Rafting Towards Relinquishment

Every morning I wake up nice and early. I do my morning stretches, do my chanting and pūjā, do my morning meditation, then settle into Pāli lessons. Often, while doing my Pāli lessons, I'm struck with an overwhelming urge to give up on my morning exercises, and go back to bed. This almost always comes with a strong sense of sadness, akin to but not exactly like the depression episodes that used to be commonplace for me. (There is a clear difference between depression and simply having a bad mood or being sad, in my experience.) But I know if I stick with it and push through it, I'll be glad I did. I'll have accomplished something, maybe it's something minor, but I'll have made it through another morning of helpful activities.

All these things--stretches, meditation, learning and writing--are beneficial to me. They improve my mood, they deepen my practice, they are valuable accessories for my ongoing war on my defilements. So I'm inclined to think that this sadness and resistance is really a tactic from the defilements. They know they're facing eradication and doing everything they can to protect themselves. But I will not falter, and I will free myself of them!

Also, I'm increasingly regarding the word "defilement" as distasteful. The overall idea is that the clean, pure mind is dirtied, is sullied, by impurities. I don't particularly like the word "impurity", either, although it probably fits better. Working on coming up with better words...

One popular idea of the point of Buddhist practice is pure acceptance of whatever is happening with no interest in changing it. I see this message delivered by modern Western teachers from a variety of traditions. But this is not what the Buddha taught. My own teacher, a monastic trained in the Thai forest tradition, told a story of being invited to talk at a Western Buddhist study group. He read from the Dhammapāda about training the mind. Everyone at the group was shocked. They believed that acceptance was what one should be doing, and not anything more.

The Buddha was quite clear that we need to train our minds. Unless we have reached full arahantship, he explicitly teaches to not be satisfied. To not be complacent. To continue striving. Not in a way that you never take a break or rest, the effort should be balanced at best, but for most people oscillates between intensity and some degree of slack. But we are to look at ourselves, see what needs changing, and work on it.

This is not to say acceptance has no place. Indeed, it is vital for the process of effective change. We have to accept where we're at. We have to acknowledge our current shortcomings as well as our current strengths. Denial and repression get us nowhere, and neither does shame or embarrassment. It is vital to accept where we are, and accept what is happening.

But once the current reality of our minds is accepted, we can work to change it. We can build on our strengths and overcome our shortcomings. More love, more letting go (a bit paradoxical, yes).

A Buddhist friend who was a therapist for awhile told me of a therapy technique called ACT: Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. That's what the Buddha taught, and that's what I'm talking about here. Complete acceptance of your current state of being, without guilt or fear or anxiety or arrogance, along with a commitment to change in specific ways...to apply right effort and uproot our unwholesome, unskillful, unhealthy, harmful tendencies and replace them with wholesome, skilled, healthy, helpful tendencies.

Change is hard. Especially change that goes against our habits. We have at least one lifetime, possibly countless lifetimes, of habitually moving towards pleasurable things and away from painful things. If we want to be liberated, and not be pushed around by our desires, we need to make different choices and establish new habits.

Perhaps before we never knew we were even making the choices. We just went with our desires. And through some Dhamma practice, we have come to realize that we do have a choice. This awareness is a good first step, but if you're anything like me, you still continue to choose to give into desire over the liberating choice. I just have too much habituation to make the Dhammic choice.

But I've had enough of a taste to see that the life lived according to Dhamma is a better life. At least for me. So, no matter how difficult, I keep making the harder choice.

Fortunately, this builds new habits. This wears new grooves in the mind. Every time I make a choice in accord with Dhamma, I make the next choice easier. Momentum builds. The new choices create a pleasant life, more enjoyable than the previous desire-driven one. My mind's craving for pleasure is harnessed for the practice. This, too, makes the Dhammic choice the easier one.

It's all about building momentum, momentum which becomes new habituation.

One of the first suttas I put in my sutta journal--my journal where I write down particularly inspiring or interesting things from scripture--was AN 11.1. It gives one of the sequences that falls under the umbrella of "dependent liberation", a sequence of steps that go from the basics all the way to enlightenment.

It starts with ethical practice. Doing good, refraining from doing evil. That results in an absence of regret. An absence of regret leads to gladness. You start feeling glad because you generally do right and act well. That leads to joy. Or more specifically, pīti, which if you read my previous post you'll see I have some questions around what exactly that means. Pīti is refreshing and satiating, which leads to peacefulness and tranqility. This tranquility becomes the basis for happiness and well-being. That allows the mind to become collected and unified. With the disturbances of mind thus cleared out, one can see reality clearly, as it is. Once one sees reality clearly, as it is, one realized that there's nothing worth clinging to. That realization leads to a fading away of passion for worldly things. Which finally results in freedom.

I have a few thoughts on this. I mean, of course I do, otherwise I wouldn't be making a post!

( dependent liberation )

So one thing that's been bouncing around in my head for some time now is, what exactly does pīti mean?

In orthodox Theravāda (as well as the semi-orthodox modernized forms of it) it specifically refers to an experience of rapturous, blissful, ecstatic energy that arises during samādhi as a precursor to jhāna (itself a highly controversial topic!). Okay, fine. I've experienced that. It's definitely and important thing to cultivate if you want to deepen samādhi.

But. Does it mean the same thing as the pīti of the seven factors? I remember once asking this question of a group of Buddhists and they said it was, in a tone implying I was a total braindead fart for even questioning it. But I'm not convinced (and could very well be a total braindead fart).

What are the seven factors? Are they exclusively for meditative states, and cultivating them is what brings a meditation to the doorstep of enlightenment? Then yes, clearly pīti means the same thing as it does in the context of jhāna and samādhi.

But I interpret the seven factors as qualities to cultivate in life in general. One should constantly be cultivating the seven factors; it should be more of a lifestyle than a meditation experience. In which case, perhaps it means something else. I don't think it's possible to go around experiencing pīti--at least not the pīti of deep samādhi--and still be functional. An alternative definition of pīti is "joy", and that, as a quality to cultivate at all times, makes sense to me. Living a joyful life.

That said, I find that when I take a good look at the experience of joy, it's actually kind of a low-key version of the rapturous pīti. Just not as intense as the pre-jhānic and jhānic pīti.

So, maybe they are the same thing after all.

In MN 43 and SN 41.7 virtually the same text appears, identifying four different versions of cetovimutti, which can be translated as "liberation of the heart" or "liberation of the mind". They are: appamāṇa cetovimutti (limitless), ākiñcañña cetovimutti (nothingness), suññata cetovimutti (emptiness), and animitta cetovimutti (signless).

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Lately my mind has been inclining towards what is called "the signless concentration", which is very similar to shikantaza in Zen.

After an initial period of getting settled, focusing on the breath or practicing some mettā, my mind starts to open up to everything. It takes actual work to get it to focus on one thing, as one might for a traditional samatha or jhāna practice (which is what I thought I was working on!). Instead, it expands to encompass every little thing that happens, without grasping. Insead of focusing on one particular thing in my experience, my focus is on everything, or nothing in particular. But I'm still focused, fully aware--not dull at all, which one can trick oneself into thinking one is focused on nothing at all, empty-headed, but are actually dull and shutting down.

I still get settled, get some samādhi, while doing this. At this point, there's no real pīti as I previously understood it, but I still enjoy it and feel refreshed by it.

I'm trying to figure out what to do with it, if anything. I know in Zen it's pretty much all you do. In the Theravāda scripture, it can lead directly to Enlightenment, although how is unclear to me. It's similar enough to dzogchen that I'm considering looking into literature on that.

Recently I attended a retreat led by a secular Buddhist who dismissed rebirth as an "Immortality Project", a fantasy invented by people grasping for some hope that they will continue after they die. But if you have a proper understanding of rebirth, you will see it is not this at all.

When I die, I will be annihilated (or at least everything I understand myself to be with my unenlightened mind). Just as the person I "was" before was when they died. Just like the person who inherits my kamma and my habits of mind did not exist before they were born (after I died) and will be annihilated when they die. I, as I understand myself to be (which is an unenlightened understanding, obviously), will not continue after death. What will continue is the kamma I possess, and the habits of mind I have established.

So my motivation to do good deeds is not to help myself out in some future life, but to help out another person, a different person, who will inherit my kammic legacy.

Since the Leigh Brasington jhāna retreat I went on, with some extra work afterwards, I've been able to summon and am working on sustaining pīti. What's that, you ask? Translated as "pleasure" or "rapture" or "zest", it's a sort of electric, energetic feeling of pleasure associated with deep states of mental stillness (samādhi). The roadmap for getting there isn't too hard...once you reach a sufficient level of stillness by paying attention to something like the breath or benevolence, you switch your attention to a pleasant bodily sensation. Like, with the breath, there's usually something inherently pleasant about breathing you can tune into. Or, with mettā (benevolence or loving-kindness), there's usually a quite pleasant feeling that arises. So, you switch your attention to the pleasant feeling, and abide with it, and soon it grows in intensity, until it becomes this electric rapturous feeling. That is pīti (or more technically pītisukha). Leigh's instructions are to simply stay with the feeling, and do nothing else. It will build on its own and erupt into first jhāna. I can already tell you that if you get distracted (you have attained an insufficient level of mental stillness), it goes away, and if you get excited about it (Oh boy! Here it comes!) it goes away. You have to remain calm and relax into it.

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In the last few months of 2020, I went on a handful of weekend and weeklong retreats where the focus was various forms of love as understood in the Buddhist system. It felt friggin fantastic, leaving me with a blissful afterglow each time. In addition, it has the effect of uprooting any ill-will I have (e.g., towards cops and fascists), and in general makes me a happier, gentler, kinder person. Complete win. I have decided to take this on as a central practice, and nowadays my meditation consists of the first half hour of some sort of samatha exercise to stabilize my mind (mindfulness of breath in the morning, asubha practice in the evening) and the second half hour just loving practice, letting my mind drift through individuals and groups and feeling love for them.

"Love" here is what are called the "sublime attitudes", the "immeasurable minds", or "the dwellings of Brahmā". Thich Nhat Hanh calls them "the four aspects of true love". In The Path of Purification (Visuddhimagga), each is given a far enemy, which is its opposite, and a near enemy, which is very similar but off the mark enough to be unhelpful.

First of these is mettā. This has been translated in various ways, including "loving-kindness", "loving-friendliness", "goodwill", and "benevolence". It is the recognition that all beings just want happiness, and every life is spent in search of happiness--even if that being is confused about what will bring happiness and pursues wrong avenues. And following that recognition, wishing happiness for them (and oneself). I wish for all beings, including myself, to reach true happiness. The far enemy is ill-will--wishing harm on oneself or another being. The near enemy is attachment: An unhealthy clinging, getting wrapped up in another so that one's own feeling of pleasant love is dependent on them.

Second of these is karuna, generally translated as "compassion". It is the recognition that all beings have stress and suffering, and wishing for their release from stress and suffering. I wish for all beings to be free from stress and suffering. The far enemy is cruelty, rejoicing in the suffering of another. The near enemy is given in the Vsm as sorrow, because if you are actually feeling the pain of another you are not having compassion for them...you are sharing in their pain. I would propose that another near enemy is pity--feeling sorry for another rather than wishing them freedom.

Third of these is muditā, translated variously as "sympathetic joy", "appreciative joy", or sometimes just as "joy". The neologism "compersion" is probably the best translation of this concept. It is rejoicing in the joy of another. Sharing in their joy. Being pleased at their good fortune. The far enemy is envy or jealousy, which is feeling some sort of pain at the joy of another, wanting what they have so bad it hurts or resenting them for what they have gained. The near enemy is exhileration, grasping at pleasure out of a sense of lack. To be honest, I don't have much experience with this near enemy, so I need more work to sort it out and understand it.

Finally, there is upekkhā, "equanimity" or "even-mindedness". This is the kind of love that is total acceptance, including all the faults and flaws. It is often a resort for when compassionate action fails--when you see someone suffering, you try to help, but sometimes they refuse the help or otherwise can't be helped...in which case the healthy thing is to step back and lovingly accept them from a distance and recognize their karma is their own, instead of getting wrapped up in a co-depedency with them. The far enemy is hatred. The near enemy is apathy or indifference. We speak a lot of "nonattachment" in Buddhism as a goal, but it's a sort of "involved" nonattachment...different from detachment and cold indifference. There must be love to keep us connected or we drift into apathy and dullness.

The focus of my work right now is examining these, experiecing these, cultivating these, and understanding these, and it's making me a better person.