Episode 40 - The arts of awakening & selfing

In this episode I explore ideas about nirvana, awakening and what we mean by ‘the self,’ as described in the Buddhist traditions founded by Gotama Buddha - whom scholars reckon may have lived around 400 BCE. I suggest that awakening and ourselves are processes, rather than fixed states or things, and that we can cultivate them through mindful awareness or Zen meditation. Rather than being accessible only to a few people endowed with special powers, awakening is an art we can all learn and benefit from. I hope you will find it to be of interest, and maybe helpful, as you navigate along your own Dharma road.

Transcript

'NIRVANA' is a Sanskrit term which literally means, ‘to extinguish’ or ‘to blow out’’ - as in extinguishing a candle flame or fire by removing oxygen. Nirvana can be considered as a mode of being that is realised when craving, clinging and wanting things to be other than they are, are extinguished. When we stop adding fuel to a fire, the fire goes out – this is also a useful metaphor for a way of handling negative or harmful emotions: if we don’t dwell on our feelings of jealousy or anger, and instead step back and release our hold on them, we can begin to feel calmer and decide what to do in a more considered way. By being mindful and calm we can see more clearly what is going on and stop adding fuel to the fire of our emotions.

In some schools of Buddhism nirvana is described as a state of transcendence, an ethereal state of other-worldly peace or even ecstasy. In this interpretation, we have a notion that nirvana is almost a super-human faculty that is only accessible to monks, nuns, gurus and saints who have special powers. From this perspective, nirvana is a condition only accessible to a few extraordinary people. I would like to suggest an alternative perspective.

But first, let us ponder on the term ‘nirvana.’ Traditionally, the word, ‘nirvana,’ is often defined as, ‘beholding the ceasing’. This is an unusual form of words. ‘Beholding’ suggests that awareness or observation is involved – in other words, we have to be aware that ‘ceasing’ is happening. The word, ‘ceasing’, here refers to the ceasing of reactivity, attachment and discrimination – a process of letting go or non-attachment. To be aware of (behold) the letting-go (ceasing) of reactivity is another way of saying to be mindful. In other words, we can think about nirvana as being accessible to anyone who learns the art of awakening – an art we can learn through the practice of zazen or mindful meditation. In being mindful we learn to let go of habitual reactive habits of thought, feeling and craving. And so, seen from this perspective, awakening or nirvana, is accessible to anyone who practises mindful awareness or zazen.

By ‘reactivity’ I am referring to a complex array of habitual, conditioned behaviours, including: attachment, craving, mental chattering, judgmental habits, obsessive thinking and feeling. This bundle of behaviours is what mindfulness teachers call ‘rumination.’ That is, the process whereby thoughts and feelings spawn further thoughts and feelings in endless cycles – continually creating disturbance, confusion, dissatisfaction, tension, frustration and exhaustion. This seemingly endless churning rumination is driven by habit and compulsion. Reactivity, in this sense, is what mindful meditation illuminates and dissolves. When we are mindful, we are letting-go of, or ceasing, reactivity – in other words we ‘behold the ceasing.’ When we let go of reactivity, our experience becomes clearer, lighter, more direct and fluid – we feel more harmonious and connected – at peace with ourselves and realising our kinship with others and with the universe. But remember, the fires of reactivity spring up when we least expect them, even after many years of mindful meditation. They do not simply go out for good. So, we have to be alert, to pay attention, to regard the practice of mindful awareness and letting-go as a lifelong process, art or skill – to be endlessly honed, refined and cultivated. 

When we are awake to life as it is – being mindful of our experiences without reactivity and attachment – we are ‘beholding the ceasing.’ This is an experience and skill we can all learn. If we think of Buddhist practice in this way, then to be mindful is itself to be experiencing nirvana – a process of moment-by-moment awakening to the reality of impermanence and interdependence within the ups and downs of everyday life. 

Just as the self is a process, not a thing or an essence, so enlightenment/nirvana/awakening is a process – a continual awakening to the reality of everyday existence – to things as they are. When we approach nirvana in this way, it becomes clear that there can be no final destination for Buddhist practice – a place or state in which nirvana is achieved once and for all - no end-state of eternal absolute unchanging enlightenment. For this would pre-suppose that there is a state in which impermanence and interdependence no longer apply – something that goes against Gotama Buddha’s insight that impermanence and interdependence are fundamental conditions of existence. It might be more useful to use the words ‘enlightening’ or ‘awakening’ to refer to this continuing process of mindful attention without attachment, reactivity or discrimination.

If enlightenment or nirvana is not the goal or destination, then the journeying itself, the practice of mindful awakening, can be considered as an intrinsically beneficial process – a process we could call ‘nirvana-ing’. Hence, as the thirteenth-century Japanese Zen teacher, Dogen, reminds us, enlightenment is practice, practice is enlightenment. Rather than thinking of Gotama Buddha as the awakened, or enlightened, one – a super-human being – it might be more useful to think of him as a human being who was extremely adept at the skill, or art, of awakening and enlightening. And keep in mind that the word, ‘Buddha,’ comes from the Pali root budh, ‘to awake, perceive, know.’ And it was in this skill of non-reactive clear-sighted awareness, that the Buddha was an expert. We could also describe this as the skill of being mindful in the fullest sense of the word.

This also prompts another reflection: when Buddhists talk about ‘Buddha Nature,’ or say things like, ‘seeing into one’s true nature,’ they often seem to be referring to some essence hidden inside us, that only a few of us can ever find or gain access to. However, in the light of the alternative way of thinking about nirvana I have been outlining, we can think of Buddha Nature in a different way - as a capacity we all have to ‘wake up’ – to awaken to this life in all its vivid, dynamic, everchanging interconnectedness. In other words, the capacity, skill or art of really being here, fully present to what is going on in and around us, without the baggage of reactive habits, cravings and attachments.

In Japanese Zen Buddhism the term nirvana is little used. Instead, the word, 'KENSHO', is often employed. It is derived from two roots: ken, meaning ‘seeing’, and sho, meaning ‘nature or essence’ - that is, ‘seeing into the nature of things’ (Dharma – the way things are). The usual translation is, ‘seeing into one’s own nature.’ But, it may be more useful to think about kensho as the art or experiencing the transitoriness and interdependence of all things - a sudden illumination or transformative experience of just being here – free of habits and dissatisfactions. The literature of Zen is full of accounts of, or attempts to evoke, these experiences and realisations. Many Japanese poets have evoked these experiences in their work – shedding light on their own capacity for awakening. Many haiku, the seventeen-syllable poems so central to Japanese literature, can be seen as demonstrations or evocations of the art of awakening. Here are a few examples: Basho’s: ‘frog pond plop’; and another, ‘Almost no one sees / the blossoming chestnut / under the eaves.’ (Hamill 2000: 10). And my variation on a poem of awakening by Muso (1275-1351): ‘Vainly I looked for a cloudless sky / not seeing what was all around me. / Then on a cloudy night, as I lifted a heavy / tile, I realised cloud, sky and tile are all one.’ (variation on poem in Stryk & Ikemoto 1965: 4)

In my view most people have experienced moments of just being – moments when all cares and desires, habits and dissatisfactions, opinions and beliefs, fall away, and we are left with a profound feeling of peace, calm and connectedness – a vibrant sense of being alive and being related to everyone and everything. But we tend not to place much value on these moments of awakening, we just move on and forget them. In Zen Buddhism these moments are valued and developed as a vital part of practice. 

For me, awakening is a process of discovery and liberation not a goal or destination – it is a creative, open and enjoyable engagement with the world as it is – in all its everyday splendour, challenge and surprise. It is the journeying itself that matters, and the journeying is the practice of awakening – being mindful.

Of course, kensho and awakening need to be cultivated by individuals and communities along with mindful ethics in order to develop wellbeing for all beings – working towards peace and sukha and away from conflict and dukkha. Developing mindful awareness and compassionate, caring, action are the keys to wellbeing and a ‘good’ life.

The rivering self

So let us take this revised notion of nirvana or awakening and connect it to Buddhist ideas about the ‘self.’ How should we consider the self? Do I have a fixed independent centre? Or am I process deeply integrated into the whole of existence? Is the self a thing we are lumbered with, or is it a process we can cultivate and craft as we proceed along life’s road?

Buddhism can be seen as a body of ideas and practices aimed at enabling anyone to become fully awake – to become aware of what it is to be here, to be alive at this moment, every moment. In the Zen tradition to sit in meditation is to treat all phenomena as being of equal importance, to be experienced and observed with equal care, acuity and equanimity. There is no thought, sensation or feeling that is too mundane or too small to be unworthy of mindful attention. Awakening in this context is to notice without commentary everything that arises, to attend to the interwoven streams of sensations, narratives, images and emotions that constitute consciousness. It is to notice that there are no solid and fixed boundaries to us. Instead, we notice that we are a constantly changing hub of relationships with everything that surrounds us, humming with information-processing and imaginative construction. We make ourselves from moment to moment, fashioning ourselves out of the materials of our experiences.

When we refer to the ‘self’, to ‘myself’ or ‘yourself’, we reify a process – we turn an ever-changing flowing phenomenon, into an object – we turn a verb into a noun. This is a misrepresentation of the actual self as we experience it – the constant river of sensations, thoughts, feelings and intentions that constitute who we consider ourselves to be. The self, considered as a thing, is, perhaps, just a linguistic fiction.

The analogy with a river is an apt one. The river is made up of intertwined currents that give rise to the shape, colour and distinctiveness of ‘the river’ at each moment. But, of course, the river is not an object, it is a process. It is constantly changing – dependent on the streams and tributaries that run into it, that are, themselves, dependent on the rainfall that falls in the catchment area around it. The river is endlessly reconstructing itself as it erodes its surroundings and absorbs the ever-changing rainfall that feeds it. Likewise, we reconstruct ourselves moment-by-moment, day-by-day – always changing and adapting to the catchment area around us – the context and circumstances within which we live and grow. In a sense, the river is always ‘rivering’, as we are always ‘selfing’ – changing, revising, modifying in response to the ever-changing conditions in which we find ourselves. 

Just as there is no fixed essence or centre to the river out there in the landscape, there is no fixed essence or centre to the self. If we try to find a fixed centre to the self, the ‘I’ that asks a question, or thinks a thought, there is always another ‘I’ behind the one that asks and thinks. We never reach the ‘I’ behind all the other ‘I’s. This absence of a fixed essential self is another meaning of what is known in Buddhism as, anatta, or non-self.

The currents of causality (known as karma in Buddhist philosophy), that contribute to our ‘rivering’ self, include: our ‘education’ – formal and informal; memories of previous experiences; habits accumulated over a lifetime; predispositions from birth; the cultural forces surrounding us; our history and our projected future – our assumptions, and our hopes and intentions. Through mindful meditation we can begin to attend to these conditions and become less dominated by them. In this way we can free ourselves from reactive habits – that may be destructive and harmful – and act in ways that are wiser, more compassionate and life-enhancing.

Sometimes, we can find ourselves, for many reasons, unable to recognise or accept the changeful contingency at the heart of our identity. We construct, instead, an image of ourselves that is fixed and rigid, and we carry this image around as a flag or marker of what we are and what we stand for. This image of a fixed identity gives us a false sense of security and separateness - and immediately rubs up against the changeful interconnected world in which we exist. So, we cling more and more tightly to our image, identity, opinions and beliefs. This often leads us into conflict, both within ourselves (as we try to hang on to our fixed identity), and with others and the world (that are always changing and challenging our fixed opinions). What happens to individuals can also happen to communities or societies: rigid self-identity can become rigid national or racial identity – and it is obvious how this rigidity or fixed identity can lead to conflict.

Stephen Batchelor argues that Gotama Buddha encourages us not to try to destroy the self (which is how Buddhism is sometimes presented – as a nihilistic religion) but to create the self, to fashion it out of the available material in the way that a carpenter creates something out of wood. Or, we might say, as a musician makes something out of vibrations of sound. The self is according to Batchelor (2010: 152) and Gotama Buddha, ‘a project to be realised,’ rather than an entity within us that has a fixed essence. The self we make in this way is a functioning, responsive, imaginative self that participates in the world and is inseparable from it. Gotama Buddha’s teachings are a recipe for action rather than a catalogue of dogmas or rules. He acts as a guide and navigator, helping anyone to enquire into the processes of living, in order to re-orientate and revise who, and how, we are in the world. And a crucial starting point for this enquiry and re-visioning is the activity of mindful meditation, attending to the stream of sensations, thoughts and feelings that constitute the fluid materials of our self-making. In this sense we are an open work, a work in progress - a process that is never finished, never complete.

But, as Gotama teaches, the way in which we attend to this flood of experiences is of crucial importance to our awakening. There is no point trying to ignore or run away from the flow of sensations, thoughts and feelings - for this is both to remain half asleep and to attempt the impossible. As Batchelor writes, for Gotama, freedom and equanimity are to be found ‘not by turning away from the world but by penetrating deep into its contingent heart.’ (ibid: 131) The art of attending in this way is to be fully present to the flow of experiences but not to add to it by commenting on it or trying to grasp at the flow, or by desiring it to be this way or that, or by responding to the flow with hope or fear. The crucial factor is to let it be, to let it flow, to be attuned to the rhythms and dynamics of movement, rather than trying to stop it – for it is unstoppable! To engage with life in this way is to experience how things are, how we are and to gain an understanding that enables us to let go of habits of thought, emotion and behaviour.

It is worth quoting Batchelor at length on the Gotama’s awakening:

[The Buddha] 'could remain fully present to the turbulent cascade of events without being tossed around by the desires and fears it evoked within him. A still calm lay at the heart of this vision, a strange dropping away of familiar habits, the absence, at least momentarily, of anxiety and turmoil. He had found a way of being in this world that was not conditioned by greed, hatred, or confusion'. (ibid)

This is what awakening is: ‘a way of being in this world,’ in the contingent reality of everyday experience, but without the turmoil caused by clinging and craving. Gotama came to terms with the complicated, messy, tangled web of everyday living. His particular insight and strategy is to realise that rejecting this reality in favour of a belief in an alternative reality, is unhelpful, unnecessary and unwise. Liberation and equanimity do not lie in entering a state or place of transcendence, heavenliness or escape from this world. Instead, according to the Buddha, freedom and equilibrium are to be found in noticing what goes on here and now, by paying attention to the relational field of which we are an integral part.

This process of attending to what goes on inside, around and through us, with care and precision, includes attending to suffering in all its aspects - from mild dissatisfaction to severe pain and illness. This means attending to the immediate felt pain and to our responses to that pain. For the fear and anxiety that we feel can exacerbate the pain itself. To pay attention to the whole spectrum of dissatisfaction, unease and dis-ease can have a profoundly calming effect on the restlessness and confusion we all feel from time to time, enabling us to experience a more peaceful equilibrium in the face of the difficulties of living. And paying attention to one’s own unease and pain tends to lead to a deeper awareness of the suffering of other beings, which, in turn, gives rise to empathy and compassion, a sense of kinship and connectedness with all beings.

At the heart of Gotama’s teachings lies a belief that only by attending to one’s own experiences in this world, can we understand and begin to deal with the difficulties that we encounter. Daily experience, even at its most mundane, becomes the raw material out of which we remake ourselves and achieve a more balanced, peaceful and less fretful mode of being. Gotama Buddha advocated mindful meditation as a particularly effective tool for enquiring into this life – discovering, for ourselves, who we are and how we are in the world. It also helps us to recognise, and navigate through, the constantly changing circumstances in which we find ourselves. 

One important factor in the processes of enquiring into, and dealing with, the serendipity of living is the recognition that uncertainty and doubt are unavoidable, indeed they are vital to any process of open-ended and continuous enquiry. There can be no final understanding or solution to the ever-changing conditions of living, no permanently valid answers to the constantly changing questions we pose. Gotama offers us guidance on how to live with uncertainty – how to work our curious way through the puzzles and unknowns we encounter from day to day. Through mindful awareness we can begin to recognise that our reactive habits of thought and behaviour often lead us astray, keeping us from forming new solutions, and creative responses, to life’s challenges. The practice of mindful contemplation and enquiry enables us to pay attention to, and to let go of, our reactive habits and rigid modes of thought and action.  In this way we can come to consider doubting, unlearning and unknowing as positive qualities – equal to, or sometimes of greater benefit, than certainty, learning and knowing.

Mindful meditation is a valuable method for seeing into the contingent temporary nature of things, and a way of learning how to live in harmony with how things are.

As we learn to step back and let go, we are not only letting go of the thoughts, feelings and sensations that besiege us, we are also letting go of our sense of a fixed or separate ego or self. Letting go of this illusory and misleading self, enables us to feel ourselves as flowing rivers of experience, and this feeling of process and fluidity can be very liberating. We can feel more open to change and creative transformation and feel more connected and related to other beings and to the world around us. Of course, sometimes it is challenging to let go of our rigid sense of self and identity, but this is a challenge worth facing as we learn to grow and adapt to an ever-changing world.

So, mindful awareness (for instance, zazen - the form of mindful attention I have practiced for over sixty years) enables those who practice it regularly to experience the self as a process that extends out into the world, to realise how open and porous we are and how interconnected we are with other beings and with our surroundings. We feel less divided from the world about us and less alienated from ourselves and other creatures. We observe the interplay of countless causal networks and interconnections that make up our being – ever-changing streams of causality and intention that, like evolution, are constantly flowing through us, forming and re-forming who we are and how we are in the world. Mindful meditation is a method of observing impermanence and interconnection in action – as a process. Experiencing the self as a process rather than an object is life-enhancing and enriching – surprises and enjoyment arise as we appreciate and negotiate the fascinating world around us. As circumstances and conditions change, we can craft ourselves in ways that adapt to these changes. So, be mindful, let go, be open to change and renewal, learn the arts of awakening and selfing, and feel yourself as a river flowing ever onward.

Thank you for listening and bye for now.

References

Batchelor, Stephen. 2010. Confession of a Buddhist Atheist. New York: Spiegel & Grau.

Hamill, Sam, trans. 2000. Narrow Road to the Interior and other writings by Basho. Boston: Shambhala.

Stryk, Lucien & Ikemoto, Takashi, eds & trans. 1965. Zen: Poems, Prayers, Sermons, Anecdotes, Interviews. New York: Doubleday Anchor.

NB. Part of this talk is a slighted amended version of pp 120-123, of my book, Agents of uncertainty, Rodopi/Brill, 2012.