xabir2005

To a few minutes. Conceptually, I think at least 6 is pretty clear. Experientially, a few. Do they/we need to understand it? If your goal is freedom from all sufferings, ignorance, clinging, and liberation from birth and death.. then yes. Not quite sure if I get you. What a child goes through is necessary. As I explained to bob3, learning the right conventions "I" "you" "him" are necessary. Imagine if we do not teach a child that right conventions, and he doesn't even know how to call his parents. It is just that we (inevitably, btw) start to grasp the conventions as refering to an inherent entity, and we also begin to grasp the world dualistically. In Buddhism we need to learn the conventions, but we investigate our experience through Vipassana and realise that reality is not how we think it is - as divided dualistically, and as solid entities. There is nothing wrong with the current education, it is just that the current education teaches people to understand things through labelling and conventions (without which we will not be able to function in society), and not the ultimate nature of reality. Education teaches people to understand things by separating them and not as a Whole (ungraspable by concepts), and as I see it, it is inevitable and necessary. The part to see the nature of reality, the Whole, in direct experience I think still belongs to the domain of spirituality. Spirituality is subtle and I don't think everyone will have the interest to look into it deeply. I think at the most, we can teach simple mindfulness techniques or breath meditation to help students relieve stress.

David Loy pointed out the similarities which is non duality. He failed to point out the difference which is non inherency. Conflating Subject into dharmas (Pali Buddhism), Conflating objects into Brahman (Advaita), both leads to non-dual experience. But it is the non inherency part that differs. If one dissolve objects into One Mind, eventually One Mind must be investigated and dissolved like investigating the word 'weather'. Richard Herman: Yes, it is the absolute "elimination of the background" without remainder. It is the affirmation of multiplicity, not dispersion, but multiplicity. The world references nothing but the world. Each thing is radiant expression of itself. There is no support, no ground. No awareness. No awareness. "All dharmas are resolved in One Mind. One Mind resolves into...." There is the radiant world. just the radiant world. No awareness. That is the Abbott slapping floor with his hand. The red floor is red. Spontaneous function. Daniel M. Ingram is truly clear on the aspect of Anatta: Rigpa and Aggregates

What skillful means?

Something I wrote over a year back: Recognising the Different Phases of Insights ...The following post is a recent one I made at The Tao Bums, which Thusness thinks serves as a good summary. I was replying to a post made by 'Dwai' containing the article Enlightenment in Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta by David Loy. Something I wrote recently at NewBuddhist forum: A week ago: (11:55 PM) Thusness: I said awareness is a luminous manifestion (11:56 PM) Thusness: That dependently orignates (11:57 PM) Thusness: Pure sound Consciousness is not pure sight consciousness (11:57 PM) Thusness: Then how could there be a pure awareness? (12:02 AM) Thusness: Awareness is a convention like 'weather', is there a 'weather' that is 'there' existing 'inherently'? (12:03 AM) Thusness: how many times i have told u that look at manifestation, the aggregates, understand from the 18 dhatus (12:03 AM) Thusness: and told u the difference between advaita and buddhism is advaita rest in a background (12:05 AM) Thusness: Awareness is just a term, a label, a convention taken by the dualistic and inherent mind as 'truly existing'. (12:05 AM) Thusness: like without investigation, we thought that there is really a 'weather' .......... (1:14 AM) Thusness: read phase 5 insight and 6 what is the difference? (1:19 AM) Me: phase 5 sees that awareness is just the stream of aggregates, phase 6 sees that the aggregates are ungraspable, unlocatable and interconnected? like the red flower analogy (1:25 AM) Thusness: phase 5 u r clear about a label, a convention (1:26 AM) Thusness: what is the impact of the label .......... Toni Packer: A somber day, isn't it? Dark, cloudy, cool, moist and windy. Amazing, this whole affair of "the weather!" We call it "weather," but what is it really? Wind. Rain. Clouds slowly parting. Not the words spoken about it, but just this darkening, blowing, pounding, wetting, and then lightening up, blue sky appearing amidst darkness, and sunshine sparkling on wet grasses and leaves. In a little while there'll be frost, snow and ice-covers. And then warming again, melting, oozing water everywhere. On an early spring day the dirt road sparkles with streams of wet silver. So — what is "weather" other than this incessant change of earthly conditions and all the human thoughts, feelings, and undertakings influenced by it? Like and dislike. Depression and elation. Creation and destruction. An ongoing, ever changing stream of happenings abiding nowhere. No entity "weather" to be found except in thinking and talking about it. Now — is there such an entity as "me," "I," "myself?" Or is it just like the "weather" — an ongoing, ever changing stream of ideas, images, memories, projections, likes and dislikes, creations and destructions, which thought keeps calling "I," "me," "Toni," and thereby solidifying what is evanescent? What am I really, truly, and what do I think and believe I am? Are we interested in exploring this amazing affair of "myself" from moment to moment? Is this, maybe, the essence of retreat work? Exploring ourselves minutely beyond the peace and quiet that we are seeking and maybe finding. Coming upon clarity about this deep sense of separation which we call "me," and "other people," without any need to condemn or overcome.

To add on to my previous post, hope this passage from MCTB helps to clarify on the difference between Vipassana and Shamatha: ...There is a lot of confusion on the differences between concentration practices and insight practices. This may be caused in part by the Mushroom Factor, or may be due in part to other factors, such as concentration practice being easier than insight practices and distinctly more pleasant most of the time. Concentration practices (samatha or samadhi practices) are meditation on a concept, an aggregate of many transient sensations, whereas insight practice is meditation on the many transient sensations just as they are. When doing concentration practices, one purposefully tries to fix or freeze the mind in a specific state, called an absorption, jhana or dyana. While reality cannot be frozen in this way, the illusion of solidity and stability certainly can be cultivated, and this is concentration practice. Insight practices are designed to penetrate the Three Illusions of permanence, satisfactoriness and separate self so as to attain freedom. (N.B., the illusion of satisfactoriness has to do with the false sense that continuing to mentally create the illusion of a separate, permanent self will be satisfactory or helpful, and is not referring to some oppressive and fun-denying angst trip). Insight practices (various types of vipassana, dzogchen, zazen, etc.) lead to the progressive stages of the progress of insight. Insight practices tend to be difficult and somewhat disconcerting, as they are designed to deconstruct our deluded and much cherished views of the world and ourselves, though they can sometimes be outrageously blissful for frustratingly short periods.... ~ Daniel Ingram

From Wikipedia: The Buddha did not reject the formless attainments in and of themselves, but instead the doctrines of his teachers as a whole, as they did not lead to nibbana. He then underwent harsh ascetic practices with which he became disillusioned. He subsequently remembered entering jhāna as a child, and realized that "that indeed is the path to enlightenment." According to Ajahn Sujato, the key difference between the experience the Buddha had as a child and the experience he had as an adult was that, as a child, his mind was uncluttered by the views that would later obscure his path to enlightenment. Sujato interprets the statement to mean that while the states of samādhi were not the goal, they were indeed the path.[34] Also I would like to add, there is a difference between Vipassana Jhana and Samatha Jhana. His Indian teachers taught him hard samatha jhanas, while the jhanas that lead to liberation is Vipassana Jhanas. However samatha jhana is also taught by Buddha, as it can profound a stable foundation for insight practice, but it is not the end goal, by itself samatha jhana does not lead to liberation. I believe when Buddha remembered the First Jhana he had as a child, he was refering to the First Vipassana Jhana. What is Vipassana Jhana and what is Samatha Jhana? Dharma teacher and Arhat, Daniel M. Ingram explains it well: The vipassana jhanas are a way of describing the stages of insight that is a bit more broad than the map that breaks the stages down into 16 ñanas. They are two descriptions of the same territory, and both have their uses. The vipassana jhanas differ from the concentration jhanas (samatha jhanas) in that they include the perception of the Three Characteristics, rather than the “pure” samatha jhanas that require ignoring the Three Characteristics to get them to appear stable and clean. However, the two may share many qualities, including very similar widths of attention and other aspects. There are eight vipassana jhanas, the first four that are formed, and the last four that are formless, with the odd exception of the fact that the eighth vipassana jhana (Neither Perception Nor Yet Non-Perception) cannot be easily investigated, as it is generally too subtle to clearly reveal the Three Characteristics. Thus, calling it a vipassana jhana is a bit problematic. However, it is part of the standard pattern of progress, so is worthy of inclusion, and helps explain some of the material found in the old texts. There is no problem at all using words like 'me', 'self', 'you', 'him', etc, as long as we understand that they are simply conventions, labels on transient aggregates of experiences that are changing moment to moment and arising according to conditions, which means to say that a self-existing, permanent entity called 'Self' cannot be found but is merely a label imputed upon a stream of experiences, that is fine. There is nothing wrong using conventions and labels. An awakened person knows conventions, sees reality. We musn't confuse conventions - i.e. we cannot say that 'I' and 'you' are the same, conventionally speaking (in terms of 'I' and 'you'), we are separate individuals with different mindstreams, and it will not make sense to say otherwise. However ultimately each mindstream are transient, dependently originated, empty of an inherent self. Actually the topic of whether enlightened person can say "me", "I", is directly addressed by the Buddha: http://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/jootla/wheel414.html Would an arahant say "I" or "mine"? Other devas had more sophisticated queries. One deva, for example, asked the Buddha if an arahant could use words that refer to a self: "Consummate with taints destroyed, One who bears his final body, Would he still say 'I speak'? And would he say 'They speak to me'?" This deva realized that arahantship means the end of rebirth and suffering by uprooting mental defilements; he knew that arahants have no belief in any self or soul. But he was puzzled to hear monks reputed to be arahants continuing to use such self-referential expressions. The Buddha replied that an arahant might say "I" always aware of the merely pragmatic value of common terms: "Skillful, knowing the world's parlance, He uses such terms as mere expressions." The deva, trying to grasp the Buddha's meaning, asked whether an arahant would use such expressions because he is still prone to conceit. The Buddha made it clear that the arahant has no delusions about his true nature. He has uprooted all notions of self and removed all traces of pride and conceit: "No knots exist for one with conceit cast off; For him all knots of conceit are consumed. When the wise one has transcended the conceived He might still say 'I speak,' And he might say 'They speak to me.' Skillful, knowing the world's parlance, He uses such terms as mere expressions." (KS I, 21-22; SN 1:25)

I and my friend 'Thusness' discovered a book that so far I think is one of the clearest and most insightful books on Buddhism, called 'Buddhism Is Not What You Think' by Zen teacher Steve Hagen. It provides great insights on Buddhism and Zen. However this is not exactly a very beginners oriented book (neither is it only for advanced practitioners and I think it will be beneficial to 'beginners' as well), but there is another book by Steve called 'Buddhism Plain and Simple' which is very popular as an introductory book to Buddhism. I have collected three books by Steve which I think are all very good. I have written a short review about 'Buddhism Is Not What You Think' in http://awakeningtoreality.blogspot.com/2010/04/buddhism-is-not-what-you-think.html Amazon link to Steve Hagen's books: http://www.amazon.com/Steve-Hagen/e/B001ILMDIW/ref=ntt_athr_dp_pel_1 Another book that I think is very good is Mastering The Core Teachings of the Buddha ( http://www.interactivebuddha.com/mctb.shtml ) - very hardcore Vipassana meditation guide. Not exactly beginner's oriented though, so you may want to keep that for your later reading. Bhante G's Mindfulness in Plain English is more beginner oriented Vipassana guide.

Here's an article I typed out (from a book), posted to my blog and read through a few times since two years ago and still finding it very insightful. --------------- URL: http://awakeningtoreality.blogspot.com/2008/11/reflection-and-presence-dialectic-of.html Update 11/11/08: Very sorry, I forgot to include the last part "Ongoing Self-Liberation", which is very well-written. This part has just been added. Update 11/01/09: Updated with a comment by Thusness/Passerby, fixed some typos in the article. Update 15/04/10: Corrected mistakes. Here's an article that Thusness/Passerby commented to me as "well described", "well presented", and "very complete". He also says "I can see the clarity of insight presented by Dr John Welwood." However he also added: "...(initially) dual mode is necessary. However the exact reason is not mentioned. It is necessary when the tendency to divide is already there." (related: The Spell of Karmic Propensities) This article covers a range of topics from psychotherapy, to spirituality, non-duality, 'reflecting', mindful witnessing, transmutation, self-liberation, and more. Update: I'm posting a part of Thusness's comment on this article here: For further comments on this article please refer to The Syncing of View, Path and Fruition Reflection and Presence The Dialectic of Awakening Dr. John Welwood As a student of clinical psychology in the 1960s, I found myself intrigued by the question: “What allows for real personality changes in people, and how does that change come about?” At that time, I was involved with my teacher Eugene Gendlin at the University of Chicago in his early attempts at developing the Focusing method. The term that Gendlin (1981, 1996) used to describe therapeutic movement was felt shift -- that moment when a change in feeling resonated concretely in the body, revealing a new sense of meaning and direction. In this critical moment of experiential unfolding – which is correlated with various physiological and cognitive changes – an old fixation gives way, like a flower opening, providing a person with a new experience of themselves and their situation. When I first learned about this, and experienced it myself, it seemed quite mysterious and profound, almost like a mini-mystical experience. At the same time, I was delving into Zen, and had become interested in the relationship between the felt shift and satori, the sudden awakening that was at the heart of Zen. I was particularly intrigued by the Zen stories where just by hearing the cry of a bird, sweeping the floor, or being slapped by one’s teacher, the disciple woke up and saw reality in an entirely new way. Satori seemed like an immense, cosmic felt shift, where one’s whole life suddenly changed, and one walked away a new being. I wondered how the felt shift and satori were related. Were they relatives of each other, two versions of the same thing or something different altogether? As a budding student of both Buddhism and psychotherapy, this was not an academic question for me, but one that had important personal and professional implications. If the felt shift was a kind of mini-satori, or even a step in that direction, then perhaps Western psychological work could provide a new way to approach the kind of realizations that had been previously been the sole province of mystics and monastics. Psychological Reflection Later, when I began to practice as a psychotherapist, this question took a new turn. By then I had done a fair degree of both psychological and meditative work, and had experienced powerful impacts from each. Although both types of work required inner attention and awareness, I was also struck by how different they were in their ways of approaching the flow of experience. On the one hand, the therapeutic process involved stepping back from one’s felt experience in order to inquire into it in a dialogical manner. In the course of the therapeutic dialogue – with the therapist and with one’s own feelings – felt experience would open up, hidden felt meanings would unfold, and feelings would shift, leading to important cognitive, affective, and behavioural changes (Gendlin, 1964; Welwood, 1982). At the same time, I was also studying the Mahamudra/Dzogchen meditative tradition of Tibetan Buddhism, which presented a very different approach. The method here involved a more radical opening to whatever experience was at hand, instead of stepping back from it, unfolding felt meanings from it, or engaging in dialogical inquiry. Working with experience in this way could lead to more sudden, on-the-spot kinds of revelation, described variously in terms of transmutation, self-liberation, or spontaneous presence (Trungpa, 1973; Welwood, 1979; Norbu, 1982, 1986). In this approach, one directly recognizes and meets one’s experience as it is, without concern for what it means, where it comes from, or where it leads. There is no reinforcement of an observing self trying to grasp, understand, or come to terms with some observed content of consciousness. The early stages of Dzogchen/Mahamudra meditation teach the student to let go of fixation on whatever arises in the mind, and this eventually develops the capacity to relax and abide wakefully in the mist of whatever experience is arising. When there is no identification either with the observer or what is observed, awareness remains undisturbed by any divisions, and a new freedom, freshness, clarity, and compassion become available. This nondual awareness, in the words of the Indian teacher, H.L.Poonja (1993, p. 33), “is your very own awareness, and it is called freedom from everything.” While psychotherapy and meditation both led to a freeing of mental and emotional fixations, the meditative approach struck me as the more profound and compelling of the two, because it was more direct, more radical, more faithful to the essential nature of awareness as an open presence intrinsically free of grasping, strategizing, and the subject-object split altogether. At the same time, the reflective dialogical process of psychotherapy provided a more effective and accessible way to work on the issues, concerns, and problems of personal and worldly life – which meditators often tend to avoid dealing with. Yet I had doubts about the ultimate merits of an approach that did not address, and was not designed to overcome, the subject-object struggle that lay at the root of most human alienation and suffering. Two therapeutic devices I found useful in my early years as a therapist were a particular focus of these doubts. Long before “inner child” work became popularized by John Bradshaw, I discovered that many people who could not relate to their feelings of hurt, fear, helplessness, anger, or sorrow in a helpful way, compassionate way could do so when they imagined these feelings as belonging to the child still alive within them. Since I had stumbled on this device on my own, rather than adopting it from a preconceived theoretical framework, it seemed all the more impressive to me. Yet I also remained aware of its shortcoming: It left the person inwardly split between an observing “adult” and an observed “child.” With most of the feeling-energy seeming to belong to the child. “Finding the right distance from a feeling” was another useful device, and a central feature of the Focusing method I taught for many years. Many clients who get too close to threatening feelings either became overwhelmed by them or else reject them in order to defend themselves from their intensity. So establishing a certain reflective distance from strong feelings makes it easier to relate to them, just as a stepping back from someone who is speaking loudly makes it more possible to hear what they are saying. Finding the right distance involves situating one’s attention “next to” the feeling, on the edge of it, close enough to be in contact with it, yet far enough away to feel comfortable. This stepped-back position is a useful therapeutic device that allows an interactive dialogue with feelings that might not otherwise be possible. However, if this is the only way one relates to one’s experiences, it can also maintain and reinforce an inner separation – between observing ego and the observed flow of experience – that can eventually become a limitation in its own right. The further I went with meditation, the less satisfied I was only drawing on reflective methods that maintained this inner division. From the perspective of contemplative practice, the root source of human suffering is this very split between “me” and “my experience.” Suffering is nothing other than the observer judging, resisting, struggling with, and attempting to control experiences that seem painful, scary, or threatening to it. Without that struggle, difficult feelings can be experienced more simply and directly, instead of as dire threats to the survival and integrity of “me.” Conventional psychotherapy teaches clients to understand, manage, and reduce the suffering that arises out of identification with a separate ego-self, but rarely questions the fundamental inner setup that gives rise to it. Divided and Undivided Consciousness Although reflective methods are certainly essential for therapeutic work, my experience with Dzogchen/Mahamudra meditation lets me see how they were still an expression, in Eastern terms, of divided consciousness. The Sanskrit term for the ordinary, mundane state of consciousness is vijnana. Vi could be translated as divided and jnana as knowing. Divided here refers to the subject/object split, in which the divide between observer and observed, perceiver and perceived is a primary determinant of how and what we perceive. All conventional knowledge, including what we discover in psychotherapy, happens within the framework of divided consciousness, as phenomenologist Peter Koestenbaum (1978) observes: All knowledge is of this dual sort, and psychotherapeutic intervention is no exception... Psychotherapy, like all other forms of knowledge, is reflection on self; it is self-knowledge and self-consciousness. (pp. 35, 70) When we reflect on self, self becomes divided – into an object of reflection and an observing subject. This is vijnana at work. Dividing the field of experience into two poles is a useful device for most purposes and yields relative self-knowledge. We learn about our conditioning, our character structure, our particular ways of thinking, feeling, acting, and perceiving. While these discoveries can be relatively liberating, who we are can never be identical with the mind/body patterns we discover through reflective discernment. Nor are we identical with the perceiver that stands back from those patterns and reflects on them. Both these poles are creations of the conceptual mind, which operates by dividing the experiential field in two and interpreting reality through concepts based on this division. Precise attention to the nature of experiencing reveals that most of our perception and cognition is conditioned by this conceptual divide. For example, we generally do not see a tree in its unique and vivid immediacy – in its suchness. Instead, our experience of the tree is shaped by ideas and beliefs about a category of objects called “tree.” Krishnamurti (1976), by contrast, describes what it is like to see a tree in a more direct, unalienated way: You look at this magnificent tree and you wonder who is watching whom and presently there is no watcher at all. Everything is so intensely alive and there is only life, and the watcher is as dead as that leaf... Utterly still... listening without a moment of action, without recording, without experiencing, only seeing and listening... really the outside is the inside and the inside is the outside, and it is difficult, almost impossible to separate them. (p. 214) Just as “the news” pretends to be an accurate and neutral presentation of world events, while concealing its hidden biases, so we imagine that conventional divided consciousness gives us an accurate portrayal of what lies before us, while failing to see how our conceptual assumptions usually produce a distorted picture of reality. In this way, we do not experience “things as they are” – in their rich and vivid experiential immediacy. As the great Dzogchen yogi Mipham put it: “Whatever one imagines, it is never exactly like that” (Kunsang, 1993, p. 114). This habitually distorted perception – where we unconsciously mistake our cognitive schema for reality – is, in Buddhist terms, samsara, “delusive appearance.” The basis of samsara is the ongoing habit of dividing the field of experience in two and imaging that the observing self is something set apart from the rest of the field. Meditative experience reveals a different kind of knowing, a direct recognition of “thatness” or “suchness”—the vivid, ineffable newness of reality, as disclosed in the clarity of pure awareness, free from the constraints of conceptual or dualistic fixation. When this kind of knowing is directed inwardly, it becomes what is called in Zen “directly seeing into one’s own nature.” In this case, “one’s own nature” is not an object of thought, observation, or reflection. Mind in its objectifying mode cannot grasp the immediate beingness of anything, least of all its own nature. We can only perceive the suchness of things through an awareness that opens to them nonconceptually and unconditionally, allowing them to reveal themselves in their as-it-is-ness. As the poet Basho suggests: From the pine tree Learn of the pine tree And from the bamboo of the bamboo. Commenting on these lines, the Japanese philosopher Nishitani (1982) explains that Basho does not mean That we should ‘observe the pine tree carefully.’ Still less does he mean for us to ‘study the pine tree scientifically.’ He means for us to enter the mode of being where the pine tree is the pine tree itself, and the bamboo is the bamboo itself, and from there to look at the pine tree and the bamboo. He calls on us to betake ourselves to the dimension where things become manifest in their suchness. (p. 128) In the same vein, Zen Master Dogen advises: “You should not restrict yourselves to learning to see water from the viewpoints of human beings alone. Know that you must see water in the way water sees water” (Izutsu, 1972, p. 140). “Seeing water in the way water sees water” means recognizing water in its suchness, free of all concepts that spring from an observing mind standing back from experience. Extending these lines from Basho and Dogen into the arena of self-realization, we might say, “if you want to find out who you are, open directly to yourself right now, enter into the mode of being where you are what you are, and settle into your own nature. Just as a snapshot of the bamboo is not the bamboo itself, how can the mental snapshots you have of yourself – the ideas and conclusions about yourself you have come to through reflective observation – be an accurate rendering of who you really are?” Divided consciousness – vi-jnana – can never yield jnana – direct, unmediated knowing, undivided consciousness, self-illuminating awareness, self-existing wisdom. Jnana is a different type of self-knowing, primarily discovered through contemplative discipline, where freedom from the subject-object setup allows direct “seeing into one’s own nature.” Stretched between the disciplines of psychotherapy and meditation, I found myself continually revisiting these questions: How might psychological reflection serve as a stepping-stone on the path of awakening? Or since psychological reflection by its very nature was a form of divided consciousness, could it subtly perpetuate a permanent state of inner division in the name of healing? I knew certain spiritual teachers and practitioners who advanced a critique of therapy to this effect. They argued that psychotherapy was a palliative, a way of making the prison of ego more comfortable, because it did not address, but instead reinforced, the error at the root of all suffering: identification with a separate self that was always trying to control or alter its experience. At the other extreme, many therapists I knew regarded spiritual practice as an avoidance of dealing with the personal and interpersonal knots that interfered with living a full, rich, engaged life. While psychological and spiritual work can certainly have these pitfalls, I could not side with either of these extreme views. I respected psychotherapy as a domain in its own right, using methods and perspectives that were valid in their own context, without necessarily having to conform to the highest standards of nondual realization. And I also felt that it was possible to build a bridge between psychological reflection, which yields valid relative self-knowledge, even though mediated by divided consciousness, and the deeper, undivided awareness and wordless knowing discovered in meditation. I wanted to see how these two kinds of self-knowing might work together as part of a larger dialectic of awakening that could include and bring together the two poles of human existence – conditioned and unconditioned, relative and absolute, psychological and spiritual, personal and universal. It was through pursuing these questions that my own therapeutic approach evolved in the direction of what I now call “psychological work in a spiritual context” or “presence-centered psychotherapy.” By providing an intermediate step between conventional psychological reflection and the deeper process of meditation, this way of working has proved to be more congruent with my meditative experience than the way I first practiced therapy. In the remainder of this chapter, I will situate this intermediate step within a larger dialectic of awakening as it unfolds through psychological reflection and spiritual presence. The Basic Problem: Prereflective Identification What makes our ordinary state of consciousness problematic, according to both psychological and spiritual traditions, is unconscious identification. As young children, our awareness is essentially open and receptive, yet the capacity to reflect on our own experience does not fully develop until the early teenage years, during the stage that Piaget termed “formal operations.” Until then, our self-structure is under the sway of a more primitive capacity – identification. Because we lack self-reflective awareness in childhood, we are mostly dependent on others to help us see and know ourselves – to do our reflecting for us. So we inevitably start to internalize their reflections – how they see and respond to us – coming to regard ourselves in terms of how we appear to others. In this way we develop an ego identity, a stable self-image composed of self-representations, which are part of larger relations – self/other schemas formed in our early transactions with our parents. To form an identity means taking ourselves to be something, based on how others relate to us. Identification is like a glue by this consciousness attaches itself to contents of consciousness – thoughts, feelings, images, beliefs, memories – and assumes with each of them, “That’s me,” or “That represents me.” Forming an identity is a way consciousness objectifies itself, makes itself into an object. It is like looking into a mirror and taking ourselves to be the visual image reflected back to us, while ignoring our more intimate, lived experience of embodied being. Identification is a primitive form of self-knowledge – the best we could do as a child, given our limited cognitive capacities. By the time our capacity for reflective self-knowledge develops, or identities are fully formed. Our knowledge of ourselves is indirect, mediated by memories, self-images, and beliefs about ourselves formed out of these memories and images. Knowing ourselves through self-images, we have become an object in our own eyes, never seeing the way in which we are a larger field of being and presence in which these thought-form arises. We have become prisoners of our own mind and the ways it has construed reality. Reflection: Stepping Back for Identification The first step in freeing ourselves from the prison of unconscious identification is to make it conscious, that is, to reflect on it. We cannot move from prereflective identification directly into nondual awareness. But we can use divided consciousness to reflect on divided consciousness. The Buddha likened this to using a thorn to remove a thorn from one’s flesh. All reflection involves stepping back from one’s experience in order to examine and explore its patterns, its feeling textures, its meanings, its logos, including the basic assumptions, beliefs, and ways of conceiving reality that shape our experience. By comparison with identification, this kind of self-reflection represents a giant step forward in the direction of greater self-understanding and freedom. As Gabriel Marcel (1950) put it, “reflection... is one of life’s ways of rising from one level to another (p. 101).” There are different ways of reflecting on one’s experience. Some are cruder; others subtler; depending on the rigidity of the dualism and the size of gap they maintain between observer and observed. I would like to distinguish three levels of reflective method: conceptual reflection, phenomenological reflection, and mindful witnessing. Conceptual Reflection: Cognitive and Behavioral Analysis The way most of us begin to reflect on our experience is by thinking about it – using theories and concepts to explain or analyze what is happening. Concepts allow us to step out of prereflective immersion in experience, so that we can see it in a new light or from a new angle. Most psychological and spiritual traditions draw on conceptual reflection at first, introducing certain ideas that help people take a new look at their experience. Buddha’s four noble truths, for example, are a way of helping people step back from their unconscious suffering in order to consider its nature and cause, as well as antidotes for it. In Western psychology, developmental theories, maps of consciousness, and character typologies serve a similar purpose, providing frameworks that help people analyze, organize, and understand their experience in more coherent ways. Some kinds of therapy are based primarily on conceptual reflection. They seek to explain or change the problematic contents of a client’s experience, rather than working with the client’s overall process of experiencing. This is a relatively crude approach, in that there is no direct encounter with immediate, lived experiencing. Instead, the relation to experience is always mediated by theoretical constructs. The therapist draws on some theory of human development or behaviour to interpret the client’s experience, while the client’s main activity is thinking and talking about his or her experience, at one remove from the experience itself. The therapist might also draw on preformulated techniques to operate on the client’s behaviour, applying certain cognitive (e.g., reframing, positive affirmations) or behavioural (e.g., desensitization, emotional catharsis) strategies to alter the undesirable contents of experience. This type of approach is often most useful with clients who lack the ego strength or the motivation to encounter their experience in a more direct, immediate way. Spiritual traditions often formulate the contemplative realizations of great teachers of the past into a “view” that is transmitted to new students in order to help them discover the essence of spiritual realization for themselves. In the Mahamudra tradition, for example, the view of awareness as intrinsically vast and boundless helps point students in that direction, so that they can discover this for themselves. In the words of Lodro Thaye, a great Mahamudra master of the eighteenth century: When one meditates with this view It is like a garuda soaring through space Untroubled by fear or doubt. One who meditates without this view Is like a blind man wandering the plains. (Nalanda, 1980, p. 84) Yet such a view can have no transformative effect if it remains only conceptual. Therefore Lodro Thaye adds: One who holds this view but does not meditate Is like a rich man tethered by stinginess Who cannot bring fruition to himself or others. Joining the view with meditation is the holy tradition. (p. 84) The danger of any view is that we would start to substitute theory for the reality it points to. Therefore, in the Mahamudra/Dzogchen tradition, the master presents the view along with “pointing-out instructions” – which transmit or experientially reveal to the student the actual state that the view describes. Then the view becomes the ground of a contemplative path whose goal is to realize the view in a full experiential way. Phenomenological Reflection: Meeting Experience Directly Conceptual reflection that provides a map of where we are or a strategy for how to proceed gives a general orientation, but has limited value in helping us relate to where we are right now, more immediately. Conceptual mapping and analysis – thinking and talking about experience – must eventually give way to an approach that helps us work directly with experience. Phenomenological reflection is the putting aside of habitual conceptual assumptions in order to explore experience in a fresher, looser way. Because it does not impose preconceived concepts or strategies on experience, it is a more refined approach. The concepts it uses are “experience-near”: they grow out of, describe, and point back to what is directly felt and perceived. In this way phenomenology narrows the gap between observer and observed. Phenomenological approaches to psychotherapy regard experiencing as a complex, living process that cannot be neatly controlled or predicted. Here the observing consciousness stays close to felt experience, inquiring into it gently, and waiting patiently for responses and insights to come directly from there, rather than from some cognitive schema. Experiencing itself is the guide, revealing directions for change that unfold in the course of exploring it. For example, a tension in the chest might first reveal itself as anxiety, then upon further reflection, as a sense of helplessness, then as an uncertainty that you are worthy of love. Perhaps you started out feeling judgmental toward the anxiety, or threatened by it, but as it reveals itself as an uncertainty about being lovable, a softer tenderness might arise. And this new way of relating to what you are going through allows it to unfold further, as the anxiety relaxes and you feel more compassionate toward yourself. In this kind of reflection, observer and observed becomes reciprocal poles of a mutual dance. This stepping-back from habitual reactions and assumptions in order to come into a fresher relationship with lived experience is the essence of what is called, in philosophical terms, “the phenomenological reduction.” Reflective Witnessing: Bare, Mindful Attention An even subtler kind of reflection happens in the early stages of mindfulness meditation, where one is simply attentive to the ongoing flow of the mindstream, without concern about particular contents of experience that arise. In this approach the gap between observer and observed narrows further, in that there is no interest in operating on the mindstream in any way – through understanding, unfolding, articulation, or moving toward any release or resolution. In the context of meditation, any of these aims would indicate the operation of some mental set or attitude, and thus an interference with the process of freeing oneself from identification with all mind-states. While phenomenological reflection is an attempt to find new meaning, new understanding, new directions, meditation is a more radical path of undoing – which involves relaxing any tendency to become caught up in feelings, thoughts, and identifications. Yet mindfulness practice is not yet the totally relaxed undoing of Dzogchen, for it still requires some effort of stepping back (from identification) and witnessing. Mindfulness practice provides a transitional step between reflection and nondual presence, incorporating elements of both. Directing mindful attention toward thinking allows us to notice a crucial difference – between thought and awareness, between the contents of consciousness, which are like clouds passing through the sky, and pure consciousness, which is like the wide open sky itself. Letting go of habitual identifications allows us to enter pure awareness, which is intrinsically free of the compulsions of thought and emotion. This is an important step in starting to free ourselves from the prison of dualistic fixation. In the Dzogchen tradition, this is spoken of as distinguishing the mind caught in dualism (Tibetan: sems) from pure nondual awareness (rigpa). As the Tibetan teacher Chokyi Nyima (1991) describes this distinction: Basically there are two states of mind. Sems refers to the state of conceptual thinking, involving fixation on some “thing.”... Rigpa means free from fixation. It refers to a state of natural wakefulness that is without dualistic clinging. It is extremely important to be clear about the difference between these two states of mind. Pure Presence: Awakening Within Experience Before becoming self-reflective, we remain identified with thoughts, beliefs, feelings, and memories arising in consciousness, and this keeps us imprisoned in conditioned mind. With reflection, we can start to free ourselves from these unconscious identifications by stepping back and observing them. Yet as long as we are stepping back, we remain in a state of divided consciousness. A further step would be to go beyond reflection and, without falling back into prereflective identification, become at-one with our experiencing – through overcoming all struggle with it, through discovering and abiding in the deep, silent source from which all experience arises. This third level of the dialectic, which takes us beyond conventional psychological models and philosophical frameworks, is postreflective – in that it usually follows from a groundwork of reflective work – and trans-reflective – in that it discloses a way of being that lies beyond divided consciousness. Even phenomenology, which, in emphasizing subject-object interrelatedness, is one of the most refined, least dualistic Western ways of exploring human experience, usually fails to go this further step. Peter Koestenbaum (1978), for example, whose work The New Image of the Person is a worthy attempt to develop a phenomenological clinical philosophy, and who is generally sympathetic to meditation and transpersonal experience, describes meditation only in terms of stepping back. He considers meditative presence – what he calls the Eternal Now – to be the ultimate phenomenological reduction: “There is no end to the repressive process of reflection because the field of consciousness is experienced to be infinite. Specifically, there is infinity in stepping back... The Eternal Now is an experience in which we are no longer inside space and time but have become an observer of space and time... In meditation, the individual takes a spectatorial attitude towards all experiences... the meditator follows the flow of the body, of a feeling, or of the environment. In this way individuals, can train themselves to become observers rather than participants in life. (pp. 73, 82, 100, 101, my italics) Koestenbaum’s words are accurate and scored up through the early stages of reflective witnessing in mindfulness practice. However, meditation that only goes this far does not lead beyond divided consciousness. The ultimate purpose of meditation goes far beyond raining us to be “observers, rather than participants,” as Koestenbaum claims. Its aim is full participation in life, but conscious participation, rather than the unconscious participation of prereflective identification. What finally replaces divided consciousness is pure presence. Of all the phenomenologists, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty have perhaps gone their farthest in acknowledging a mode of awareness beyond subject and object, as well as its sacred import. Borrowing a term from Meister Eckhart, Heidegger (1977) speaks of Glassenheit, letting-be, using language reminiscent of Buddhist reference to suchness: To let be – that is, to let beings be as the beings which they are – means to engage oneself with the open region and its openness into which every being comes to stand, bringing that openness, as it were, along with itself. (p. 127). Merleau-Ponty (1968) suggests the need to develop what he calls surreflection – which might be translated as “higher reflection” – That would take itself and the changes it introduces into the spectacle into account... It must plunge into the world instead of surveying it, it must descend toward it such as it is... so that the seer and the visible reciprocate one another and we no longer know which sees and which is seen. (pp. 38-39, 139) These attempts by two great philosophers to point the way beyond traditional Western dualistic thought are admirable. Yet even at its best, phenomenology can point to, but does not provide a true upaya, or path, for fully realizing nondual presence. In the practice of Mahamudra/Dzogchen, meditators discover nondual awareness, at first in glimpses, as the focus on objects of consciousness gradually drops away and they learn to rest in open presence, in what rankling Merril-Wolff (1994) called “consciousness-without-an-object.” This nondual presence could be described in terms of qualities such as depth, luminosity, or spaciousness, yet in its immediacy there is no self-reflection on any such attributes. Instead, one simply rests in the clarity of wide open, wakeful awareness, without any attempt to alter or fabricate one’s experience. Here there is direct self-knowing, direct recognition of one’s nature as pure being, without self-reflection. When attention is turned outward, perception is clear and sharp, since it is not clothed in concepts. The world is not seen as something separate form awareness, nor is it any less vivid and immediate than awareness itself. Nor is awareness seen as something subjective, “in here,” separate from appearance. Awareness and what appears in awareness mutually coemerge in one unified field of presence. In this unified field of presence, neither perceptions nor awareness can be objectified as anything for the mind to grasp. This ungraspable quality of experience is the basic meaning of the Buddhist term emptiness. The Mahamudra tradition speaks of the inseparability of emptiness and awareness, emptiness and clarity, emptiness and appearance, emptiness and energy. We could also speak of the inseparability of emptiness and being. Pure presence is the realization of being-as-emptiness: being without being some thing. Being is empty, not because it lacks anything, but because it cannot be comprehended in terms of any reference point outside itself. Being is precisely that which can never be grasped or contained in any physical boundary or conceptual designation. In Nishitani’s (1982) words, “being is only being if it is one with emptiness. In that sense, emptiness might be called the field of ‘be-ification’.” (p. 124). Emptiness in this sense is not some “attribute” belonging to awareness, appearance, or being, but their utter transparency when apprehended in pure presence, beyond the subject-object division. This realization is called by many different names, such as self-illuminating awareness, jnana, Buddha-nature, wisdom mind, great bliss, great perfection. As self-illuminating awareness that simultaneously illuminates the whole field of experience, pure presence is intimate engagement, rather than stepped-back detachment. In contrast to reflection, it does not involve any “doing” at all, as the great Dzogchen Longchenpa indicates when he says: “Instead of seeking mind by mind, let be” (Guenther, 1977, p. 244) Once awareness extricates itself from the fetters of conceptual mind, through reflection and mindfulness, it can self-realize its intrinsic nature as pure freedom, relaxation, openness, luminosity, and presence. This happens, in Mahamudra terms, through “settling itself in its own nature.” Since this resting in presence goes beyond effort, one-pointedness, and witnessing, it is called nonmeditation. Although analogies can suggest what this is like, no word or image can describe its radiant immediacy, as Lodro Thaye points out: It is space, ungraspable as a thing. It is flawless precious clear crystal. It is the lamp-like radiance of your own self-luminous mind. It is inexpressible, like the experience of a mute. It is unobscured, transparent wisdom. The luminous dharmakaya, Buddha-nature, Primordially pure and spontaneous. It cannot be demonstrated through analogy, And cannot be expressed in words. It is the space of Dharma, Forever overwhelming mind’s inspection. (Nalanda, 1980, p. 84) In the state of nonmeditation it is no longer necessary to make a distinction between conceptual mind and pure awareness, in that all mind-states are recognized as forms of awareness and presence. It is more of a question of being fully awake within thought, feeling, perception when they arise, no longer maintaining a hair’s breadth of separation from whatever arises. This quality of pure presence reveals spontaneous clearings in the experiential stream, without any strategy or intention to create change. There are two closely related ways in which these changes may occur: transmutation and self-liberation. Spontaneous Transmutation The Tantric tradition of Vajrayana Buddhism is known as the path of transformation, in which “impure” experience – marked by ignorance, dualism, aggression, grasping – is transmuted into “pure” experience – illumined by awareness, openness, nongrasping, and spontaneous appreciation. The basic Vajrayana methods of visualization, mantra, mudra, and symbolic ritual eventually leads to the more advanced, utterly direct approach of Mahamudra/Dzogchen, where the practitioner finally cuts through the separation between pure and impure by completely meeting and opening to the raw immediacy of experience on the spot. In this direct encounter, the thick, heavy, fixated quality of experience falls away, revealing a deeper, living intelligence contained within it. Chogyam Trungpa (1973) describes this kind of change: At this point whatever is experienced in everyday life through sense perception is a naked experience, because it is direct. There is no veil between [you] and “that.”... Tantra teaches not to suppress or destroy energy but to transmute it; in other words, go with the pattern of energy... When [you] go with the pattern of energy, then experience becomes very creative... You realize that you no longer have to abandon anything. You begin to see the underlying qualities of wisdom in your life-situation... If you are highly involved in one emotion such as anger, then by having a sudden glimpse of openness... you begin to see that you do not have to suppress your energy... but you can transform your aggression into dynamic energy... If we actually feel the living quality, the texture of the emotions as they are in the naked state, then this experience also contains ultimate truth... We discover that emotion actually does not exist as it appears, but it contains much wisdom and open space... Then the process of... transmuting the emotions into wisdom takes place automatically. (pp. 218-219, 221, 222, 234, 235-236) Here there is no deliberate effort to transmute the emotions; rather, transmutation happens spontaneously through opening fully to them: You experience emotional upheaval as it is but... become one with it... Let yourself be in the emotion, go through it, give in to it, experience it. You begin to go toward the emotion rather than just experiencing the emotion coming toward you.... Then the most powerful energies become absolutely workable... Whatever occurs in the samsaric mind is regarded as the path; everything is workable. It is a fearless proclamation – the lion’s roar. (Trungpa, 1976, pp. 70-71) As a student in this tradition, with a few budding glimpses of what the previous words might actually refer to, I began to feel that even Focusing – which was the simplest, most penetrating, experience-near therapeutic method I knew – still did not go far enough. Focusing involves attending to an unclear bodily-felt sense, while remaining extremely respectful, gentle, and attentive toward every nuance of experience that arises from it. Seeing how concrete steps of experiential change can emerge from attending to a felt sense is an important discovery – something that people who use spiritual practice to avoid their feelings and personal experience would do well to learn. Yet as Focusing is commonly practiced, there is often a bias toward unfolding meaning from a felt sense, toward resolution, toward looking for a felt shift. In this way, it can become a form of “doing” that maintains a subtle I-It stance toward one’s experience. The bias here can be very subtle. Wanting our experience to change usually contains a subtle resistance to what is, to newness, to what I call unconditional presence – the capacity to meet experience fully and directly, without filtering it through any conceptual or strategic agenda (Welwood, 1992). The subtle spiritual pitfall of psychological work is that it can reinforce certain tendencies inherent in the conditioned personality: to see ourselves as a doer, to always look for the meaning in experience, or to continually strive for “something better.” Although psychological reflection can certainly help people move forward in important ways, at some point even the slightest desire for change or improvement can interfere with the deeper letting go and relaxation that are necessary for moving from the realm of personality into the realm of being, which is only discoverable in and through nowness – in moments when all conceptualizing and striving cease. When we let experience be as it is, instead of seeking to alter it in any way, the focus of inner work shifts in an important and powerful way. No longer is our experience something apart from us that we need to change or resolve; instead, the focus widens to a larger field: how-we-are-with-our-experience. And when we relate to our experience in a more spacious, allowing way, it becomes less problematic, because we no longer exist in an I-It, subject-object tension with it. Although the main aim of psychotherapy is to reduce psychological distress and increase self-understanding, rather than to overcome divided consciousness, I nonetheless felt a need to practice therapy in a way that was more congruent with the nondoing quality of meditative presence. I was also inspired in this vision by moments in my own personal work when opening to my experience just as it is has brought me into a fuller sense of presence – a kind of “being-without-agenda,” which led to a powerful sense of stillness, acceptance, and aliveness. Such moments afforded a glimpse of what lay on the other side of divided consciousness: being at-one with myself in a new and deeper way. Of course, there is a time for actively trying to penetrate the veils of experience, as well as a time for allowing experience to be as it is. If we are unable or unwilling to actively engage with our personal life issues, then letting-be could become a stance of avoidance, and a dead-end. Yet if we are unable to let our experience be, or to open to it just as it is, then our psychological work may reinforce the habitual tendency of the conditioned personality to turn away from nowness. While Focusing showed me a way out of the first pitfall, meditation – which taught me about the wisdom of nondoing – showed me beyond the second pitfall. In training professionals I also found that the investment in change can introduce a subtle bias into therapists’ responses, thereby communicating to their clients: “You’re not all right the way you are.” And this can reinforce the alienated attitude most people already suffer from: “I should be having a better experience from the one I’m having – what’s wrong with me?” When clients pick up this bias from their therapists, it can create a fundamental obstacle in the therapeutic process and relationship. Clients either try to go along with the therapist’s agenda, which can disconnect them from their own being, or else they resist the therapist’s agenda, which keeps them stuck. The more I trained therapists, the clearer it became that the most important quality in a therapist was the capacity for unconditional presence – which, oddly enough, is hardly mentioned or taught in most therapy training. When therapists are present with a client’s experience in this way, something inside the client can begin to relax and open up more fully. What I have found, again and again, is that unconditional presence is the most powerful transmuting force there is – precisely because it is a willingness to be there with our experience, without dividing ourselves in two by trying to “manage” what we are feeling. The nondoing of unconditional presence is compatible with a wide range of therapeutic methods, both directive and nondirective. It is not a passive stance, but rather, an active willingness to meet and inquire into felt experience in a totally unbiased, nonreactive, noncontrolling way. In teaching unconditional presence, I have found it helpful to delineate different stages of this coming-into-contact. First of all, there needs to be a willingness to inquire, to face directly into our felt experience and see what is there. Then we can begin to acknowledge what is happening inside us: “Yes, this is what I’m experiencing right now. I’m feeling threatened...hurt...angry...defensive.” Acknowledging involves recognizing and naming what is going on, seeing how it feels in the body, and inviting it more fully into awareness. The power of bare acknowledgment should never be underestimated. To help clients linger here and not rush on toward some hoped-for resolution, I often say something like, “Notice what it’s like right now just to acknowledge what you’re feeling.” Attending to the felt quality of this recognition cuts through the impulse to react to the content, allowing the client to be more present with it. Once we acknowledge what is there, it becomes possible to meet it more fully by allowing it to be there as it is. This does not mean wallowing in feelings or acting them out. Instead, allowing means giving our experience space and actively letting it be as it is, putting aside any urge to manage or judge it. Often what interferes with this is either identifying with the feeling (“this anger is me”) or resisting it (“this anger is not me”). A certain amount of time and concentration is often necessary before we can let our experience be there in this more allowing way. Having allowed our experience to be as it is, we can then let ourselves open to it more fully, no longer maintaining any distance between it and ourselves as observer, judge, or manager. This is the point where unconditional presence diverges from Focusing and other reflective methods. There is a complete opening to, entering into, and becoming one with the felt experience, without any attempt to find meaning in it, or to do anything with it, to it, or about it. What is most important here is not so much what we are feeling, but the act of opening to it. For example, a client fears that he is nothing – that if he looks inside, he won’t find anything there. Although I first ask him to pay attention to this “Fear of being nothing” in this body and we discuss how it relates to situations from his past (this is still reflective inquiry), eventually I invite him to open directly to the sense of being nothing – to enter into it and let himself be nothing. (Here reflection gives way to presence.) After a while he says, “It feels empty, but there’s also a fullness, and a kind of peace.” He feels full because he is present now, rather than disconnected. It is his being that feels peaceful and full. And he starts to realize that his sense of nothingness was actually a symptom of being cut off from himself – a disconnection reinforced by stories and beliefs he had about the dreaded void at his core. Of course, feelings don’t always transmute this easily. It depends entirely on the client and our relationship. Yet for clients who have experienced this a number of times, it can happen more and more readily. Feelings in themselves don’t necessarily lead to wisdom, but the process of opening fully to them can. When we no longer maintain distance from a feeling, it cannot preserve its apparent solidity, which only crystallizes when we treat it as an object separate from ourselves. In the example, the client’s fear of being nothing only persisted as long as he resisted that experience. But when he opened unconditionally to being nothing, this inner division ceased, at least for a while, as he stepped out of the fixed stance/attitudes/associations he held power toward “being nothing,” with their long history dating back to childhood. In becoming present in a place where he had been absent, he experienced his being, rather than his nothingness. “being nothing” transmuted into the empty fullness of being – where the fear of being nothing no longer had a hold on him. When the focus of awareness shifts from a feeling – as an object of pleasure or pain, like or dislike, acceptance or rejection – to our state of presence with it, this allows us to discover new resources and wisdom hidden within it, as we move from the stream of personality into the larger space of being. Out of presence with anger, strength often emerges; out of presence with sorrow, compassion; out of presence with fear, courage and groundedness; out of presence with emptiness, expansive spaciousness and peace. Strength, compassion, courage, spaciousness, peace are differentiated qualities of being – different ways in which presence manifests. In this way, being fully present with ourselves overcomes the inner war, at least for a moment, between self and other, between “me” and “my experience.” And from there, everything looks and feels different. A felt shift happens, but this is more than the “content mutation” that Gedlin (1964) describes as a result of reflective unfolding. An example of content mutation would be anger unfolding to reveal fear, which in turn might unfold further, revealing itself as a desire to be loved, and then a sense of relief at realizing that one’s anger was pushing away the love one wanted. I call these “horizontal” felt shifts, because even though deeper feelings and realizations may unfold, the process remains mainly within the realm of personality. But the transmutation that often occurs through unconditional presence is a “vertical” shift, where one moves from personality into a deeper quality of being, as a fixed constellation of observer/observed dissolves, along with all reactivity, contraction, or striving. Of course, this kind of deepening may not happen quickly or easily, or by itself lead to lasting personal transformation. Often a long sequence of horizontal unfolding must occur before a vertical shift happens, and a long period of integration is necessary before these shifts can lead to real differences in the way one lives. Nor am I suggesting that Focusing and other reflective methods cannot also lead to vertical shifts. But when someone opens completely to what they are experiencing – the personality – which is an activity of judgment, control, and resistance – disappears for a moment. Therapists without some background in meditation may have difficulty fully appreciating this or allowing it to unfold. I make a point of helping clients recognize the nature and significance of this shift into being when it occurs. I encourage them to rest there, appreciate the new quality of presence that has become available, and let it move freely in their body, without having to go on to another problem or anything else. The sense of presence might deepen and new aspects or implications might reveal themselves. Or perhaps the client starts to feel uneasy, resist, or dissociate. In that case, we might move back into reflective inquiry, to see what is going on – what old beliefs, object relations, or identities may be interfering. We might then explore these obstacles reflectively until at some point, I again invite the client to be present with his or her experience in the way just described. In this way, the capacity for presence expands, while obstacles standing in its ways are also worked through. This contemplative approach to psychological work differs from conventional therapy in being more concerned with recovering the presence of being – accessed through opening directly to experience – than with problem-resolution. The problem-solving mentality reinforces the inner division between reformer self and a problematic “me” it wants to change. By contrast, the vertical shift facilitated by unconditional presence is a change of context that alters the whole way a problem is held. People often discover that their alienated, controlling, or rejecting attitude toward the problem at hand is in fact a large part of the problem itself. This allows them to see and consider new ways of relating to the problematic situation. Unconditional presence is more radical than psychological reflection in that it involves giving into our experience (as in Trungpa’s statement, “Let yourself be in the emotion, go through it, give in to it...”), while learning to ride the energy mindfully, without becoming overwhelmed by it. This approach is clearly not for people lacking in ego strength – those who are unable to step back and reflect on their feelings, or whose primary task is to establish a stable, cohesive self-structure. Focusing, by contrast, helps strengthen the observing ego by helping clients find the right distance from their emotional upheaval. But here one simply dives in, radically erasing any separation from one’s experience. Transmutation through unconditional presence happens somewhat differently in psychological and in meditative practice. In therapy, it is part of a dialogical process, and therefore always develops out of and return to a reflective interchange. Reflecting on what has happened in a vertical shift also helps integrate the new quality of presence into ongoing daily functioning. In meditative practice, by contrast, mind–states can transmute in a more immediate, spontaneous way, without reference to a prior or subsequent reflective process. By not engaging in reflective articulation, the meditator can often move beyond divided consciousness in a deeper, more sustained way. The challenge here, however, lies in integrating this deeper awareness into daily life and functioning. Ongoing Self-Liberation Transmutation, as just described, still involves a slight sense of duality, at least initially, in that one makes some effort to go toward experience, go into it, open oneself to it. Beyond transmutation lie still subtler possibilities of nondual presence, usually only realized through advanced meditative practice. In the Mahamudra/Dzogchen tradition, this is the way of self-liberation. Here one learns to remain continually present within the movement of experience -- whether thought, perception, feeling or sensation. In the words of a great Dzogchen master, Paltrul Rinpoche, "It is sufficient to simply let your mind rest in the state of whatever takes place, in whatever happens" (Kunsang, 1993, p. 120). This kind of naked awareness -- where there is no mental or emotional reaction to whatever arises -- allows each experience to be just what it is, free of dualistic grasping and fixation, and totally transparent. Pure presence makes possible the self-liberation of the mindstream. This is Mahamudra -- the supreme mudra, the ultimate seeing that "lets beings be as the beings which they are." What is this supreme mudra? In the words of Tilopa, one of the grandfathers of Mahamudra, "When mind is free of reference points, that is Mahamudra." Not to rely on reference points -- attitudes, beliefs, intentions, aversions, self-concepts, object relations -- to interpret our experience or evaluate who we are in relation to it is to rest in the "core" of being, "at the still point of the turning world, neither from nor towards." This sense of "resting in the middle of one's experience" is not a "position" in any determinate "place." This use of the term middle is taken from Nishitani (1982), who describes it as the mode of being of things as they are in themselves -- namely the mode of being wherein things rest in the complete uniqueness of what they themselves are... It is immediately present -- and immediately realized as such -- at the point that we ourselves actually are. It is 'at hand' and 'underfoot'... All actions imply an absolute immediacy. And it is there that what we are calling the 'middle' appears (pp. 165-66) Resting in the middle means standing in pure presence. Normal divided consciousness places us on the perimeter of the field of experience, stepped back from whatever we are observing. When resting in the middle, by contrast, "the standpoint of the subject that knows things objectively, and likewise knows itself objectively as a thing called the self, is broken down" (Nishitani, 1982, p. 154). The self-knowing that arises here is immediate and nonobjectifying. "It is not a 'knowing' that consists in the self's turning to itself and refracting into itself. It is not a 'reflective' knowing... This self-awareness... is a knowing that comes not as a refraction of self bent into the self but only on a position that is, as it were, absolutely straightforward... This is because it is a knowing that originates in the 'middle.' It is an absolutely nonobjective knowing of the absolutely nonobjective self in itself; it is a completely non-reflective knowing... On all other fields the self is at all times reflective, and caught in its own grasp in the act of grasping itself... and caught in the grasp of things in its attempt to grasp them... It can never be the 'straight heart' of which the ancients speak. (pp. 154-55)" The ultimate practice here is learning to remain fully present and awake in the middle of whatever thoughts, feelings, perceptions, or sensations are occurring and to appreciate them, in Mahamudra/Dzogchen terms, as Dharmakaya -- as an ornamental display of the empty, luminous essence of awareness. Like waves on the ocean, thoughts are not separate from awareness. They are the radiant clarity of awareness in motion. In remaining awake in the middle of thoughts -- and recognizing them as the luminous energy of awareness -- the practitioner maintains presence and can rest within their movement. As Namkhai Norbu (1986) suggests: "The essential principle is to ... maintain presence in the state of the moving wave of thought itself ... If one considers the calm state as something positive to be attained, and the wave of thought as something negative to be abandoned, and one remains caught up in the duality of grasping and rejecting, there is no way of overcoming the ordinary state of the mind.” (p. 144) It is a dualistic fixation, the tension between "me" -- as self -- and "my thoughts" -- as other -- that makes thinking problematic, tormenting, "sticky," like the tarbaby to which Brer Rabbit becomes affixed by trying to push it away. Thoughts become thick, solid, and heavy only when we react to them. Each reaction triggers further thought, so that the thoughts become chained together in what appears to be a continuous mind-state. These thought-chains are like a relay race, where each new thought picks up the baton from the previous thought and runs with it for a moment, passing it on again to a subsequent thought. But if the meditator can maintain presence in the middle of thinking, free of grasping or rejecting, then the thought has nothing to pass the baton on to, and naturally subsides. Although this sounds simple, it is advanced practice, usually requiring much preliminary training and commitment. When one can rest in presence even in the midst of thoughts, perceptions, or intense emotions, these become an ongoing part of one's contemplative practice, as opportunities to discover a pervasive quality of even awareness in all one's activities. As Tarthang Tulku (1974) describes this: "It's possible to make thought itself meditation... How do we go into that state? The moment you try to separate yourself from thought, you are dealing with a duality, a subject-object relationship. You lose the state of awareness because you reject your experience and become separate from it.... But if our awareness is in the center of thought, the thought itself dissolves... At the very beginning... stay in the thoughts. Just be there... You become the center of the thought. But there is not really any center -- the center becomes balance. There's no 'being,' no 'subject-object relationships': none of these categories exist. Yet at the same time, there is... complete openness... So we kind of crack each thought, like cracking nuts. If we can do this, any thought becomes meditation... Any moment, wherever you are, driving a car, sitting around, working, talking, any activities you have -- even if you are very disturbed emotionally, very passionate, or even if your mind has become very strong, raging, overcome with the worst possible things and you cannot control yourself, or you feel depressed... if you really go into it, there's nothing there. Whatever comes up becomes your meditation. Even if you become extremely tense, if you go into your thought and your awareness comes alive, that moment can be more powerful than working a long time in meditation practice. (pp. 9-10, 18)" Here no antidote need be applied: no conceptual understanding, no reflection, no stepping back, no detachment, no witnessing. When one is totally present in the thought, in the emotion, in the disturbance, it relaxes by itself and becomes transparent to the larger ground of awareness. The wave subsides back into the ocean. The cloud dissolves into the sky. The snake naturally uncoils. These are all metaphors that say: It self-liberates. Self-liberation is not a dialogical process, but a "straight heart" realization of being-emptiness. It makes possible an intimate knowing of reality, as Nishitani suggests when he writes that "Things reveal themselves to us only when we leap from the circumstance to the center, into their very [suchness]" (1982, p. 130). This "knowing of not-knowing" is a complete openness and attunement to the self-revealing qualities of self, world, and other beings. For one who can remain fully present even in the middle of deluded thoughts and emotions, the distinction between samsara and nirvana, conventional and awakened consciousness, duality and nonduality is no longer of great concern. This is known as the awareness of 'one taste'. When one is no longer trapped in divided consciousness, the relative duality, or play of self and other, in daily life is not a problem. One can play by the conventional ground rules of duality when appropriate, and drop them when they're not useful. The interplay of self and others becomes a humorous dance, an energetic exchange, an ornament rather than a hindrance. Summary and Conclusion Most of us live caught up in prereflective identification most of the time, imagining that our thoughts, feelings, attitudes, and viewpoints are an accurate portrayal of reality. But when awareness is clouded by prereflective identification, we do not yet fully have our experience. Rather, it has us: We are swept along by cross currents of thoughts and feelings in which we are unconsciously immersed. Driven by these unconscious identifications – self-images, conflicting emotions, superego commands, object relations, occurring thought-patterns – we remain asleep to the deeper import of our experience. We remain angry without even knowing we are angry, anxious without understanding why we are anxious, and hungry without realizing what we are truly hungry for. This is the condition that Gurdjief called “the machine.” Reflective attention helps us take a major step forward from there. Conceptual reflection allows us to make an initial assessment of what is going on and why. Beyond that, subtler, more direct kinds of phenomenological reflection can help us finally start to have our experience. In psychotherapy, it is a major advance when clients can, for example, move from just being angry to having their anger. This means that their awareness can hold the anger and reflect on it, instead of being overwhelmed or clouded by it. Beyond that, mindful witnessing allows us to step back from our experience and let it be, without being caught up in a reaction or identification. A further step on the path of awakening involves learning to be with our experience in an even more direct and penetrating way, which I call unconditional presence. Here the focus is not so much on what we are experiencing as on how we are with it. Being fully present with our experience facilitates a vertical shift from personality to being. Being-with anger, for instance, involves opening to its energy directly, which often affects a spontaneous transmutation. The anger reveals deeper qualities of being hidden within it, such as strength, confidence, or radiant clarity, and this brings us into deeper connection with being itself. From this greater sense of inner connectedness, the original situation that gave rise to the anger often looks quite different. Beyond transmutation there lies the still subtler potential to self-liberate experience through naked awareness. Instead of going into the anger, this would mean simply resting in presence as the anger arises and moves while recognizing it as a transparent, energetic display of being-awareness-emptiness. This possibility is discovered not through a dialogical process like psychotherapy, but through contemplative practice. To summarize the progression described here: It is a movement from unconscious, prereflective immersion in our experience (identification), to thinking and talking about experience (conceptual reflection), to having our experience directly (phenomenological reflection), to nonidentified witnessing (mindfulness), to being-present-with experience (unconditional presence, leading to transmutation), to a trans-reflective resting in open presence within whatever experience arises, which is no other than pure being/emptiness (self-liberation). If we use the analogy of awareness as a mirror, prereflective identification is like being captivated by and lost in the reflections appearing in the mirror. Reflection involves stepping back from the appearances, studying them, and developing a more objective relationship with them. And transreflective presence is like being the mirror itself – that vast, illuminating openness and clarity that allows reality to be seen as what it is. In pure presence, awareness is self-illuminating, or aware of itself without objectification. The mirror simply abides in its own nature, without either separating from its reflections or confusing itself with them. Negative reflections do not stain the mirror, positive reflections do not improve on it. They are all the mirror’s self-illuminating display. Psychotherapy as a dialogical process is essentially reflective, although when practiced by a therapist with a contemplative background, it can also include moments of nonreflective presence that facilitate a shift into a deeper dimension of being. In the spiritual traditions, disciplined reflection also serves as a stepping-stone on the way toward greater presence. In gurdjieff’s teaching, for instance, focused self-observation is what allows people to step out of “the machine” and become available to the more pointed presence that he terms “self-remembering.” While psychotherapy and spiritual practice may both incorporate reflection and presence, the home base of therapy is reflection and the home base of spiritually is presence. I would like to close with a few final considerations for Western students of the further reaches of contemplative awareness. From anecdotal evidence, stabilizing the pure presence of rigpa in the ongoing realization of self-liberation appears to be quite rare, even among dedicated students of Dzogchen/Mahamudra. This tradition flowered in Tibet, a far simpler and more grounded culture than ours, which also provide a social mandala, or cohesive cultural context, that supported thousands of monasteries and hermitages where meditation practice and realization could flourish. Yet even there, years of preliminary practice and solitary retreat were usually recommended as the groundwork for full nondual realization which was sometimes described as the golden roof that crowns the entire spiritual enterprise. The question for modern Westerners, who lack the cultural support found in traditional Asia and who often find it hard to spend years in retreat or even to complete the traditional Tibetan preliminary practise, is how to build a strong enough base on which this golden roof can rest. What kind of preliminary practices or inner work are most relevant and useful for modern people as a groundwork for nondual realization? What special conditions may be necessary to nurture and sustain nondual presence outside of retreat situations? And how can this spacious, relaxed quality of presence be integrated into everyday functioning in a speedy, complex technological society like ours, which requires such high levels of mental activity and mental abstraction? Since unresolved psychological issues and developmental deficiencies often present major hurdles to integrating spiritual realizations into daily life, spiritual aspirants in the West may also need to engage in some degree of psychological work, as a useful adjunct to their spiritual work, and perhaps as a preliminary practice in its own right. (Welwood, 1984, 2000). Perhaps for Westerners genuine nondoing and letting-be can only be fully embodied in a healthy, integrated way once one has learned to attend to bodily feelings and grapple with one’s personal experience in a Focusing-style reflective manner. That is why it is important to understand the uses and limitations of psychological reflection, and to study its role as a stepping-stone both toward and “back” from nondual presence – as a bridge, in other words, that can begin to unlock deeper qualities of being and help to integrate them more fully into everyday life.

AlwaysOn is right. Buddha did not reject Vedanta since Vedanta did not exist at that time. However he did reject the teachings of Sankhya (I will attach the sutta below), which existed at that time. He rejected all kinds of teachings of those days actually in multiple occasions, just so happens that Vedanta is not included becos it originated much later on. There are many sutras in which Buddha refuted each of the false views from the religions existing in his days individually, but as a general 'guideline' he explains why his teaching is unique from all the other religions and that only his tradition produces liberated beings: the basic fundamental reason is because all other teachings did not overcome the extreme views of being (Self-view, eternalism) and non-being (nihilism). In particular the Buddha very clearly stated that what differentiates his doctrine from others is that only his doctrine utterly transcends all doctrines of a Self. If you find these words of Buddha very elitist... well unfortunately you're right, and though I agree that no religions should have monopoly over truth - it is Buddha's own personal observations and statement (and I am not putting words in his mouth, nor attempting to sow discord here as I have great appreciation for all spiritual traditions, but just simply stating the facts) that all the other teachings he witnessed in India were not leading to the same kind of insights and liberation he was teaching. The Buddha was in actual fact an elitist. As Vajrahridaya points out, "Hindu's find it hard to accept that Buddhism is in fact different and has been different since the Buddha declared that it was different, and it seems that only Buddhists know this because only Buddhists understand intuitively what dependent origination actually means. Because if you actually did, you would become Buddhist. Buddhism has always been elitist. The Buddha was an elitist, arguing with all other forms of spirituality of the time and every Buddhist master from then on has been elitist." Anyway back to topic: regarding the criticism of Sankhya by Buddha, I posted in my blog article Two Sutras (Discourses by Buddha) on the Mistaken Views of Consciousness Second Sutra (Mulapariyaya Sutta: The Root Sequence) http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/mn/mn.001.than.html Rob Burbea in Realizing the Nature of Mind: Thanissaro Bhikkhu: p.s. With due respects to Thanissaro Bhikkhu who is a venerable from the Theravadin tradition of Buddhism, his comments on "the Dharma-body, Buddha-nature, rigpa" is not in accord with what is taught in the Mahayana and Vajrayana Buddhist traditions, since in these traditions the Dharmakaya (dharma body)/Buddha Nature/Rigpa is explained as empty as well. It is however a common misunderstanding even among Buddhists. Also see: Rigpa and Aggregates As my friend who is an experienced Dzogchen practitioner, Vajrahridaya (who himself wrote a very good article on refuting Consciousness as 'Source' which I posted in ‘What makes Buddhism different’) said: And as Vajrahridaya pointed out:

http://awakeningtoreality.blogspot.com/2008/01/ajahn-amaro-on-non-duality-and.html (The following is written by Ajahn Amaro on the teachings of Non-Duality, Anatta and Emptiness by Buddha, as well as being a great description of Stages 5 & 6 of Thusness/PasserBy's Seven Stages of Enlightenment) Ancient Teachings on Nonabiding This principle of nonabiding is also contained within the ancient Theravada teachings. It wasn’t just Ajahn Chah’s personal insight or the legacy of some stray Nyingmapa lama who wandered over the mountains and fetched up in northeast Thailand 100 years ago. Right in the Pali Canon, the Buddha points directly to this. In the Udana (the collection of “Inspired Utterances” of the Buddha), he says: There is that sphere of being where there is no earth, no water, no fire, nor wind; no experience of infinity of space, of infinity of consciousness, of no-thingness, or even of neither-perception-nor-non-perception; here there is neither this world nor another world, neither moon nor sun; this sphere of being I call neither a coming nor a going nor a staying still, neither a dying nor a reappearance; it has no basis, no evolution, and no support: it is the end of dukkha. (ud. 8.1) Rigpa, nondual awareness, is the direct knowing of this. It’s the quality of mind that knows, while abiding nowhere. Another teaching from the same collection recounts the story of a wanderer named Bahiya. He stopped the Buddha on the street in Savatthi and said, “Venerable Sir, you are the Samana Gotama. Your Dharma is famous throughout the land. Please teach me that I may understand the truth.” The Buddha replied, “We’re on our almsround, Bahiya. This is not the right time.” “Life is uncertain, Venerable Sir. We never know when we are going to die; please teach me the Dharma.” This dialogue repeats itself three times. Three times over, the Buddha says the same thing, and Bahiya responds in the same way. Finally, the Buddha says, “When a Tathagata is pressed three times, he has to answer. Listen carefully, Bahiya, and attend to what I say: In the seen, there is only the seen, in the heard, there is only the heard, in the sensed, there is only the sensed, in the cognized, there is only the cognized. Thus you should see that indeed there is no thing here; this, Bahiya, is how you should train yourself. Since, Bahiya, there is for you in the seen, only the seen, in the heard, only the heard, in the sensed, only the sensed, in the cognized, only the cognized, and you see that there is no thing here, you will therefore see that indeed there is no thing there. As you see that there is no thing there, you will see that you are therefore located neither in the world of this, nor in the world of that, nor in any place betwixt the two. This alone is the end of suffering.” (ud. 1.10) Upon hearing these words, Bahiya was immediately enlightened. Moments later he was killed by a runaway cow. So he was right: life is uncertain. Later Bahiya was awarded the title of “The Disciple Who Understood the Teaching Most Quickly.” “Where” Does Not Apply What does it mean to say, “There is no thing there”? It is talking about the realm of the object; it implies that we recognize that “the seen is merely the seen.” That’s it. There are forms, shapes, colors, and so forth, but there is no thing there. There is no real substance, no solidity, and no self-existent reality. All there is, is the quality of experience itself. No more, no less. There is just seeing, hearing, feeling, sensing, cognizing. And the mind naming it all is also just another experience: “the space of the Dharma hall,” “Ajahn Amaro’s voice,” “here is the thought, ‘Am I understanding this?’ Now another thought, ‘Am I not understanding this?’” There is what is seen, heard, tasted, and so on, but there is no thing-ness, no solid, independent entity that this experience refers to. As this insight matures, not only do we realize that there is no thing “out there,” but we also realize there is no solid thing “in here,” no independent and fixed entity that is the experiencer. This is talking about the realm of the subject. The practice of nonabiding is a process of emptying out the objective and subjective domains, truly seeing that both the object and subject are intrinsically empty. If we can see that both the subjective and objective are empty, if there’s no real “in here” or “out there,” where could the feeling of I-ness and meness and my-ness locate itself? As the Buddha said to Bahiya, “You will not be able to find your self either in the world of this [subject] or in the world of that [object] or anywhere between the two.” There is a similar and much lengthier exchange between the Buddha and Ânanda in the Shurangama Sutra, which is a text much referred to in the Ch’an school of the Chinese tradition. For pages and pages the Buddha asks Ânanda, in multifarious ways, if he can define exactly where his mind is. No matter how hard he tries, Ânanda cannot establish it precisely. Eventually he is forced to the conclusion that “I cannot find my mind anywhere.” But the Buddha says, “Your mind does exist, though, doesn’t it?” Ânanda is finally drawn to the conclusion that “where” does not apply. Aha! This is the point that these teachings on nonabiding are trying to draw us to. The whole concept and construct of where-ness, the act of conceiving ourselves as this individual entity living at this spot in space and time, is a presumption. And it’s only by frustrating our habitual judgments in this way that we’re forced into loosening our grip. This view of things pulls the plug, takes the props away, and, above all, shakes up our standard frames of reference. This is exactly what Ajahn Chah did with people when he asked, “If you can’t go forward and you can’t go back and you can’t stand still, where can you go?” He was pointing to the place of nonabiding: the timeless, selfless quality that is independent of location. Interestingly enough, some current scientific research has also reached a comparable conclusion about the fundamental nature of matter. In the world of quantum physics, scientists now use such terms as “the well of being” or “the sea of potential” to refer to the primordial level of physical reality from which all particles and energies crystallize and into which they subsequently dissolve. The principle of non-locality in this realm means that the “place where something happens” cannot truly be defined, and that a single event can have exactly simultaneous effects in (apparently) widely separated places. Particles can accurately be described as being smeared out over the entirety of time and space. Terms like “single place” and “separate places” are seen to apply only as convenient fictions at certain levels of scale; at the level of the ultimate field, the sea of quantum foam, “place” has no real meaning. When you get down into the fine, subatomic realm, where-ness simply does not apply. There is no there there. Whether this principle is called nonabiding or non-locality, it’s both interesting and noteworthy that the same principle applies in both the physical and mental realms. For the intellectuals and rationalists among us, this parallel is probably very comforting. I first started to investigate this type of contemplation when I was on a long retreat in our monastery and doing a lot of solitary practice. It suddenly occurred to me that even though I might have let go of the feeling of self—the feeling of this and that and so on—whatever the experience of reality was, it was still “here.” There was still here-ness. For several weeks I contemplated the question, “Where is here?” Not using the question to get a verbal answer, more just to illuminate and aid the abandonment of the clinging that was present. Recognizing this kind of conditioning is half the job— recognizing that, as soon as there is a here-ness, there is a subtle presence of a there-ness. Similarly, establishing a “this,” brings up a “that.” As soon as we define “inside,” up pops “outside.” It’s crucial to acknowledge such subtle feelings of grasping; it happens so fast and at so many different layers and levels. This simple act of apprehending the experience is shining the light of wisdom onto what the heart is grasping. Once the defilements are in the spotlight, they get a little nervous and uncomfortable. clinging is the focus of our awareness, it can’t function properly. In short, clinging can’t cling if there is too much wisdom around. Clinging operates best when we are not looking. When clinging is the focus of our awareness, it can’t function properly. In short, clinging can’t cling if there is too much wisdom around.

Thanks

Mindfulness In Plain English is a very good book on mindfulness and meditation. Available for free reading online (and hardcopy).

Actually no, he is in fact disappointed with his teachers who reached the 7th and 8th jhana as it clearly was not the liberation he sought. Disappointed, he left off himself in search of the way, and discovered something that nobody else taught him. One of his titles is the Rightly Self-Awakened One. I don't know what you're refering to, but it is an individual thing I suppose. Yes. But only those with the right karmas, and the willingness to follow his teachings, will he be able to affect people. The amount of influence is limited - simply because not everyone is ready to hear or practice the teachings. I'm sure you're aware that many people just aren't interested in spirituality. Even if one is considered a 'believer', how many are truly interested in developing wisdom and attaining liberation... many just want to accumulate more merits, achieve their worldly goals, etc. Group rafts also require people's willingness to get into the raft. Buddha is one such 'group raft'. Yes.. and I would also add that human beings has the greatest potential to 'raise' or 'lower' their vibration, in other words, the ability to drop or raise to other lower/higher realms is most easiest in the human realm due to the great opportunity here to either accumulate wholesome or unwholesome karmas.

Practice Vipassana or Self-Inquiry (whichever you prefer). It will lead to unshakeable certainty beyond doubts about Reality. Then you will not get confused.

My experience is that there is a clear difference between the 'sense of existence' or the One Mind and the experience of just the 'radiant world' which I both experienced. Both are the same experience: one taste, it is both the experience of luminosity, yet different level of deconstruction. For example one who experiences the I AM/sense of existence may not experience the impersonality aspect, and having experienced that aspect doesn't mean one has deconstructed the subject-object construct leading to the experience of non-division with the world, etc etc (stages before that have a sense of a Witness observing world). However, even though I intuitively understand the difference, I cannot say that I have relinquished the Self, in other words there are mental constructs and tendencies to reference back to a Self. An experience that is similar to Stage 5 of Thusness/PasserBy's Seven Stages of Enlightenment 'just manifestation' doesn't mean one has given rise to the insight of anatta. If one has given rise to this insight however, then it is permanent, and the constructs and tendencies that prevent sustaining of non-dual experience are removed via insight.

Yes. Mutual feelings Btw how are you doing these days, curious.. you may want to PM me. What are you refering to as 'arbitrary schema'? No intentions to defend anyone... just replying when I see a point to be made.. I see your point. Yes, unless a person enters deeply into samadhi and jhanas, the person will not be able to see his past lives. Any other past life memories that one claims to have (especially as an adult who didn't remember them from young but then suddenly claim to have a vision/memory) is likely an image inserted by a spirit... and any powers that one claims to have without having attained samadhi/jhanas is almost certainly due to the influence of spirits, or an immediate past life being in those realm, and I know of many such people. However there are also the case of children remembering their past lives, and there are scientists (like Dr Ian Stevensons and many others) who have researched have traced their cases and actually proven that their memories are valid. They do not at some point in their lives suddenly remember their past lives (which would be more suspicious), but rather to them the memory is like what they always had all along. They usually forget them later in their lives. Given the prevalence of cases of young children accurately remembering past lives (and then forgetting them later) I don't think I would say that their memories are necessarily from external entities though there is a possibility. I mean why do spirits choose children more than adults? That said I think the children's memories are far from 'divya cakcus' as it is as far as I know only memories pertaining to their immediate past life. Those with 'divya cakcus' can remember far more than that and I know of such people personally.

Rebirth is truth and does not contradict the teachings of anatta. From Emptiness and the Middle Way http://newbuddhist.com/forum/showthread.php?t=4215 (rizenfenix) Continuing consciousness after death is, in most religions, a matter of revealed truth. In Buddhism, the evidence comes from the contemplative experience of people who are certainly not ordinary but who are sufficiently numerous that what they say about it is worth taking seriously into account. Indeed, such testimonies begin with those of the Buddha himself. Nevertheless, it’s important to understand that what’s called reincarnation in Buddhism has nothing to do with the transmigration of some ‘entity’ or other. It’s not a process of metempsychosis because there is no ‘soul’. As long as one thinks in terms of entities rather than function and continuity, it’s impossible to understand the Buddhist concept of rebirth. As it’s said, ‘There is no thread passing through the beads of the necklace of rebirths.’ Over successive rebirths, what is maintained is not the identity of a ‘person’, but the conditioning of a stream of consciousness. Additionally, Buddhism speaks of successive states of existence; in other words, everything isn’t limited to just one lifetime. We’ve experienced other states of existence before our birth in this lifetime, and we’ll experience others after death. This, of course, leads to a fundamental question: is there a nonmaterial consciousness distinct from the body? It would be virtually impossible to talk about reincarnation without first examining the relationship between body and mind. Moreover, since Buddhism denies the existence of any self that could be seen as a separate entity capable of transmigrating from one existence to another by passing from one body to another, one might well wonder what it could be that links those successive states of existence together. One could possibly understand it better by considering it as a continuum, a stream of consciousness that continues to flow without there being any fixed or autonomous entity running through it… Rather it could be likened to a river without a boat, or to a lamp flame that lights a second lamp, which in-turn lights a third lamp, and so on and so forth; the flame at the end of the process is neither the same flame as at the outset, nor a completely different one…

Do you believe in rebirth?

Yes what you said is right. But also as Thusness said, "one should not skew towards emptiness and neglect the non-dual essence of luminosity". The essence, nature, and energy should be seen as inseparable. Luminosity, emptiness, manifestation. We are not denying the clear sensation of pain (even without labeling it as such), in fact a true practitioner is authenticated moment by moment in the "CLARITY and VIVIDNESS of the NOW" that alwayson is talking about, that is the non-dual luminous clarity, yet without reifying. Of course, the same can be said likewise, "one should not skew towards luminosity and neglect its emptiness", as reification happens, solidifying a point of luminous clarity into a solid Self. The true nature of mind is the union of luminosity and emptiness. p.s. As for Taoism, I do not think they have a metaphysical position of Self unlike in the majority of Indian philosophies. I do not think Lao Tzu or any of the major Taoist figures actually 'posit that you do have a self' like SFJane said. This is the understanding of Thusness who used to guided by a Taoist teacher for many years in the past, and also Dr. David Loy (author of a good book 'non-duality') who noted that Buddhism and Taoism are the only religions that do not have a metaphysical self or soul in their teachings.

Thanks!

To me I believe he is refering to the Mahayana definition of Enlightenment with the capital E - which is equivalent to Buddhahood, like Shakyamuni Buddha. I have however no doubts he has attained at least enlightenment (no caps) in the sense of having entered the bhumi stages and considered an Arya, a Bodhisattva. Yes, many Buddhist scriptures actually referred to retinues of thousands of enlightened arhats at the Buddha's assembly. And just because you graduated from a university doesn't mean you cannot recognise your professors and lecturers and treat them as your teacher and pay gratitude and respect to them. And of course there are lots of Buddhist teachers who became enlightened and are teaching others. They are no longer just 'students on the path'. But I don't think they will be arrogant enough to disregard the Buddha as having been their original teacher. In fact it is a natural result that having become enlightened, they are even more grateful for the Buddha's teachings for seeing the subtle wisdom and teachings the Buddha imparted out of compassion to sentient beings. The Buddha however, in that life time (however he had learnt from many Buddhas in his past lives), did not have a teacher, and only the category of Buddhas and Pratyekabuddhas do not have teachers because they have cultivated for a very very long time and the time was just ripe for their awakening and they did not have to rely on one. Arhats belonging to the Sravaka (hearer) category learnt from teachers within their lifetime, practiced, and then as a result gained liberation. Of course it wouldn't. That is just your presumption. Given that there are countless universes in the Buddhist world views, there would be currently countless enlightened persons throughout the universe(s). But does the number mean anything? Not really. Just because there are a lot of enlightened people doesn't necessarily lead to 'mystic force' or whatever. Such things doesn't exist. Each person has their own individual karma. What do you expect enlightened beings to do? Do you think having enlightened beings means no more natural disasters etc? The world will still roll on, evil people will still be evil (if they have no intentions to change their ways), disasters still happen, etc. Wars will still happen because that is the karma of people - the Buddha tried to stop the Sakyans from engaging in war but he let go of his attempts at the end because he knew the past life karmas involved (involving a group of villagers hunting fish) and that nothing could be done. For example your friend can become enlightened and yet you can remain as evil as before and then become reborn in hell, for example. The Buddha couldn't stop his cousin who is a member of his sangha from being reborn in avici hell for his evil deeds of trying to hurt the Buddha and cause schism in his sangha. Being related or close to an enlightened person doesn't help. Similarly having thousands of enlightened persons doesn't matter, they may create a positive influence (but it is still limited considering that there are millions/billions of people in the world), but they cannot force a person to become enlightened - it's the individual that matters. Nobody can force another person to become enlightened. That has to come by himself, his own willingness and practice. Having thousands of enlightened beings cannot help in that regard. This is just some new agey assumptions. I do not believe in them. Why do you think that having a percentage of enlightened humans = a new heaven and a new earth on a collective level? Lets say if we manage to get 1% of our population enlightened, but does that mean the 99% will as a result become definitely enlightened too? I highly doubt so. A new heaven and a new earth is only for that particular individual. The same world we live in can still be hell for another. It is how each of us lives. Awakening is individual and up to the individual. And unfortunately it will still be, even if a percentage of our population becomes enlightened.

Just for anyone curious: Buddha Boy practices Tummo learnt from the Sakya sect of Tibetan Buddhism. He has not eaten/drank/pissed/slept/etc, intends not to, for his 6 year meditation retreat. There is a documentary on him by Discovery Channel called 'Boy with Divine Powers', quite fascinating. Last heard in 2009, he's doing fine.

In Mahayana Buddhism, enlightenment means Buddhahood, which also confers things like omniscience, perfection of all virtues, all powerful, mastery of expedient means, etc etc. This doesn't mean there aren't anyone who is enlightened and liberated (in the sense of realisation of emptiness, freedom from samsara, etc) whether as a Bodhisattva or an Arhant, for in Buddha's times alone he had thousands of students who are enlightened and liberated, and there continue to be such people today. I do not doubt that HHDL is such a person. Also, he is a highly qualified Dzogchen teacher and practitioner, so if he had not realised his nature of mind, it would not be possible for him to take on that position.