Rafting Towards Relinquishment

I co-host the Circle City Sangha, a Plum Village group in Indianapolis. Recently, after one of the sessions I facilitated, a woman who has become a regular attendee came to me with some degree of gratitude for sharing a presentation of Buddhist thought different from what she had heard before. She told me of how she heard a teaching on the “simile of the saw.” The way it had been taught to her was that if you don’t keep love in your heart even when having your limbs sawed off by brigands, you aren’t a Real Buddhist™. I’m glad that karma or the devas or her ancestors brought her to us, and that she is now able to add Buddhist ideas to her already existing robust spiritual practice.

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I’m a fast person. So when I first read Thích Nhất Hạnh’s suggestions about the need for slowing down to be mindful, I balked. I’d also read from other teachers that one can be mindful at any speed, that one should not force oneself to move at an unnatural pace, so I grabbed onto that. “Sure, you may need to be slow to be mindful, but I don’t,” I said. “I am quick by nature. I can be fully aware while moving fast!” At the time, I was practicing with my first sangha, which was a Plum Village sangha (Thích Nhất Hạnh’s school) in Austin. Every meeting, there would be a ceremonial serving of tea, and one week in 2011, I had the honor of providing it. I remember walking into the room at my natural pace with the tray of tea cups, and someone breaking the customary silence to admonish me to slow down. I did not like that.

But now I’m taking a closer look at it.

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The first book of instruction in Aleister Crowley’s system of ritual magick is Liber O. In the introduction, he wrote: “In this book it is spoken of the Sephiroth and the Paths; of Spirits and Conjurations; of Gods, Spheres, Planes, and many other things which may or may not exist. It is immaterial whether these exist or not. By doing certain things, certain results will follow; students are most earnestly warned against attributing objective reality or philosophic validity to any of them.” I first read this in my final teen year, and it sunk deep. It has long been the approach I take with the more unverifiable aspects to the religious and spiritual teachings I follow. I remain agnostic but still employ them as a helpful way for framing my understanding of the world and my spiritual path. That is, I do not believe the “woo” things, but I entertain them as possibilities and use them as a framework for approaching my experience. With this preface, I can give the topic of today’s post. Among my DSM-V-TR diagnoses is ADHD, and I have given some thought to it, and the nature of greed and rebirth. If the reader will indulge me, I will share those thoughts.

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An idea that floats around many spiritual circles is that happiness is a choice you can make. That, in any moment, you can choose to be happy, and thus, any unhappiness is entirely your responsibility. I think most sensible people can immediately see the absurdity of this maxim of toxic positivity, but like many clichés, there is some truth to it. The fact is, it is possible to “choose happiness,” but it’s not as easy as the glib tone of the trite sentiment makes it sound. For most of us, especially those of us with pronounced mental health issues, it takes a lot of work to get there.

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For a long time, I refused to ever use the word “spiritual.” I could not articulate a precise definition, so I discarded it as a useless term. I still don’t have a precise definition, but now I find it useful for pointing to things that can happen in the heart and mind at a deep level, resulting in profound transformations in the way we exist in the world. They are things that go beyond the work we might do in a therapist’s office, but not wholly disconnected from that, either; when we untie the knots of our traumas, we clear out avenues for spiritual expression.

There isn’t a word in the Indian languages the Buddha taught in that could be translated exactly as “spiritual.” The closest is nirāmisa, which literally means “not flesh” or “not raw meat.” In a narrow sense, we might restrict the idea of a Buddhist “spiritual” path to nothing other than that which the Buddha taught as the highest aspiration: complete liberation from suffering, and from the great Wandering (the literal definition of saṃsāra). But, since we really don’t have a precise definition for the word, can there be other options? I’d like to step back and consider.

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If you spend much time reading the works of Buddhist masters, you might come across rather shocking ideas: Liking and disliking things is harmful, and the practice of Dhamma leads to their end. What?! We may hear about equanimity, and how it is one of the most important mental states the Buddha told us to cultivate. If we misunderstand it, it sounds like apathetic indifference. It sounds like leaving behind the greatest things in life and reducing existence to a constant gray blah.

But then we meet one of those masters. We watch a video from an Ajahn, or meet a monastic who has been in robes for more than a decade. We see how happy they are. They don't look like their lives are a constant gray blah! They smile, they laugh, and they are warm and kind. Maybe their writings sound a bit harsh at times, but in person they radiate a simple joy. They may even look happier than we've ever imagined possible.

Freedom from liking and disliking is the secret.

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"Refuge" is a word that I had never connected with until about six months ago. We have this jargon, sometimes called "Buddhist Hybrid English" as a tongue-in-cheek reference to "Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit," a form of nonstandard (some would say mangled) Sanskrit used to write many Buddhist texts. Paul Griffiths introduces his article coining the term with the sardonic sentences, "Buddhist thought has a strange, and in many respects deplorable, effect upon language...and is now in the process of wreaking its havoc upon the English language, creating a dialect comprehensible only to the initiate...." English words used to translate Buddhist concepts from Pali a century ago have stuck with us, and they often require an entire essay to even begin to explain. "Refuge" was always one of those words for me.

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The Buddha spoke of four progressive stages of enlightenment. The final stage is that of the arahant, who has completely eradicated all causes of suffering, and is unfettered by craving and ignorance. Long before that, though, one must reach that first stage, which is commonly referred to as "entering the stream." This stage is marked by the arising of right view, and it marks the true entry onto the noble eightfold path. Until the breakthrough of stream entry, the student doesn't really understand what the path is about.

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Yogācāra interests me. It seems like a development in Buddhist philosophy that was inevitable as soon as Abhidharma became more about reifying than an aid for teaching and understanding, which needed to pass through the Madhyamaka phase (which then also became more about reifying, but reifying absence rather than presence as Derrida might have it) and come out the other end as Yogācāra. I really mean just the earlier Yogācāra material, too, not the later studies that reified it as an idealist position. My sources for this are the excellent work of William Waldron (The Buddhist Unconscious and Making Sense of Mind Only), as well as the work of Tagawa Shun'ei (Living Yogācāra) and Ben Connelly's Inside Vasubandhu's Yogacara (the latter two I found less satisfying but still worth reading). I have also been reading over translations of the Saṃdhinirmocana Sūtra and other translations of Vasubandhu's Thirty Verses. The former I find more puzzling and seems to be referring to Mahāyāna philosophical concepts which I am unfamiliar with, but the latter seems concise and clear and even inspiring.

I should add that I don't think any of this philosophical apparatus is really all that necessary if you just stick close to the practice as outlined in the EBTs. But once speculations and theorizing and highly technical elaborating on the basic doctrines therein begins, you almost need Mahāyāna philosophy.

So I have a few thoughts. First, the "basis consciousness", more popularly known as the "storehouse consciousness". The monastics at the Hillside Hermitage teach about what they call the "periphery" and how to discern the periphery. This comes through clearly on their teachings on mindfulness of body, wherein they point out that a sense can never sense itself, for example, the eye cannot see itself, therefore the body-sense can't sense the body, but instead senses bodily sensations. The two are to be distinguished, and the body is fundamentally unknowable. But we can know its effects on our experience...the arising of lust and craving, for example. We can feel the pressure it exerts on us when we engage in renunciation and restraint (especially for those of us for whom desire is our dominant affliction!). This idea suffuses their teachings on yoniso manasikāra and satipaṭṭhāna, as well. My take on this is that this peripheral thing that influences our experience, even giving rise to the objects and features of our experience, is the same thing as what the storehouse consciousness is referring to. It is fundamentally unknowable directly, and we can only know it by the effects it has on our conscious experience. It is a repository of all of our habitual structures, our cognitive scheme, the physiology of our perceptual systems, everything that shapes our experience that is not directly part of the experience. As such it is not a thing itself, but a process, a continuous transformation, and "storehouse consciousness" is just a convenient way to label it.

Then there's the I-maker, the me-maker, the part that does the grasping and identifying, that relates everything to a self, either by identifying with it or by appropriating it as a possession (i.e., takes a percept as "my" percept, one that belongs to a perceiving self that is separate from the percept). This seems quite straightforwardly to me as the manas.

And finally there's the realm of sense-consciousness itself (by which I mean all six senses, so both physical and mental things). For a nonenlightened person such as myself, anything that makes it to my actual sensual experience has first been transformed by the storehouse consciousness, given various determinations and limitations because of that, then gets processed by the I-maker and related to a self in some capacity, and then finally becomes something I actually experience.

I am not entirely clear on what "reversal of the basis" is, other than it's something that happens when you do objectless meditation (such as animitta cetosamādhi, which is my central meditation practice) and has something to do with clearing out or purifying the storehouse consciousness. This is not a thing that makes sense to me. I also admit a very weak grasp on the "three realities" teaching, although that one I find somewhat more intriguing.

When eradicating a harmful behavior, I find I have to work from two directions. First I need to recognize the causes, then I need to work on actually changing the behavior.

Any behavior has causes. These causes may be surface-level desires or fears, or they may be rooted in deep unconscious structures and traumas. Many times we do something harmful to ourselves or others without fully understanding why we're doing it. So it's important to unearth these causes, and understand why we do what we do. If we do not understand and address these subtle or deep causes, we will never be successful at changing a behavior we want to change. As long as the causes remain, the impulse to behave in that way will continue.

But I find this often isn't enough. I have seen some assert that all one needs to do is become aware of one's own behavior, and its causes and consequences, and that person will naturally let go. And sometimes this works, but often for me it is not enough. Perhaps I haven't penetrated with enough wisdom, but in any case I often find more work is needed. These behaviors are usually ones that have been repeated and reinforced over our whole lives (possibly even more, if we do indeed have multiple lives). Even if we understand the motivations and reasons for our harmful decisions, the force of habit will still pull us in that direction. So in every moment, we need to realize we have a choice: To follow-through on harmful behaviors, or to take deliberate and helpful actions--even if that action is merely restraint. The more we make the better choices, the easier they will become to make in the future, until that itself becomes a habit.

A quick aside: I do not want to be misinterpreted here as "you choose your reality" or "you choose your moods" or something. I don't want to end up on r/thanksimcured! As someone with a severe mental illness rooted in my physiology and genetics, which thus requires medication, I would say that while it's arguable that everything is a choice, it might not be within our capabilities to make that choice. This will be a topic for a future post, but I would say that part of the practice of the Dhamma and mindfulness is to strengthen our ability to broaden our control over more of our minds and lives, but there are some things we may not ever be able to control. In any event, acceptance of where you're at is necessary, even if you want to make a change afterwards.