two. While it's good to have a general arc and theme, the real question was, "How are you going to practise today?" For example:

I will practice the gradual entry into emptiness followed by contemplating the aggregates in formal sitting this morning.
I will walk mindfully to and from the cafe, being aware of change around me.
I will drink my coffee mindfully.
I will listen to the sound of silence while typing.
I will be mindful of my posture, and changes in posture – especially while getting into the car, driving, and getting out of the car.
I will lay off text messaging until the evening.
I will be patient and attentive with the kids at bedtime.
I will be mindful of speech, especially when talking on the computer.

It need not be so extensive, of course! It's probably best to focus on one or two things.

What this does is make the gap between our intentions and the actuality very clear. We can see, "Oh, I'm supposed to be walking mindfully to the cafe, not thinking about computer games" or "Oh, I said I wasn't going to surf the World Wide Web until this evening."

It also helps me to really visualise myself being mindful of changing postures as I get out of a car, for example, or creating space in a conversation for others to speak. It creates a blueprint for a day of mindfulness. Marcus Aurelius would do something similar in resolving on waking up not to become angry with the difficult people he would meet that day. We, too, may wish to acknowledge where difficulty may lie, price it in, and decide on a noble way of tackling it.

Finally, at the end of the day, I've started jotting down a brief review of how well the plan went. For example, I might notice that during my lunchtime walk, I was only mindful at a couple of intermittent moments, the rest of the time I was thinking and planning. There's no judgment, but I think resolve is created in that act of reflection, and we see the gap between our intentions and our present capacity. Reviewing also helps us to see where there are challenges and we might need to change our approach or our expectations. I'm also someone who enjoys a challenge, so that can be motivating.

I've always reflected on how my practice is going, but this brings some extra intentionality and focus. Plus, creating a practice plan and reviewing at specific times should, in theory, free me from constantly re-evaluating what my aims should be and how well it's all going. Overall, I think this will bring some healthy clarity and accountability to how I practice. Hopefully, it will help with continuity in daily life.

Non-identification and working with the aggregates

2024-06-15T00:00:00Z

I've been drafting a few complicated pieces for this blog, about the signless concentration of mind, about meta-cognition, about systems thinking. These are all topics I want to say something about, but might also require a lot of detail and scholarly effort. Instead, I'm sitting in the garden in the sunshine, writing in a notebook and listening to Miles Davis and the theme I want to discuss is non-identification.

I'm always looking for the crux of an approach, the purpose, the active ingredient. I think this may have something to do with being a busy lay practitioner. If I can get to the pith, my practice can be efficient in some way, or at least that's the idea. I also just want to understand. Why do we contemplate these themes? Why do we cultivate certain qualities? And of all the many themes presented to us, non-identification strikes me as one of the fundamentals of Buddhism, perhaps the fundamental. It is a form of non-clinging. This, I feel, is why we develop the perception of impermanence—so that we do not identify with that which cannot be a lasting self, or cling to passing phenomena.

For myself, I've noticed a certain coolness in the heart and mind when I contemplate an insight theme such as the aggregates. This is in addition to the gatheredness and pleasantness of soothing and stilling the mind. Furthermore, after formal meditation when the effects of gathering the mind have dissipated somewhat, I notice that the coolness can still be around, especially if I pause for a moment or I allow space for it.

When contemplating the aggregates, I might focus on them in turn—form, feeling tone, perception, volitions, sense consciousness—and see how they are impermanent, conditioned and constructed, and do not constitute a self or the basis for a lasting self. another, more organic way of working in this terrain was shared with me by Laura Bridgman, and that is to ask the question...

Who am I taking myself to be?

Both methods can be incredibly helpful, it seems.

I've been practising with the aggregates most days recently and intend to keep this up for a long time. I was initially finding the fifth aggregate, viññāna, a little slippery to get hold of. It's usually spoken of as sense consciousness: that which registers sensory contact with an object. One helpful understanding of the fifth aggregate shared by Ajahn Amaro that viññāna represents the "I"-making, the feeling of "I am the thinker / doer / the one hearing / the meditator". And you can see how asking, "Who am I taking myself to be?" can undercut this kind of self-making.

How I am practising

2024-05-06T00:00:00Z

In two meditation groups I belong to, people recently expressed an interest in learning more about how other people practise. So I decided to write a little snapshot of what I’m doing—more or less—on the cushion at the moment.

On the cushion

When the house is quiet in the morning, I sit on my meditation bench and begin to let the mind settle while tuning in to what’s here. It may be that a particular practice calls to me at this point. Generally, I will either take up:

The first three satipatthānas (domains of mindfulness: body, feeling tone, and mind)
radiating mettā
or mindfulness of breathing (ānāpānasati).

When the mind has settled to the degree that it becomes easy to stay with the meditation object (the breath, the body, mettā etc.), I will dwell in this state—often known as “access concentration”—to consolidate it.

The next phase of practice, if there is time and energy, is to bring in an insight reflection as the fourth satipatthāna. For me, at this time, this means contemplating the aggregates:

physical form
perception
vedana (feeling tone: pleasant, unpleasant, neither, in their worldly/unworldly variations)
sankhāras (mental formations, habits, tendencies)
sense consciousness (eye, ear, nose, taste, touch, mind).

I’ll particularly look at the “not me, not mine”, "neti, neti", aspect of these, but also their impermanent and ultimately unsatisfactory nature. Recently, I tried sending mettā to the aggregates. It remains an analytical practice because you are isolating and contemplating these elements of experience but with an heart dimension, too.

At times I will go deeper into samādhi, at others, the mind will not settle easily in the beginning and so instead, I’ll explore that through the lens of an insight theme.

In the first phase of the practice, if I take up the first three satipatthānas, it’s mainly about moving through them as a way of exploring how my experience is and settling the mind rather than as an analytical practice, which is more the flavour when working with the aggregates later on.

I feel this mode of practice makes sense as a progression and covers a few bases from samādhi to mettā and insight. Furthermore, when I engage with insight practices, I sometimes feel a coolness that remains with me for a while and is noticeable when I slow down during the day. By contrast, my current feeling is that while samādhi alone has great benefits and changes the character of the day there is a sense of "when it's gone, it's gone". Although I would concede that repeated access to samādhi must have lasting effects on a person.

Off the cushion

Honestly, this is tricky. It’s so easy to get lost. Watching my mind and where it is pulled has been very helpful in daily life. This can be combined with mindfulness of breathing as a kind of double defence, as suggested by Upasika Kee Nanayon. In a similiar vein, I have been combining radiating mettā with mindfulness of the breath—when I remember to—as I go about my day. This builds a bit of stillness, momentum, and warmth—which is actually important for mindfulness.

As ever, in both formal and informal practice the task is to develop wholesome qualities and abandon the unwholesome. This is known as sammā vāyāma (skilful effort).

Appropriate attention: notes on a home retreat

2024-04-22T00:00:00Z

I sat an online at-home retreat with Gavin Milne over the weekend. It was very interesting to be practicing in a hybrid space: letting go of some distractions (and noticing getting hooked by others) and emphasising practice but also being present and connected with family and having that context of bringing practice into every posture, task, and situation—or trying to! I kept some notes, as I wanted to put some markers down for how we were practising with this approach. Here's what stood out to me from Gavin's instructions.

Day 1: Instructions

Key piece for this retreat is: yoniso manasikara (appropriate attention).
We want to be awake for what's happening.
It is a practice to be present and awake while on the computer. We really can start to infuse every aspect of our life with awareness.
Probably don't start listening to audio. Books OK.
There's a certain support for awareness when the schedule is flexible. We realise that there is no better time than now to be aware, not waiting for the next sitting. No agenda, less pressure.
We're making a "wide fence" practice space.
Meditation space open.

Day 2: Instructions

Invitation to take the hands off, see what arises.
Yes practice can be about samadhi, but it can also be about receptive open awareness, moment-to-moment mindfulness. We can emphasize one or the other but these come together. Analogy of building a boat (samadhi) vs jumping in and swimming (receptive mindfulness). We can mix and match, it's fine to spend a little time building a boat, or diving in.
If we give mindful attn to the body, the mind will naturally begin to settle.
Glass of murky water settling analogy - we keep things stirred up if we put pressure on ourselves.
There's no wrong experience to be having. There's no experience we can't wake up to.
Personal observation: when I realise that there’s no wrong experience to be having, then I can be with the changing flow of experience. This may not always flow in a pleasing direction but to be with it is to be present.
Last night a sense of something like Nibbana wants us to awaken or needs us to awaken to be realised? I can't remember!
Relax, be aware, don't get caught up on the method.
How we are aware is more important than ticking off 30 mins of sitting.
Greed, hatred, delusion is not a judgment, it's a way of describing the vortex that spins us away from this timeless refuge of the present.
Opposite of greed is generosity: we're giving our attention to life (and to the kids!), rather than "I'm only giving attn to this if it feels like I want it to feel."
Noticing background narratives, "Oh yeah, I really want to get calm and peaceful this weekend."
Noticing when meditation becomes about the future.
We're not going to figure out this practice through thinking this weekend. Coming back to the tangible. The type of wakefulness we're talking about is direct. Prioritising just shining the light of awareness. Bare attention.
Make our home in the causes of awakening, and let awakening happen by itself.
In meditation just now we engaged with first three of the 7FA (seven factors of awakening): mindfulness, curiosity, energy.
Curiosity is the beginning of wisdom.
By energy in 7FA we mean conserving energy, redirecting it into present moment. Not effort, not striving. Sensitive like a mother attending to a child.
Most important attribute leading to awakening according to the Buddha: yoniso manasikara (appropriate attn). The movement towards seeing life in accordance with how it really is. Attention that is on the right track. Attention that gets to the root. Interesting that the most important attribute is not mindfulness.
Sayadaw U Tejaniya, "There is dharma talk everywhere... If we can think and see nature as it really is, the mind can become free."
Resisting the pulls of that which doesn't really serve us.
Am I relating to this as permanent or impermanent, can it give lasting satisfaction, as if there is a personal self? These are questions related to yoniso manasikara.
Am I prioritising things as though I'm never going to die? Never quite getting around to being here and the practice.
Bare attention is on the right track. For me this is also hinting at keeping our mental activity related to the present.

Q&A

Gavin: We escape from prison by letting the prison walls fall away, not by trying to break out.

Day 2: Evening dhamma talk

Want to present a shape that can make sense of how we practice in our lives.
Leela Saarti influenced this framing.
Through the ages there is a transition that human's have made from a proeccupations with the world outside to a sense of coming home.
Eventually the sense of disconnect from ourselves becomes the source of dissatisfaction, and we naturally turn back towards ourselves.
Yoniso manasikara is asking us to honestly evaluate whether what we are pursuing can genuinely satisfy us.
Buddhadharma is a vehicle, not the ultimate destination, but it seems to be a reliable vehicle.
Catch 22: not paying attention to realise that we're not paying attention. In Bhante G's book Eight Mindful Steps to Happiness.
Coming home, into the body. It's through this body that we relax the sense of separation.
Best translation of Mara is "The Tempter". The more comfortable we are being mindful of the body, the less leverage Mara has.
Hindrances: don't go to war with them, but don't perpetuate them. There's no wrong experience to be having. But what about dropping through them, discovering what may be underneath them.
T.S. Eliot Four Quartets quote: "Knowing the place for the first time."
Ajahn Chah, two types of suffering quote: 1) suffering of grasping after things that cannot satisfy, 2) suffering that comes when we turn towards the truth of impermanence etc., turning towards how things are, feel fully the constant change of experience. If we choose the type of suffering of being with and fully feeling the impermanent the suffering is of a different quality, we can hold it and experience it differently, and perhaps compassion can arise from this. Like when there is equanimity and pain and grief can still be there but we don't suffer.
Normalising the rub that comes when we commit to a path but it's the way to penetrate more deeply.
We do have these questions about how to practice, am I doing it right? But it's more important to get clear about Ajahn Chah's two types of suffering and which we're experiencing. It's quite an achievement to feel the second kind, of feeling fully the constant change of experience.
Some of this is challenging but there is great value in continuing to show up.

Day 3: Instructions

Beginner's mind, starting afresh.
Questioning the mindset of 7 x 45 min meditations = productive day.
How much effort does it actually take to show up?
Realigning: here I am now.
Structure can be helpful but it's not ultimately about that. It's about getting to the other shore. Being honest with what I'm experiencing, how I'm doing.
Keeping yoniso manasikara simple: seeing with mindfulness the impermanent, changing nature of things. When this awareness shuts off we relate to things, feelings, people, ourselves as if they are permanent. For example, if I nail it this time I get the nice feeling that will last. Or feeling unpleasantness, maybe we need to feel that changing feeling. Maybe it's the suffering that leads to the end of suffering. For example, feeling judged if we don't reply to a text but maybe taking care right here and we might feel a rub, feeling like we might be judged, but maybe this is the suffering we need to feel. This practice is not about controlling the worldly winds: a lot of that suffering is the second type.
There's a middle way here. We can operate from good intention.
William Blake: "A fool who knows their folly becomes wise."
Gavin thinks Buddhism is about coming into relationship with craving and aversion and realising it's less personal than we thought. Being mindful of our reactivity supports equanimity. Not necessarily about simply not craving.
We have the potential now as adults to discover the resources in our being, and that means we don't have to work as hard as we have been doing (assume this refers to strong reactivity).
Noticing how we're relating to experience. Often the naming is enough. "Ah, I'm looking forward to..."
The only way things become peaceful is by taking good care of this moment.
The path bears fruit for us only when we've learnt all the lessons we need to learn.
7FA: a direct teaching. A deep reconnection. Not a to do list. Check in with what the Buddha's pointing to. Mindfulness, curiosity, energy. Being here, being curious, bringing energy back into present moment awareness rather than distractions. These first three are causes for the remaining factors.
If I can access wellbeing in the present moment, that's a game changer. Taking care of the moment, not trying to make it happen. The joy of living. Inner joy.
Lots of levels of equanimity. Can be a feeling of being unshakable but also a subtle quality of being able to meet the rubs of life.
We don't really do the depth, we let the depth in. The last four of 7FA are the fruit. And in a way even mindfulness is fortuitous, deep, and mindfulness. And curiosity is part of the nature of the awake, aware mind.
We have this whole day, this opportunity.
I feel like this online at home format might be the best way for me. A bit of structure, but also the ease of being at home. Just a couple of meditations into the day and already feeling very peaceful and still. Even while talking to wife, kids, and mother-in-law. Connection can be a boon to practice.
There's great value in exploring how to find this deep reconnection in the lives that we lead. Let's engage with this challenge. And the resonance that this has on others can be profound. This might be exactly where we need to be.
The invitation for today is to explore continuity, stringing together passages of being aware and awake. We are beings that are changing and unfolding all the time. We're threading wakefulness through the varying and challenging conditions of our day.
Assumptions can be the biggest obstacle, e.g. "If I were at a retreat centre this would be better."
Taking care of the means, sowing seeds: how we are with others has an effect, the seeds we plant in practice have an effect. Never underestimate the effect of a small act of generosity.
Jump in. Explore continuity.
Sayadaw U Tejaniya on moment-to-moment continuity: "Can you thoroughly understand the whole story if you've missed a couple of episodes?" And I suppose, if we don't bring the practice into our lives and include the difficult, we're not getting the whole picture.
Meditation can happen in every posture.
Personal observation: I think I was possibly feeling the second type of suffering after lunch. A kind of unease and anxiety, maybe coming up as a result of the practice, being with things as they are, perhaps on some level understanding the changing flow of experience. It settled down with the afternoon meditation.

Day 3: Closing talk

Try to keep some of the shape of this container. For example, keep yoniso manasikara going tomorrow. We might notice that we turn these faculties off.
Conditions for stream entry:
- Listening to the teachers
- Practising the teachings
- The company of good/wise friends
- Yoniso manasikara, wise attention (is supported by the previous three).
Sitting practice can help us clarify intention. This is the time when we are reconnecting with the intention to practice each day, and then we can go out and practice in every posture.
We're taking care of the means of awakening and we're not quite sure when the fruit will come along, but it does come along.
There's a lot of this path we walk ourselves but we absolutely need support and community, and input and inspiration from others.
Trust your intuition and flow, that felt sense of what's supportive for you.
Keep discovering, be a good friend to yourself.

Resources

A Path with Heart - Jack Kornfield
Awareness Alone is Not Enough - Sayadaw U Tejaniya
Sayadaw U Tejaniya's website

Just this present moment

2024-04-17T00:00:00Z

Ryunosuke Koike, in The Practice of Not Thinking, describes mindfulness as keeping your thoughts related to immediate experience, and keeping the mind somewhat tethered to the other senses: being aware of seeing, hearing, touch, etc. I think this is a useful rule of thumb: it's quite simple to check whether our thoughts are related to present moment experience or not. As people who've been on retreat will testify, when the mind's energy is conserved perception becomes clearer. This is fertile ground for insight and understanding. We're not allowing the mind to expend all of its energy roaming freely in abstract thought, or get embroiled in old dramas.

This is something you'll find all over early Buddhist teachings, too, of course, but I'm finding the directness of this instruction refreshing. And it's not hard to see why it works. When we look at the teaching of dependent arising, which describes the process by which suffering arises. The final inflection point before suffering arises in this chain of events is, arguably, clinging. Intervening here is our last chance to do something before the consequences of craving or aversion fully mature. Experientially, clinging often shows up as obsessive thoughts about that which we crave. So by keeping thoughts more or less anchored in the present moment we prevent clinging from overwhelming the mind.

As someone who is prone to a lot of discursive thought and reflection, this simple present moment experience is an element of mindfulness that—though it seems obvious—I have somewhat lost sight of. It was obvious to me when first beginning the practice, but as we immerse ourselves in the philosophy of the early Buddhist tradition, there can be a lot of thinking, a lot of figuring things out, making connections, and a lot of grander-seeming ideas and practices. Sometimes figuring things out seems itself to be the practice, and though of course making sense of the teachings is important, this can be a trap.

The approach I have most often taken is to practice mindfulness of mind in the sense of watching thoughts arise and pass without necessarily believing or acting on them. Being aware of what the mind is doing and learning about the condition of the mind, and its habits. This is my home turf and I get a lot of benefit from it. It's very much like noticing the pull of the idea of pleasant experiences on the mind. However, I do find Koike's instruction helpful as an extension to this because it's a useful back-to-basics, black-and-white rule of thumb, a yardstick I can measure by. And I'm currently interested in practicing in ways that have reasonably clear requirements to which we can orient:

Are my thoughts connected to immediate experience or not?

That immediate experience could be driving, working, meditating, planning. And, if my thoughts are freewheeling away from the task at hand, would it be helpful to return to just this present moment?

To be clear, we are not intending to wipe thoughts out entirely, I see it as restraining them to be more or less relevant to the matter at hand. And of course, the mind will wander – this is part of its natural functioning but we still have the choice to bring it back if we are interested in cultivating a deep sense of presence. In the way I'm interpreting Koike's instruction, we can think about how best to settle the mind, how best to contemplate, how best to let positive qualities and energies take root, and abandon the unwholesome.

So we might ask:

What am I seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling, touching, thinking?
Are my thoughts directed towards this immediate experience or task?
And are my thoughts and my attitude wholesome?

There is a simile in the early texts of mindfulness being like a post to which six wild animals are tied. These six represent the six senses: sight, touch, hearing, taste, smell, and mind. Without the post, the animals would be a chaotic brawl of scales, fur, and feathers. With the post, they are tamed. The mind is tamed and its energies conserved, gathered, ready for work, and prone to insight.

Neuroaffinities

2024-04-05T00:00:00Z

I walked down to the harbour and into a tiny shack for a coffee, and got chatting to the barista about computers and Star Trek. Then his pal popped in and the conversation continued, then someone else joined in. It was raining outside and I was in no hurry to go anywhere. Not for the first time of late, I began to suspect that the reason this all felt so easy was that my neurotribe had fortuitously assembled in this small caffeinated haven.

The sheepdog in my brain

2024-04-01T00:00:00Z

One morning recently, driving past a farm, I saw sheep escaping from their pasture and spilling out into the road. I stopped the car to avoid scaring them and making things worse. Just as the sheep were about to enter another property, the sheepdog caught up with them and jumped and barked to corral them in the opposite direction. The ringleader was a mother with two lambs. She was quite aggressive towards the sheepdog—I thought she might actually bash past and escape into the garden beyond. But the sheepdog responded with enough energy to deter the sheep and lambs without harming them and the reprobates ran back along the road into the field.

I’d recently heard the meditation teacher, Christina Feldman, use the image of a sheepdog to describe the process of collecting the mind and it had seemed apt. However, it wasn’t until I saw this sheepdog working to gather the flock that I gained a visceral sense for this process...

...how we guard and if necessary restrain the mind to keep it in pastures where we thrive, pastures free of ill will, craving, self delusion, and self building.

When I see the mind creating a self, a me who has to make progress on the path, or when I am griping about something, I want to picture this sheepdog corralling the mind back to the pasture of the present moment.

My overview of early Buddhist practice

2024-03-25T00:00:00Z

Welcome to my new website. This is intended to be a space where I write down my thoughts about Buddhism and meditation, and related issues. It’s a personal blog, so it reflects my views and experience. I do not claim to be any kind of authority. Instead, I will just talk about things how I see them, and perhaps readers will find some things useful or else be able to see my missteps and not repeat them.

Let me introduce myself. My name is Mark, I’m 43, and have a family. I’ve been meditating since 2010 and quite seriously since 2014. I practice in the Insight Meditation tradition, which can mean a lot of things. More specifically, I’m influenced by the Thai Forest tradition, the teachings of Laura Bridgman, and Gavin Milne, the cittanupassanā (mindfulness of mind) of Sayadaw U Tejaniya, and some of my thinking has been influenced by the Tranquil Wisdom Insight Meditation (TWIM) method of Bhante Vimalaramsi. The teachings of Rob Burbea and those in his lineage have also been part of my journey so far.

In terms of metaphysics, I am sympathetic to idealism: the idea that mind is fundamental—but, of course, I really don’t know! I just find this a more parsimonious and appealing theory of reality. Politically, I am left of centre. I am not particularly optimistic about climate change.

In terms of the dharma (Buddhist teachings), I have an open mind about the spiritual aspects of the teachings though the primary focus of my thought over the past ten years or so has been trying to understand the essence of early Buddhist practice and how to practice in the midst of life:

What did the Buddha teach?
How are we to make sense of the teachings?
What methods really work, especially in the midst of family life?
What’s the best way for a lay practitioner like me to live and practice, realistically?

I hope to write about some of these themes here.

What is my understanding of Buddhist practice?

So, what do I think I know about meditation? Where is my understanding after over ten years of dedicated practice? That’s a tough question, but I will try to answer it.

The TL;DR is:

Use mindfulness of mind to know what you are experiencing, how it’s affecting the mind, and what qualities are in the mind.
Gently and skilfully use what you know to keep the mind and heart in wholesome states. These will deepen as your mind increasingly dwells in the wholesome.

We see what’s here in the present and decide how to respond skilfully and with care. When there is wellbeing and collectedness, we can deepen that. And when the mind is stable, imbued with wholesome qualities, we can see clearly, reflecting on themes that support greater insight, letting go.

Meditation works

Firstly, I know that Buddhist practice and meditation helps. Not only does it potentially open up some peak experiences, it can bring a baseline increase in happiness, resilience, kindness, and equanimity. There is probably research along those lines, and I think it bears out in personal experience. I also find it interesting that meditation can open up states of profound wellbeing that you probably wouldn’t believe were possible unless you have given it a fair trial. It’s a bit like being a jogger when no one else can understand the benefits of exercise.

It helps to be informed

Secondly, it helps to know what we are doing. We don't want to be making it up as we go along. At the other extreme, purely academic work can sometimes be a form of procrasti-learning (thanks to my friend, Chris, for teaching me this word), where we never quite get around to practice. The middle way is to be informed, to know the approach we’re taking and its potential strengths and weaknesses, and to actually bring it into our lives and formal practice.

There are certain teachings that it helps to be aware of and to reflect on:

The four noble truths.
The eightfold path.
The Satipatthana Sutta.
Dependent arising and, ideally, transcendent dependent arising (the spiral path).
The Brahmaviharas.
The aggregates
The hindrances.
The indriyas.
The seven factors of awakening.
A range of sutta teachings, not just the Satipatthana Sutta and the Anapanasati Sutta.

But we don’t need to know this stuff to get started. The practice can actually be very, very simple (see Right Effort, below).

Watching the mind

I have a strong interest in mindfulness of mind (cittanupassanā). This is a cornerstone of practice, and the third of the four satipatthānas (domains of mindfulness). Mindfulness of mind enables us to know what’s happening in our experience and in our minds and how to respond wisely. Sometimes, simple awareness is all that’s needed to alleviate a difficult mind state but at other times we may need to redirect our attention, or relax and let go of something that is hindering us. It is a practiced form of self awareness. It is a kind of meta-cognition. It also has the advantage of dispelling the idea that thinking and mindfulness are somehow incompatible, or that we can’t be mindful when difficult mind states are present, that meditation is all about sitting cross-legged on a beach in full bliss.

Just to be clear, this isn’t about watching the mind in a controlling or judgmental way, it’s about knowing and befriending the mind, becoming close to it, intimate with it, aware of it. It's useful to ask ourselves whether we subscribe to a mode of practice that is about being with experience as it is or one that is about manipulating experience, controlling energies to produce certain states. I lean towards the former, although I do believe that we ought to make wise choices, and can influence our experience in wholesome ways (see Right Effort, below). Whatever life presents us with is the path, and can be learned from. The way we influence experience is mainly about promoting wholesome mental qualities. We bring conditions into being that will ripen subsequently. Like a farmer sowing seeds, what we develop in the mind will bear fruit sooner or later. For example, the act of becoming aware of experience itself has a wholesome effect and conditions future moments of awareness.

Right Effort

And what are the seeds that we sow? We sow wholesome qualities of mind such as the Brahmaviharas (lovingkindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, equanimity); generosity; contentment; renunciation; mindfulness (present-moment and situational awareness, meta-cognition); calm and stillness; self-knowledge, insight and understanding, and so forth… basically states that diminish craving and aversion. These wholesome qualities may not be around much to begin with but we incline towards them. We may even come into contact with very difficult mental and emotional terrain once we begin to be aware in a deeper way, so it’s important to be gentle with this process.

This is the kind of effort the Buddha was asking for, he referred to it as Right Effort, and it’s absolutely central. I think translating this phrase, samma vayama, as Right Effort is a little misleading. We might think it just means a kind of middle way: not too much effort, not too little—which is absolutely true—but Right Effort has a specific technical meaning that I would perhaps translate as Right Method. It’s the effort we make to:

Prevent the arising of unwholesome mental and heart qualities.
Abandon unwholesome mental and heart qualities that have arisen.
Cultivate wholesome mental and heart qualities.
Protect those wholesome mental and heart qualities that have arisen.

As the meditation teacher Christoph Köck has said:

I tend to think of practice not so much in terms of mindfulness or concentration but when people ask, ‘What is your practice?’ I tend to say, ‘Well, my practice is to keep my mind in a wholesome spectrum.’ and that’s quite independent of whether I feel well or unwell, or whether I’m engaged with other people or on my own.

Right Effort does not mean that when we are sad or angry we repress that feeling because it’s “unwholesome”. Aversion to sadness, for example, would be unwholesome, but compassion for our sadness would be wholesome. So it’s about finding a skilful way of relating to what’s here rather than pushing it away. Of course, if it’s genuinely possible to let go of a difficult feeling then that’s a different case.

We can also see that to be obsessed with some meditative outcome is counterproductive because craving for our preferences—for experience to be other than it is—would not be entirely wholesome. This skilful effort leads to skilful mindfulness and skilful samādhi (collectedness of mind) which in turn deepens our practice of ethics and Right Effort in a feedback loop. This makes profoundly wholesome states possible and these enable us to see the movements of mind with increasing subtlety... all without suppressing the difficult or insisting on the lovely.

Why mindfulness and discernment are needed

As you can imagine, in order to fulfil Right Effort, we need to know what kind of mental qualities are present. This requires mindfulness. And rather than be haphazardly aware, we can try to know whether we are aware or not. We can know what we are experiencing as we experience it. Sayadaw U Tejaniya uses the example of not just seeing a red car pass by, but knowing that we’ve seen a red car pass by. Upasika Kee Nanayon speaks of mindfulness of the breath and mindfulness of mind as a kind of double barrier, a twofold protection from getting lost in experience. I see this as part of sampajanna (a broader contextual awareness) and dhamma vicaya (investigation, meta-cognition): knowing what’s present in our minds.

So, we can know that we are mindful, and this protects and deepens mindfulness. We can know that we are knowing the breath. We can know that we are radiating compassion. We can know that the mind has become absorbed in something that has the potential to produce an unwholesome mind state. This knowing sometimes is sufficient to bring the mind back to balance; sometimes we will need to wait for the fixation to subside, or perhaps look at the situation through a different lens (impermanence, or emptiness perhaps). This is watching the mind, becoming familiar with it.

We also need to be able to clearly perceive unwholesome and wholesome states, and discern what should be cultivated and what should be let go of, and how to do that. This takes practice. Mindfulness and understanding are indispensable for this.

We also use mindfulness to notice when something has taken our attention away from our intended cultivation and to learn how this happens. This gives us a practical understanding of dependent arising: how a pleasant or unpleasant feeling tone causes craving or aversion and drags mind away from the wholesome and into suffering. And when we do this, we weaken the strength of the hindrances, those obsessions of mind that pull us away from our intended place of dwelling: the wholesome spectrum of mind and heart. Sri Ramana Maharshi speaks of this as weakening a garrison by destroying the defending forces whenever they emerge from the gate to attack.

What techniques do we employ to fulfil all this?

I won’t write much here because Buddhism has many, many techniques and often it’s the techniques that receive the most attention. As I wrote above, in a sense the technique can be very simple. We might use an object such as the breath or a wholesome feeling like friendliness or equanimity to very gently anchor the mind. And we watch the mind and see when it gets pulled away towards unwholesome states. We understand how this happens (seeking a pleasant feeling, for example), relax and let go, and return to cultivating the wholesome.

I feel that the important thing is that we understand what a technique is trying to achieve and, for me, techniques should be used in such a way that supports the understanding I have outlined above. I would particularly recommend these approaches:

The Thai Forest tradition. I particularly enjoy Ajahn Amaro’s talks and writings, and of course those of Ajahn Sumedho and Ajahn Chah.
The writings of Bhikkhu Anālayo, the German scholar and monk. His practical guides to Satipatthāna and Ānāpānasati might be a good starting point.
The teachings of Laura Bridgman and Gavin Milne, especially if you want to work with the inner critic.
The teachings of Sayadaw U Tejaniya, who specialises in mindfulness of mind and including the everyday in our practice as we watch for craving, aversion, and delusion creeping in.
A particularly good book for understanding the approach of Sayadaw U Tejaniya is Uncontrived Mindfulness by Vajradevi.
Richard Shankman has a lot of pragmatic and useful things to say in his book, The Art and Skill of Buddhist Meditation, particularly in clarifying the difference between meditation practices of the early Buddhist tradition and some of the practices and ideas we've inherited from the Visuddhimagga, 1,000 years later—not to disparage the latter but it's good to know the provenance of what you're practising.
Bodhi College offers diverse voices on the early Buddhist tradition.
The Tranquil Wisdom Insight Meditation (TWIM) of Bhante Vimaralamsi offers a thought-provoking challenge to some of the assumptions about practice we've inherited. I would recommend Mark Edsel Johnson’s book, Tranquil Wisdom Insight Meditation, if you're interested in a fresh perspective.

That should be enough to be going on with! And hopefully, if you are familiar with these traditions, you will be able to see how they all use mindfulness of mind—watching the mind, being aware of the mind—to dwell in wholesome conditions of the heart, and to learn from the movements of mind towards and away from experiences.

So, thanks for your interest. This was a longer post to lay out my stall, but there will probably be a range of content on this blog. Sometimes I will unpack these topics in greater detail, sometimes I may just chat about what’s going on for me. In this age we may be entering of soulless AI-rehashed content, I want the writing here to have a companionable feel.