Conquering the Conqueror

If you're in the historic centre of Berlin, and you stroll through the beautiful Tiergarten park, you're bound to notice a landmark statue, a golden figure on top of a  column called  Siegessäule (The Victory Column). The figure is called 'Victory' but local people call her 'Goldelse' – 'Golden Lizzie'. Lizzie was put on her plinth in 1873, to commemorate the series of military victories by the Prussian kingdom that culminated in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-1. This caused the end of the French Second Empire and unified the German states under Prussian leadership. At that time, this conflict was the most recent in the various wars that had been going on since the tenth century after Charlemagne divided his empire into three. Nowadays we have the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Germany and France, but for centuries it was a fluid collage of territories, much like much the rest of Europe, in which shifting borders defined areas of influence and relationships rather than embracing distinct nationalities. 

If you walk down the straight boulevard from the Victory Column past the Brandenburg Gate along Unter den Linden for about 10 minutes, you'll come across a single story building on the left hand side with Greek Corinthian columns. It's called the Neue Wache, the memorial to the war dead. It's a simple building, consisting of a grey tiled hall, with grey walls and light descending from the ceiling over one black statue – which is the sole item in the room. At first glance, the statue seems to be of a sack, but you quickly realize it is the figure of a seated hooded woman. Look more closely and you see she is cradling a skinny male. It's a statue by Käthe Kollwitz called 'Mother with a Dead Son'. Kollwitz was a committed and outspoken pacifist all her life and she created this statue in 1937/8 in memory of her son – who had died in the First World War. Ostracized by the Nazis, she died a few weeks before the end of the last pan-European conflict, the Second World War. Now the statue has been deliberately placed as a reminder – and the straight line of the boulevard that links it to Golden Lizzie amplifies the message: victory means that one side is crushed, and on that side, the mothers and wives are in mourning and the nation is shattered. 

The victory paradigm is however showered with lustre and glory. In fact history is depicted in terms of its conquering kings and emperors: Alexander the Great, Genghiz Khan, Tamerlane, and, in Europe, by the would-be conquerors of its heartland:  Charles V, Louis XIV, Napoleon, Kaiser Wilhelm and Hitler. The scenario played out with one side achieving domination and crushing the other, then a reversal of the process. This went on for centuries with increasing devastation. And then as the conqueror fell and the empires crumbled into dust and pain, ordinary people picked themselves up, raised their kids, fed the chickens and got back to work. The daily history of people the world over. 

Thankfully it seems that this particular zone of conflict has cooled down – due to the post-war determination to found the EU, soften the borders and increase cooperation. What will it take for the borders of Russia to follow suit? Is it even possible for there to be a more cooperative relationship between Israel, the Palestinian statelets and the Arab world around them? Maybe this could begin with a collective day of mourning... then a day when the women of all sides grieved together... "Mother with Dead Son' presents a more realistic image of war than Golden Lizzie. Through such a mutual acknowledgement of our common pain and fear, the current devastation could have a similar effect as the Second World War and urge a peaceful resolution.

This year as always, the dominator model is in full swing. The headline focus is on Ukraine and Gaza, but let's not forget, Yemen, Ethiopia, Sudan and a number of conflicted states in Africa. China is arising as a dominant power, much to the irritation and concern of the current chief dominator, the United States, where a classic dominator candidate for presidency is gaining support, even though he's on trial for a range of criminal offences – including supporting insurrection. Domination, with its simplistic logic, is a popular theme: the strong man will 'fix things', quickly.  How? By the use of military and financial power. This is supported by an increasing polarisation of 'us and those outsiders', that relies upon religious, ideological or mythic 'nationalist' views. Resentment and blame for those who have been deemed to be on the 'other side' (even within the nation) are stirred up, and that supports heavy policing and overriding of the constitution, and of course, ethics. It was a strategy popularised by Hitler, but it has not gone out of date. 

Domination is in fact the thing that needs to be fixed. It's based on an unawakened response to uncertainty and diversity: the ignorant citta reacts by demanding hard and permanent solutions, fixed boundaries, and simple strategies that will defend it against changing conditions that it can never control. Based on the incapacity and insecurity that ignorance brings, the citta projects 'the other' out there as being the source of its own problem. Losing touch with its ability to be fluid, heartful and ethically secure, the citta concocts various distorted messages: 'They'll take over, they'll take your livelihood, rape your women, defile your national identity.'  The narratives of resentment and prejudice present some other group as depriving or threatening you. Even when the opposite is true. As an obvious example, throughout the history of what was called 'Christendom' one of the fall-back strategies has been to blame, kill or expel the Jews whose industry and intelligence supported trade and finance, and whose culture formed part of the rich fabric of Europe. The Islamic Ottomans could hardly believe their luck when the medieval Spanish monarchs expelled a Jewish population that had lived in Spain for 700 years – those damnable Turks promptly welcomed the Jews as a means to revive their failing economy. Meanwhile, there is no record of Jews ever presenting a threat to a nation; in general, they have contributed to it. 

As another example, take Brexit and its slogan 'Take back control':  European centres of finance have prospered as London was shot in the foot by this outbreak of British nationalism. (The fact remains that most of the 'national' UK wealth and resources continues to be controlled by non-British entities.) But facts are useless in the face of the blend of insecurity and the lust for supremacy. Hence indigenous people, women, Brussels Eurocrats, negroes, Communists - any identity can be created to justify the fear, insecurity and consequent reactions that are founded on the bedrock assumption that we have to conquer and subjugate to survive. But get this: humanity thrived, thrives and is fulfilled  by working together; otherwise, our species would have been exterminated during African prehistory.

The case is that, the dominator (and their team) themselves represent a greater threat to their supine population because (Mao or Stalin are supreme examples) they have to dominate everyone – including their erstwhile supporters. The reality of other people being much like me is blocked by the fantasy-projections of the other that the dominator despises or feels threatened by: fantasies born of their own psychological afflictions and trauma. These are self-glorifying, identity providing – and insatiably addictive. In this way domination becomes a drug.  You can see that play out in politics (no-one can own any territory, why harden borders and seize more land?) and in financial terms ( when you have $10billion, why do you need more?).

Security? How can aggression and inequality create a world free from hostility, fear and resentment?  

Supremacy? In our attempt to conquer Nature, we mangle the delicate biological mechanisms that maintain life. We exterminate bees with pesticides although we have no way of pollinating plants to produce fruit. Our negligence and stubborn resistance to acting in harmony with the biosphere is generating climate and environmental changes that threaten to heat the planet to a point that profoundly challenges our survival. Supreme arrogance: it's the problem of self-view.

So in the long run, domination defeats itself. The empires crumble. So far the Russia-Ukraine conflict has only served to unify the diverse Ukrainian peoples and draw them closer to the European heartland, and to ramp up support for NATO. The Israel-Gaza conflict has isolated Israel, added to the trauma carried by Jews the world over and increased support for the Palestinian people - despite the atrocities committed by Hamas.  

Is there a solution? 

'Cultivate; investigate, purify and release the citta from self-view,' has to be the starting point. When you enter your true territory, the domain of heart-consciousness, you get the message. In your intimate territory, control and domination don't work. You can't even control your thoughts and emotions. You don't even own this body. Here there are no hard borders - everything permeates you from the air you breathe to the memories that well up in your mind. You have to co-operate, forgive and allow inner changes that defy your identity. You learn to give up craving for simplistic, 'me and my group' solutions and fixed positons. Instead there can be an acceptance of life’s uncertainties and frustrations rather than feeling threatened by them. As we stop projecting our personal failings and dissatisfactions outward, we see otherness as a basis for increased understanding and even wonder. A love based on the miracle of sharing life gets born, and a relationship based on harmony rather than coercion. 

The great conquest then is the conquest over self-view. This has always been the teaching and the Way of the supremely awakened ones.

Questions and Answers: In and Out of the Ego-tunnel

These are questions taken from my Dhamma Tracks page. The responses may back up the ongoing reflections around Dependent Origination.

 

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Why is our experience inextricably linked to our body and its place in the world?

 

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Well, we’re alive. What does that mean? Animate, sensitive, growing, moving, participating in a context whereby we breathe what’s around us, consume it and are made conscious by it. Consciousness is an intelligence that serves the animate being (me) by reporting on what’s happening around and within it. So our experience has external and internal aspects, it’s viññāṇa, a dualistic awareness that presents experience as a ‘world’ (get to that later) and a ‘self’ experiencing it (better get to that later too). It separates into subject and object. Its program (saṅkhāra) is to maintain the life and coherence of a separate living being. That is – ‘see this so that you know what to do about it’. In the Buddha’s analysis, consciousness is dependent on ‘form’ (rūpa) – that is, something detected by a sense base. Because of the eye, we experience a visible world – if there’s nothing to see, visual consciousness is inert. But what that visible form looks like depends on the kind of consciousness we have – we don’t see what a butterfly sees. Furthermore, mental consciousness adds naming (nāma) –  various programs that determine what we attend to and how we respond to form. What is New York like to a Congolese pigmy? And if I walk through a tropical forest with a native person, I just see trees, but she/he ‘sees’ something far more intricate and vivid. So nāma adds a further degree of subjectivity to ‘my world’ – in fact ‘naming’ shapes the ‘me’ bit of any experience. 

 

Moreover, consciousness itself depends on a sensory form (aka body) as a platform. It seems separate, but actually it’s inextricably linked to name and form, self and world.

 

All this weave is further complicated by the fact that consciousness operates through not one but six senses – seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching, and conceiving. That sequence presents an increasing sense of involvement and intimacy, but they all refer to the living body. Seeing places the world at a distance in front of our body, with hearing it’s around us, then we experience being entered (by smell and taste) and wrapped (by skin) and eventually tossed around in and creating a world that extends through time (by mind).  These various sensory messages don’t add up to anything cohesive (and we need a coherent reality in order to function) but mind weaves a few aspects of sense-data and subjective impressions into a workable model – complete with preferences, assumptions, and blind-spots, and we are shaped by all this. Thus we ‘become’ (bhava) an individual self, constantly busy weaving and being bound to ‘my world’. But the self that is created has tunnel vision, it forms in the ‘ego-tunnel’ of ‘my world’ with its self-view.

 

This tunnel is largely mind-made. Mind-consciousness (mano-viññāṇa) both overrides the bodily sense with its receptivity and responsive energies, and holds the body to be a vehicle, a kind of donkey, or a robot with awkward pains and flushes. Thus mind extricates the ‘me bit’ into an autonomous self that pretends it’s separate from the body and indeed the rest of creation, while dominating and consuming it. Thinking depends on embodied energy, and just as we consume and devastate the planet because we assume we’re not part of it (and yet are affected by that devastation), so we ignorantly consume and devastate our bodily energies.  Hence the domination and exploitation paradigm has dire consequences: externally there is climate-crisis, pollution, and bio-extinction – and internally there’s stress, anxiety, depression and mental illness. It’s an inextricable cosmos.  We have to be touched by it and handle all of it (internal, external) with respect.

 

But … there is a way out of the world – in this very body. (see A.4:45). So be careful of exclusion. The way to where ‘my world’ ceases is through gaining perspective on and dispassion around nāma.  You do this by sensing how nāma affects your body, through focusing and stimulating (or suppressing) the somatic energies that act as a basis for consciousness. Huh? For example, what does craving feel like in your body? And how about ill-will? Or gratitude, or joy? Two of these impulses twist you up, two give you openness and ease. Bad and good kamma. Like that, you’re going to feel craving and aversion for the poisons that they are, and work on reducing them. And you’re going to incline towards the good stuff. Your inner body can relax compulsive impulses and widen attention into a more receptive mode; it can step out of the ego-tunnel to the end of ‘my world’. That internal process has external consequences.  

 

However, let’s avoid getting upset or excited about our internal stuff; it’s just conditioned by consciousness, don’t claim it. Let good and bad move through – and you can do that by tracking these energies in your body. So there’s no need to create an identity. Just be in a shared world with conscience and concern, and tune in to the gift and grace of that.

 

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…some advice on settling the mind, developing samādhi, when breathing meditation (due to chronic illness) is very difficult. I also find breathing meditation makes me more tense and tight! 

 

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There are several processes that support true cultivation of heart: goodwill, moral sensitivity, restraint – and mindfulness of body. For what we call ‘meditation’, or the samādhi aspect of cultivation, the Buddha says that mindfulness of body is essential – see my remarks above. To cultivate this fully, we are encouraged to be aware of the body in bodily terms (kaya kaye). In its own terms, the body’s intelligence is one of externally feeling sensations and internally feeling somatic energies (tension, ease, balance, dis-ease and so on). So your job is to get these felt domains settled and comfortable: that’s samādhi practice. In detail it begins by being receptive to whether the body feels safe and settled with what’s around it. And also that its internal somatic presence is not pushed or overridden by the mind’s wishes to daydream, plan or even get into samādhi. If you cultivate balance and sensitivity in bodily terms and restrain the mind’s notions, an aspect of breathing will probably come to the fore. Don’t prejudge the meditation; don’t seek the breath, don’t focus on a point where you want the breathing to be; just be receptive to how breathing happens for you, get interested in it and enjoy its life-sustaining presence. 

 

If the breathing doesn’t come to the fore, sustain your mindfulness of the body as a whole unit, bounded by skin – its subtly tingling felt boundary. You can walk, sit, stand or recline with mindfulness of the body. When sustained mindfulness settles, and clears imbalance in the body, it ripens into ease – and this is samādhi.

 

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[In a talk] You say ‘...bring attention to the place where the neck enters the skull.’ Why that place as a platform and prelude to resting in the heart?

 

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This was probably a guided meditation where I was encouraging awareness to immerse the body. I imagine there were quite a few pointers in that talk, so this neck/skull area is not the only point, but it is one of the points where tension arises and the body’s interoceptive sense separates the head from the rest of the body. 

 

This sense of the head being separate from the rest of the body is normal – most people experience themselves as living somewhere behind the eyes – but this isn’t true. Moreover it creates an imbalance. The head is always looking down on the body, directing it, critiquing it, and assuming control over experiences that are not in its domain – such as breathing (which is a whole-body experience, powered by the abdominal and thoracic tissues). The separation is dependent on a lot of energy being gathered and consumed in the head (face, forehead, jaw). This can result in headaches and neck tension. Tension = too much energy locked up in too small an area.

 

Necks are often tilted forward over a work surface and thereby carry the weight of the skull at an angle. So the neck muscles get tight; therefore energy can’t flow through. If energy can’t flow through, it can’t release and refresh. So energy remains bottled up in the head (= excessive thinking). 

 

If we can spread some soft, receptive awareness around the juncture of the head and skull, this supports a relaxing and a release of an energetic bottleneck. (The body has a few of these: throat, solar plexus, lower abdomen for example.) A wide and sympathetic awareness brings a corresponding energy to bear. I imagine that was the theme of the meditation. It certainly should be.

 

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 When working with vitakka, a sense of buried "guilt" arises and sometimes the origin is identified and related to past lapse of judgment, wrong view, poor ethical choices that affected not only myself but others. But the problem is now when I interact or relate to others out of this feeling of guilt. It feels anxious, regretful and stifling. Could you elaborate on the Buddha's teachings on guilt?

 

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The heart (citta) is a receptive experience that is attuned to bringing us into harmony. Harmony occurs when it senses a wholesome rapport internally and externally. This involves ethical sensitivity: my actions and intentions are not oppressing or abusing what’s around me, and they are not oppressing or abusing my heart. However due to ignorance and craving, actions and intentions do go astray and the result is a bruised heart – and I am barely aware of it at first. Reviewing that and how it happened brings the experience of remorse (vippatisāra). This is regarded as healthy – we’re waking up, and learning; so remorse encourages ‘conscience and concern’ (hiri-ottappa) and increased mindfulness. The oppressive quality you call ‘guilt’ comes when there is identification with the unskilful action: one becomes the disease rather than the patient. This is an aspect of the hindrance of worry – udhacca-kukkucca; it’s not skilful remorse.  The foundation for this stuck state is the mechanism called clinging. This bonds the heart to a mental state and supports shaping an identity out of it. ‘Shaping’ means one becomes that state. Hence the heart is trapped in a painful ego-tunnel. 

 

The long-term project is to not create a tunnel in the first place – to witness skilful states as skilful states, gifts not belongings; and unskilful states as diseases. States arise from causes and conditions, not some solid self. Do you see where states arise from? For many people the origin of their mental content is a blur. Hence one needs the insight wisdom of meditation to get clear about this.

 

The more immediate response to remorse is to acknowledge any error, and refrain from actions that you see as contributing to that error. Then to cultivate the healing energies of good will.

 

However, it can also be the case that one feels ‘neurotically’ guilty – one experiences guilt based on a personality profile. One’s personality is shaped by relational causes and conditions, and if one’s upbringing and social conditioning is one of feeling unworthy and needing to work hard to win approval, the citta is starved of the good will that should give it a healthy shape. So one feels ‘at fault’ and ‘needing to be better’ in any relationship. In such an ego-tunnel, it’s easy to feel that ‘the fault is mine’ in any scenario, because the sense of ‘I am at fault’ is a shaping condition in one’s personality structure. 

Here again, the steady and deep practice of good will is needed. Allowing yourself to be as you are is good-will. This doesn’t mean that everything you do is OK, but that you are OK and can learn from errors rather than be burdened by them.

 

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As I listen to your Dhamma teachings during the rains retreat the message is there is no self. But throughout daily activities it is difficult to remember this… .Is the self the personality, the tangled thread of karma? There remains confusion with giving & receiving Metta. 

 

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I’d adjust your comment to say that not-self is not about denying the experience of selfhood (which is necessary for sane and functional life), but about recognising that that experience is of a psycho-somatic weave of perceptions, attitudes, intentions, and introspective images that are formulated in the citta. There is no solid entity there, no-one who is born and dies. But that weave needs to be purified (as it affects your own and others’ well-being); and the process of so doing untangles it. Then it becomes a flexible weave that supports responsibility. 

 

You’ll even find references to being accomplished with regard to self in the suttas: ‘one thing is very helpful for the arising of the Noble Eightfold Path. What one thing? Accomplishment in virtue … Accomplishment in desire … Accomplishment in self … Accomplishment in view … Accomplishment in diligence … Accomplishment in careful attention’ (S.45: 64-68 and 71). 

From this you can understand that your subjective sense needs to be skilfully engaged in order to fulfil the Path. Just don’t take your self personally!

 

Giving metta means first of all feeling that quality arise as a heart-energy, not just as a principle. It’s something that your citta can awaken to.  Feel touched by the goodwill of others whenever you notice or recollect it. Linger in that and the heart will gladden and start suffusing that energy. You can then bring people or aspects of your ‘self’ to mind.  Receiving it first is the key, because that means we open the ego-tunnel to let some light in. Then we experience a mutual world and metta is a natural energy flowing within that. It too is not-self.

Where Are You Going?

This is a section of a map of the London Underground rail network. It will show you how to get from Notting Hill Gate to Holborn along straight lines (with two easy bends) without hindrance. Of course, it’s a fantasy. The actual rail line snakes through the mud, shale and rock underneath the city. But even if you expected to walk between those two points along unobstructed straight streets, you’d be disappointed. The city is a multi-layered tangle of physical constructions that support and shape the centuries’-long process of human interactions; there are no straight lines. But it’s a useful map – millions of people use it to transit through the city every year. They don’t need to know what’s happening on the surface and what they are travelling through; such realities serve no purpose. Instead, attention can be given to the phone or the newspaper or one’s private thoughts as the train rattles on. These apparently do have purpose.

Our life on the social web is full of maps. And they define us: take national ones ... government and the psychology of the state profoundly shape our outlook and possibilities. Yet boundaries, governments and psychologies change, states die – Yugoslavia, Savoy, Gandhara, Assyria – and new states spring up – Moldova, Israel, South Sudan. People move around: someone born in Hong Kong may emigrate to Toronto, and become as Canadian as an Inuit woman … but what kind of cultural reality do they share? On a more domestic level, we use time maps called ‘calendars’ in which every day is offered any equal amount of space and consists of hours that all have their own box, defined by straight lines. This is totally unlike lived-in time … which can be dense, speedy, tangled or open. Then there is the occupation map, the ‘To-Do’ list that will neatly configure your duties and spur you into action. No day then need be unconfigured; there’s always some bleeping reminder nudging you through a maze of tasks, promises, and interactions.  Thus we become our occupations. Life itself is mapped in decades: you’re thirty – how about your job, relationships, babies? You’re forty – there’s the pressure of managing a career and a burgeoning family. By fifty you’re in midlife crisis, so that in the succeeding years you should be planning for retirement … health insurance plans ... and what you will leave behind? Where did that map take you to?

Notice how conventional maps just lead you to another point on the map ... and on … and on. And then you die without having arrived at anywhere that settled or conclusive. Their notions of where we are, what we have to do and what we belong to, are as different from your directly felt reality as the map of the Underground is from the mud and shale and street-life of London. Do you feel you can’t keep up? That you’re failing? ‘Samsāra’ , it’s called. Could it be that the disembodied reality and the samsāric pressure that those maps create affects mental health? So it becomes important to realise who are you – apart from the map that you first create and are then created by.

Meditation (or more accurately cultivation (bhavanā) of ‘heart’/citta) has the potential to take you to a true real-life centre. However, meditation techniques may well present maps of stages and a to-do list of duties that are to be undertaken in order to make that progress; and some destinations on that map are held to be a long way off in a journey that may extend for lifetimes. Knowing the nature of maps, a good question to ask then is, ‘Is there a journey? If so, from where to where?’  

Feeling a need to inquire into the nature of the journeys, and even of there being a map, it's worthwhile exploring where we’re going – and how. Inquiry is part of cultivation. How then to meditate? You might get the idea of holding your mind on to some point on your body ... it brings you into the present; the act of focusing is an important part of cultivation. However, attention alone is not going to get you out of samsāra.  Attention is an action that has results, but it’s such a constant one that we barely acknowledge it as such, let alone make a clear decision about that action and how to place it. Where then does that action begin? Attention normally arises with respect to a sense-field. For example, when seeing, the eyes present a visual field, and because of interest to discern an object there’s a focus on a detail. That’s attention (manasikāra): it’s not created by the eyes, but by the mind, or the mind’s interest. With that act of attention most of the field fades into the background and is ignored, and the focus holds 5% or less of the field and absorbs what occurs in that; if the interest firms up, and becomes decisive, there is a further refinement of focus.

This narrowing and restriction of input provides the basis for what we experience. It is an extremely significant act, but it doesn't present an unbiased reality. Architects notice design, burglars notice windows, doors and locks, real-estate agents notice neighbourhoods, traffic, access to shops and services… so what is a house? How would a dog see it? There is a subjective bias that accompanies attention, and that affects what you see (hear, taste, etc.).  That is, attention is accompanied by subjectively-tinted interest and a biased receptivity and these together formulate the experience of distinct object arising within a wider field. Furthermore, as with advertising, politics or media in general, the object itself may be loaded with details to incline the mind one way or another. In any case based on the formulated and tinted object, feeling and intention/motivation arise. As the Buddha commented ‘whatever one repeatedly gives attention to becomes the inclination of one’s mind’(M.19). So here is instant kamma: the act of attending does more than select an object, the whole process shapes you; it creates phenomena and immerses you in their reality, just as other maps do. ‘With the arising of attention there is the arising of phenomena.’ (S.47.42) Attention, interests and biases therefore need to be managed with care. Can you focus on these?

To do this, we have to turn towards another factor: awareness. Awareness (ñāña) is the receptivity of consciousness (viññāna), the openness to receive data. It is based in the ‘heart’ (citta) – whose receptivity is attuned to the input of the sense-fields, or more exactly to the field of the body and the mind (manas) – which maps and shapes phenomena out of the other senses. So whatever attention has shaped up into a perception contacts the citta, gives rise to disagreeable or pleasurable feeling, and hence, intention/ motivation/ desire arises.  And then the reactive dance around the senses starts. Now what if one deliberately restrained the process of attention so that objects didn’t jump up with their sharp outlines …? This means that instead of getting input from the 5% of a sense-field, you tune in to entire field of the mind. Then your awareness would more fully sense the nature of the interest or intention that was directing the attention. This kind of focus lessens the sharpness of the object definition, but it makes the quality of intention apparent. And by not being absorbed on a detail, you notice the signal that conditions attention in the first place. In other words, you become aware of what interests and motivates you, for good or for bad.  This is called 'deep' or 'careful' attention (yoniso manasikāra): it's not so much about what something is, but what it does to you.

So this is not about attending to a point. In fact, the Buddha’s teaching on cultivation doesn’t suggest that. Instead, you’re starting place is with intention rather than attention – and which your mindfulness covers: ‘When your virtue is well purified and your view straight, based upon virtue, established upon virtue, you should develop the four establishments of mindfulness … internally and externally ….’ (S.47:3; cf. S.47:15; S.47:47) This means there is an awareness based on noticing cause and effect, and that can track the source, effect and destination of phenomena in terms of the internal and external fields of body and mind. ‘Internal’ and ‘external’ refer to the body’s sense of what is within it (its somatic energies) and around it (the sense-world), and to the mind’s establishment of a location internally (its state) and externally (the psychological world).  As you keep tuned in to these fields, you’ll recognise where intentions take you – to benevolent or afflicted places in your heart and body –  and discover that ‘intention’ is not just an idea, it’s a saṅkhāra, an energy that runs through your nervous system. Notice how joy tends to send a brightening energy to the face and chest, fear cramps the abdomen and rage hardens the face and other soft tissues. This is a pivotal insight. 

The Buddha-to–be gave an account of investigating three sankhāra in particular that obstructed balance and liberation – ones that supported purposes based on sensuality, cruelty and brutality. Realising that these tracks led to harm for himself and others, he cultivated putting them aside and establishing right purpose (samma-sankappa) – that is non-sensuality, non-cruelty, and harmlessness; a matter of undoing. (see M.19).

Considering the obsessive nature of our thoughts and moods, we might well wonder how he 'did' undoing. My suggestion is that you can’t just cut out unskilful thoughts and drives by willpower alone; it takes cultivation. And as the Buddha’s main theme of cultivation was mindfulness of breathing, it seems to me that this process is the key.  Reviewing the instructions he gave (M.118), you’ll notice that they mention being aware of the entire body when breathing in/out; acknowledging the somatic/internal bodily energies when breathing in/out, and soothing those energies. Basically, you’re uprooting unskilful energetic pathways.  Even more profoundly, through fully comprehending the effect of tracing and releasing the bodily saṅkhāra, there can be the release of the heart, the ending of suffering and stress. This is the main track to getting off the map, the final destination of cultivation.

It is by keeping these fields open and mindfully cultivated, that a meditator can continue their practice ‘off the cushion’ in daily life. Actually, it’s more a matter of bringing your daily life training into the internal domain and taking it deeper – so the citta is steadied and able to notice the effect of any intention and attention. Whereas focusing on a predetermined point will tend to restrict awareness of energy, if one’s awareness is attuned to the entire field of the inner body it will be alert to the saṅkhārā that formulate the drives and reflexes of the heart. 

This process-path of investigating and purifying purpose/intention consists of uprooting energies and attitudes that contaminate our society and devastate our planet. It erases the divide between ‘internal’/‘on the cushion’/meditation and ‘external’/‘make a living’/occupation. It’s transformational because people suffer not so much from deliberate bad intention, but from not developing deep purpose. Life can be a matter of bouncing off what is thrown at you or trying to stay afloat in what you’re dumped in. But there is a track that can be followed that leads out of this; it is a line well worth following. So can we live with our minds and hearts aimed at a process of sustainable living rather than being tethered to the virtual realities of time and identity? Are you ready and interested to travel through your own intimate life? How can do that except with a rightly trained heart?

You're always good enough –in the relational field.

It was a normal day in the monastery.  At the meal time a group of Sri Lankan donors turned up to offer dana – the daily meal. The group comprised about six adults and four children. One of the adults explained that the group consisted of three generations – grandparents, parents, children; maybe an aunt or two, it wasn’t that clear. Everyone mingled together and helped to offer the food, then we went into the sala, the main meeting/dining hall. They paid their respects to the shrine and to me, with the children – two girls and two boys – coming up to me individually to offer their formal bows. After the meal, they all returned; the adults sat to the back of the small hall and the children came to the front, took some cushions and, plopping themselves down on them, looked at me with cheerful faces. The oldest was a girl who turned out to be eleven; the smallest was a boy who looked about three.  I engaged the girl in a conversation about school and her favourite subjects, about which she was quite animated. The other kids were moving a bit and exploring their cushions in a quiet way.  

Suddenly the door opened and a Western woman came in; she sat down, pulled out a piece of paper, and saying ‘I’ve got some questions,’ began asking about the not-self and emptiness and how to get into the not-self. She was talking at high-speed but after a while I managed to engage her in some dialogue, and pretty soon it came down to suffering – which is not unusual when people launch a high-speed monologue. She had this self in her head who was constantly screaming and fighting with her father. Her father was psychologically on her back all the time, had been all her life, telling her that she wasn’t good enough. So I tried to address that as best I could, but her ability to listen wasn’t that high. I’d get started on suggesting that she couldn’t overcome this thing with her reasoning mind otherwise after fifty years she surely would have done so … instead to feel the emotion now and how it felt in her body. But I’d only get started in that before she’d interrupt with more about feeling so trapped and stuck and wanting the whole thing to stop; wanting to be able to not feel anything, to get detached and into emptiness and not care any more. A wrong view on not-self and emptiness. Not that this was the  topic; the point that stuck out was how to meet and resolve the suffering.

Somewhere in all this, I turned my attention to the Sri Lankan group. The adults were sitting quite relaxed and listening. The children were sitting quite comfortably – well, maybe the little boy was bouncing on his cushion – so I said to them ‘Do you think you’re not good enough?’ They looked at me, clearly not understanding what I was saying. So I addressed the eldest girl, ‘Do you ever think that you’re not good enough?’ and she didn’t have any words, just broadened her smile and wriggled a bit. So I gestured to the parents and grandparents and said to the woman, ‘This is why they don’t get what I’m talking about - because of the parents. This is where it begins.’ The adults weren’t hovering over the children; they were attentive, but letting the children find their own space. The children weren’t running riot but gently animated and responsive. That’s what happens when the topic of being good enough doesn’t take hold. There’s a healthy relational field.

We don’t generally see relationships in terms of fields, but as something that happens between two people. This is an aspect of the illusion of being a separate self, a viewpoint based on the observation that when we’re born our bodies become separate from the body that they’ve been forming in. But this appearance is deceptive, because psychologically and emotionally, the newborn is not separate. In fact its sensory-motor system isn’t capable of operating its body; it can’t even hold its own head up. She or he doesn’t yet know what the physical body is: their gaze notices fingers and experiments with moving them to make the connection that ‘this is part of me’. And a lot of the time their eyes are focused on a parent; they need the adult’s help, as well as the smile and the chattering and cooing that the parent offers in order to establish connectivity. Through this sympathetic attention to one who is in a totally open state, there’s a steady atmosphere of emotional warmth that gives them the meaning ‘you belong; without doing anything you’re welcome here’.  That meaning, and the responsive interactions that affirm and enrich it, are the relational field. It’s generated by a few people, but the proper development is that as it gets established, it builds our emotional/ psychological body so that we can feel we belong – whether those people are present or not. This atmosphere, this relational field, is therefore not-self; it is the gestation place for our emotional body. 

Why do I say ‘body’? Well, those meanings, feelings and interactions get learned, familiarised and integrated as an ongoing psychological template – that is, an internalised form: ‘this is being here, this is me ’. Just like a body of knowledge, that emotional body moves around with us, and acts as the basis for our self-reference. But that reference is also not-self; it’s a non-verbal condition of being basically OK. 

To explain the emotional body in Buddhist terms: once we have the six-fold sense consciousness, we have mind consciousness and with that comes the the sensitivities that establish interactive connection. These sensitivities are the ‘aggregates’ of vedana - feeling-tones, sañña, meaning, and sankhara – activated energies that form impulses, reflexes and emotions. These three rise and move from citta, the heart of the conscious process, and direct impulses, speech and action. However it is also through these we’re aware of ourself as the subject in an apparently ‘outside’ world that affects us and receives our response. Thus we belong and have meaning – or not.

As feeling, meaning and activation get running, something is interpreted (saññā) as friendly or hostile with agreeable or disagreeable feeling (vedanā).  So there is the response (sankhāra) to move towards or to defend.  That’s the basic program of the emotional body, and it forms in dependency on the relational context in which it is dwelling. This is primarily the human context. In those early years, it’s going be the parental or familial interaction. In the original social model, there is the extended family of uncles, aunts, grandparents and so forth, that perhaps even extends through a village or a tribe, and it includes all the children in its field of belonging. So this establishes a wide relational field; the interactions are not just between one or two personalities but to a collective ethos. With a wide field, the emotional body is firmly established because it has wide-spreading roots. This is what it’s like to be a human amongst all the humans; it’s not just based upon the rather fragile person-to-person relationship, where there is a special person who who likes or doesn’t like me, or is having a good or bad day and so on.  

It's rather like when we plant the seed of a shrub or tree in the earth: those roots will grow out into the soil. Over time, through their micro-organisms, they will cause the soil to adapt to their needs. Now if you take that seed and put it in a plant pot, it will continue to grow, but the soil is pretty much stagnant as it doesn’t have creatures moving around in it. And as the roots grow they’ll be bound by the circumference of the pot. If the plant isn’t repotted in successively bigger pots the roots grow tight, tangled and compressed. And, as it is also pot-bound, the soil can’t adapt. Similarly, the healthiest psychological and emotional growth occurs in a broad relational field of supportive humans. Someone who only has one or two parents to bond to has a rather small pot and so the emotional body is more self obsessive: ‘my emotional welfare is dependent on one or two people, I’d better please them.’  So there’s a lot of introverted questioning about one’s value and being good enough, and a lot of critical self-referencing. The soil doesn’t have much fertility in it, and they might not even know there is any: it’s just a matter of me and you. Then if something is discordant in the relationship, I, the little helpless one, had better change, because the one or two controlling adults aren’t going to. If there’s something wrong, there’s something wrong with me. Even though sometimes, of course, the two adults are having a bad day, or have a drink problem, or are fighting with each other, etc, etc. Or sometimes, their day is spent working to raise the family and they can’t offer the continual presence. The field is depleted, but the little one assumes ‘It’s my fault.’ Accordingly, a wise parent will look to other relatives or a baby-sitter in order to keep feeding the little one’s emotional body.

Moreover, when you’re an infant, (and sometimes as an adult) you can’t always get away from discord in the field; you may be stuck in a situation, or with a family member, that’s not responsive. So the system closes, and you numb out around the sense of ‘something wrong with me’. Or you think of something else or otherwise distract. But in their closed state, the aggregates form an inadequate subject (little me) and a hostile person that lives inside me.  As with the distressed woman, the problem isn’t actually the hostile person, it’s the relationship with the person that the aggregates form. From that toxic or stagnant soil, a hostile meaning has become a person living in a starved emotional body.

So it’s not exactly a loving person that we need, but the healthy relational soil that will feed our emotional bodies. In this context, love isn’t sentiment or romance; it’s the atmosphere of emotional warmth and connectivity that is the sign of a living relational field. So the question is: if that has been, or is, inadequate, how do we find that field and that atmosphere? It’s not something that we can create; we can’t create being seen with sympathy. We may not feel comfortable with being completely open - and we may have learnt that to receive emotional warmth we have to do something. But that doesn’t create a welcome, fertile soil. We have to get our roots to open, even tentatively, in a way that opens their tight ball. Now the pot plant finds it very difficult because it’s never learn to extend its roots. It doesn’t know living soil, it finds the creatures moving through it frightening, it doesn’t know that its roots will cause that soil to adapt. It’s learnt that the soil is dead and so it holds itself closed. So it carries its pot around with it, searching for the one person who would love me. Yet it doesn’t know what that love is, so there is fantasy and projection.  

It seems to me that the basic Buddhist practices of generosity and morality (= to others as to myself) are the soil for our roots to grow in. They establish a relational field that isn’t based on personalities but on a common value, the value of mutuality. It empties self-view. Anyone can participate in a human context of welcome acceptance and looking out for each other. As I commented to the woman in distress, you start with giving to something, caring for whatever you feel safe with, even a dog. Continue with sīla, mutual respect and non-harming. Then  dwell in the feel of those qualities, absorb them. This is the basis of the love that feeds our roots; we give it, receive it and in it there’s no need to perform, attract anyone or be special. And it affects the soil of our felt environment. It’s open, and boundless; there’s nothing to fear. This is the beginning of that sympathetic awareness that is extended through giving, to conscience and concern, further and further to reach all beings, inner and outer, with goodwill and compassion. And equanimity, of course, because not everyone's available; when their relational field is clogged, equanimity at least keeps yours open.