The goal of Buddhist meditation is Nibbana. We incline towards
the peace of Nibbana and away from the complexities of the sensual realm, the endless
cycles of habit. Nibbana is a goal that can be realised in this lifetime, we don't have to
wait until we die to know if it's real.
The senses and the sensual world are the realm of birth and death. Take sight for
instance, it's dependent on so many factors: whether it's day or night, whether or not the
eyes are healthy, and so on. Yet we become very attached to the colours, shapes and forms
that we perceive with the eyes and we identify with them. Then there are the ears and
sound, when we hear pleasant sounds we seek to hold onto them and when we hear unpleasant.
sounds we try to turn away. With smells we seek the pleasure of fragrances and pleasant
odours and try to get away from unpleasant ones. Also with flavours, we seek delicious
tastes and try to avoid bad ones. Then touch -- just how much of our lives are spent
trying to escape from physical discomfort and pain and seeking the delights of physical
sensation. Finally there is thought, the discriminative consciousness. It can give us a
lot of pleasure or a lot of misery. These are the senses, the sensual world. It is the
compounded world of birth and death. Its very nature is dukkha, it is imperfect
and unsatisfying. You'll never find perfect happiness, contentment or peace in the sensual
world, it will always bring despair and death. The sensual world is unsatisfactory and so
we only suffer from it when we expect it to satisfy us. We suffer from the sensual world
when we expect more from it than it can possibly give; things like permanent security and
happiness, permanent love and safety, hoping that our life will only be one of pleasure
and have no pain in it, 'If we could only get rid of sickness and disease and conquer old
age'. I remember twenty years ago in the States people had this great hope that modern
science would be able to get rid of all illnesses. They'd say: 'All mental illnesses are
due to chemical imbalances. If we can just find the right chemical combinations and inject
them into the body schizophrenia will disappear.' There would be no more headaches or
backaches. We would gradually replace all our internal organs with nice plastic ones. I
even read an article in an Australian medical journal about how they hoped to conquer old
age! As the world's population keeps increasing we'd keep having more children and nobody
would ever get old and die. Just think what a mess that would be! The sensual world is
unsatisfactory and that's the way it's supposed to be. When we attach to it, it takes us
to despair because attachment means that we want it to be satisfactory -- we want it to
satisfy us, to make us content, happy and secure. But just notice the nature of happiness
-- how long can you stay happy? What is happiness? You may think it's how you feel when
you get what you want. Someone says something you like to hear and you feel happy. Someone
does something you approve of and you feel happy. The sun shines.and you feel happy.
Someone makes nice food and serves it to you and you're happy. But how long can you stay
happy? Do we always have to depend on the sun shining? In England the weather is very
changeable, the happiness about the sun shining in England is obviously very impermanent
and unsatisfactory.
Unhappiness is not getting what we want, wanting it to be sunny when it's cold, wet and
rainy, people doing things that we don't approve of, having food that isn't delicious and
so on. Life gets boring and tedious when we're unhappy with it. So happiness and
unhappiness are very dependent on getting what we want and having to get what we don't
want. But happiness is the goal of most people's lives; in the American constitution I
think they speak of 'the right to the pursuit of happiness'. Getting what we want, what we
think we deserve, becomes our goal in life. But happiness always leads to unhappiness
because it's impermanent. How long can you really be happy? Trying to arrange, control and
manipulate conditions so as to always get what we want, always hear what we want to hear,
always see what we want to see, so that we never have to experience unhappiness or
despair, is a hopeless task. It's impossible, isn't it? Happiness is unsatisfactory, it's dukkha.
It's not something to depend on or make the goal of life. Happiness will always be
disappointing because it lasts so briefly and then is succeeded by unhappiness. It is
always dependent on so many other things. We feel happy when we're healthy but our human
bodies are subject to rapid changes and we can lose that health very quickly. Then we feel
terribly unhappy at being sick, at losing the pleasure of feeling energetic and vigourous.
Thus the goal for the Buddhist is not happiness, because we realise that happiness is
unsatisfactory. The goal lies away from the sensual world. It is not a rejection of the
sensual world but understanding it so well that we no longer seek it as an end in itself.
We no longer expect the sensory world to satisfy us. We no longer demand that sensory
consciousness be anything other than an existing condition that we can skillfully use
according to time and place. We no longer attach to it or demand that the
sense-impingement be always pleasant, or feel despair and sorrow when it's unpleasant.
Nibbana isn't a state of blankness, a trance where you're totally wiped out. It's not
nothingness or an annihilation, it's like a space. It's going into the space of your mind
where you no longer attach, where you're no longer deluded by the appearance of things.
You are no longer demanding anything from the sensory world. You are just recognising it
as it arises and passes away.
Being born in the human condition means that we must inevitably experience old age,
sickness and death. One time a young woman came to our monastery in England with her baby.
The baby had been badly ill for about a week with a horrible racking kind of cough. The
mother looked totally depressed and miserable. As she sat there in the reception room
holding the baby, it turned red in the face and started screaming and coughing horribly.
The woman said, 'Oh, Venerable Sumedho, why does he have to suffer like this? He's never
hurt anybody, he's never done anything wrong. Why? In some previous life what did he do to
have to suffer like this?' He was suffering because he was born! If he hadn't been born he
wouldn't have to suffer. When we're born we have to expect these things. Having a human
body means that we have to experience sickness, pain, old age and death. This is an
important reflection. We can speculate that maybe in a previous life he liked to choke
cats and dogs or something like that and he has to pay for it in this life, but that's
mere speculation and it doesn't really help. What we can know is that it's the kammic[*] result of being born. Each one of us must inevitably experience sickness
and pain, hunger, thirst, the ageing process of our bodies and death -- it's the law of
kamma.[*] What begins must end, what is born must die, what comes
together must separate. We're not being pessimistic about the way things are, but we're
observing, so we don't expect life to be other than it is. Then we can cope with life and
endure it when it's difficult and delight when it's delightful. If we understand it, we
can enjoy life without being its helpless victims. How much misery there is in human
existence because we expect life to be other than what it is! We have these romantic ideas
that we'll meet the right person, fall in love and live happily ever after, that we'll
never fight, have a wonderful relationship. But what about death! So you think, 'Well
maybe we'll die at the same time'. That's hope isn't it? There's hope and then despair
when your loved one dies before you do or runs away with the dustman or the travelling
salesman.
You can learn a lot from small children because they don't disguise their feelings,
they just express what they feel in the moment; when they're miserable they start crying
and when they're happy they laugh. Some time ago I went to a layman's home. When we
arrived his young daughter was very happy to see him and then he said to her, 'I have to
take Venerable Sumedho to Sussex University to give a talk'. As we walked out of the door
the little girl turned red in the face and began screaming in anguish so that her father
said, 'It's alright, I'll be back in an hour'. But she wasn't developed to that level
where she could understand 'I'll be back in an hour'. The immediacy of separation from the
loved was immediate anguish. Notice how often in our life there is that sorrow at having
to separate from something we like or someone we love, from having to leave a place we
really like to be in. When you are really mindful you can see the not-wanting to separate,
the sorrow. As adults we can let go of it immediately if we know we can come back again,
but it's still there.
From last November to March I travelled around the world ... always arriving at
airports with somebody meeting me with a 'Hello!' and then a few days later it was
'Goodbye!' And there was always this sense of 'Come back' and I'd say 'Yes, I'll come
back' ... and so I've committed myself to do the same thing next year. We can't say
'Goodbye forever' to someone we like can we? We say, 'I'll see you again', 'I'll phone you
up', 'I'll write you a letter' or 'until next time we meet' -- we have all these phrases
to cover over the sense of sorrow and separation.
In meditation we're noting, just observing what sorrow really is. We're not saying that
we shouldn't feel sorrow when we separate from someone we love, it's natural to feel that
way isn't it? But now, as meditators, we're beginning to witness sorrow so that we
understand it rather than trying to suppress it, pretend it's something more than it is or
just neglect it. In England people tend to suppress sorrow when somebody dies. They try
not to cry or be emotional, they don't want to make a scene, they keep a 'stiff upper
lip'. Then when they start meditating they can find themselves suddenly crying over the
death of someone who died fifteen years before. They didn't cry at the time so they end up
doing it fifteen years later. When someone dies we don't want to admit the sorrow or make
a scene because we think that if we cry we're weak or it's embarrassing to others, and so
we tend to suppress and hold things back, not recognising the nature of things as they
really are, not recognising our human predicament and learning from it. In meditation
we're allowing the mind to open up and let the things that have been suppressed and
repressed become conscious, because when things become conscious they have a way of
ceasing rather than just being repressed again. We allow things to take their course to
cessation, we allow things to go away rather than just push them away.
Usually we just push certain things away from us, refusing to accept or recognise them.
Whenever we feel upset or annoyed with anyone, when we're bored or unpleasant feelings
arise, we look at the beautiful flowers or the sky, read a book, watch TV, do something.
We're never fully consciously bored, fully angry. We don't recognise our despair or
disappointment because we can always run off into something else. We can always go to the
refrigerator, eat cakes and sweets, listen to the stereo. It's so easy to absorb into
music, away from boredom and despair into something that's exciting or interesting or
calming or beautiful. Look at how dependent we are on watching TV and reading. There's so
many books now that they'll all have to be burnt, useless books everywhere, everybody's
writing things without having anything worth saying. Today's not-so-pleasant film stars
write their biographies and make a lot of money. Then there are the gossip columns, people
get away from the boredom of their own existence, their discontent with it, the
tediousness, by reading gossip about movie stars and public figures. We've never really
accepted boredom as a conscious state. As soon as it comes into the mind we start looking
for something interesting, something pleasant. But in meditation we're allowing boredom to
be. We're allowing ourselves to be fully consciously bored, fully depressed, fed up,
jealous, angry, disgusted. All the nasty unpleasant experiences of life that we have
repressed out of consciousness and never really looked at, never really accepted, we begin
to accept into consciousness -- not as personality problems anymore but just out of
compassion. Out of kindness and wisdom we allow things to take their natural course to
cessation, rather than just keep them going round in the same old cycles of habit. If we
have no way of letting things take their natural course then we're always controlling,
always caught in some dreary habit of mind. When we're jaded and depressed, we're unable
to appreciate the beauty of things because we never really see them as they truly are.
I remember one experience I had in my first year of meditation in Thailand. I spent
most of that first year by myself in a little hut and the first few months were really
terrible -- all kinds of things kept coming up in my mind -- obsessions and fears and
terror and hatred. I'd never felt so much hatred. I'd never thought of myself as one who
hated people but during those first few months of meditation it seemed like I hated
everybody. I couldn't think of anything nice about anyone, there was so much aversion
coming up into consciousness. Then one afternoon I started having this strange vision -- I
thought I was going crazy actually -- I saw people walking off my brain. I saw my mother
just walk out of my brain and into emptiness, disappear into space. Then my father and my
sister followed. I actually saw these visions walking out of my head. I thought 'I'm
crazy! I've gone off!' but it wasn't an unpleasant experience. The next morning when I
woke from sleep and looked around, I felt that everything I saw was beautiful. Everything,
even the most unbeautiful detail, was beautiful. I was in a state of awe. The hut itself
was a crude structure, not beautiful by anyone's standards, but it looked to me like a
palace. The scrubby looking trees outside looked like a most beautiful forest. Sunbeams
were streaming through the window onto a plastic dish and the plastic dish looked
beautiful! That sense of beauty stayed with me for about a week and then reflecting on it
I suddenly realised that that's the way things really are when the mind is clear. Up to
that time I'd been looking through a dirty window and over the years I'd become so used to
the scum and dirt on the window that I didn't realise it was dirty, I'd thought that
that's the way it was.
When we get used to looking through a dirty window everything seems grey, grimy and
ugly. Meditation is a way of cleaning the window, purifying the mind, allowing things to
come up into consciousness and letting them go. Then with the wisdom faculty, the Buddha
wisdom, we observe how things really are. It's not just attaching to beauty, to purity of
mind, but actually understanding. It is wisely reflecting on the way nature operates so
that we are no longer deluded by it into creating habits for our life through ignorance.
Birth means old age, sickness and death, but that's to do with your body, it's not you.
Your human body is not really yours. No matter what your particular appearance might be,
whether you are healthy or sickly, whether you are beautiful or not beautiful, whether you
are black or white or whatever, it's all non-self. This is what we mean by anatta,
that human bodies belong to nature, that they follow the laws of nature, they are born,
they grow up, they get old and they die. Now we may understand that rationally but
emotionally there is a very strong attachment to the body. In meditation we begin to see
this attachment. We don't take the position that we shouldn't be attached, saying 'The
problem with me is that I'm attached to my body, I shouldn't be. It's bad isn't it? If I
was a wise person I wouldn't be attached to it.' That's starting from an ideal again. It's
like trying to start climbing a tree from the top saying, 'I should be at the top of the
tree. I shouldn't be down here.' But as much as we'd like to think that we're at the top
we have to humbly accept that we aren't. To begin with we have to be at the trunk of the
tree, where the roots are, looking at the most coarse and ordinary things before we can
start identifying with anything at the top of the tree. This is the way of wise
reflection. It's not just purifying the mind and then attaching to purity. It's not just
trying to refine consciousness so that we can induce high states of concentration whenever
we feel like it, because even the most refined states of sensory consciousness are
unsatisfactory, they're dependent on so many other things. Nibbana is not dependent on any
other condition. Conditions of any quality, be they ugly, nasty, beautiful, refined or
whatever, arise and pass away but they don't interfere with Nibbana, with the peace of the
mind.
We are not inclining away from the sensory world through aversion, because if we try to
annihilate the senses then that too becomes a habit that we blindly acquire trying to get
rid of that which we don't like. That's why we have to be very patient.
This lifetime as a human being is a lifetime of meditation. See the rest of your life
as the span of meditation rather than this ten-day retreat. You may think 'I meditated for
ten days. I thought I was enlightened but somehow when I got home I didn't feel
enlightened any more. I'd like to go back and do a longer retreat where I can feel more
enlightened than I did last time. It would be nice to have a higher state of
consciousness.' In fact the more refined you go the more coarse your daily life must seem.
You get high and then when you get back to the mundane daily routines of life in the city,
it's even worse than before, isn't it? Having gone so high, the ordinariness of life seems
much more ordinary, gross and unpleasant. The way to insight wisdom is not making
preferences for refinement over coarseness but recognising that both refined and coarse
consciousness are impermanent conditions, that they're unsatisfactory, their nature will
never satisfy us, and they're anatta -- they're not what we are, they're not
ours.
Thus the Buddha's teaching is a very simple one -- what could be more simple than 'what
is born must die'? It's not some great new philosophical discovery, even illiterate tribal
people know that. You don't have to study in university to know it.
When we're young we think 'I've got so many years left of youth and happiness'. If
we're beautiful we think 'I'm going to be young and beautiful forever', because it seems
that way. If we're twenty years old, having a good time, life is wonderful and somebody
says 'You are going to die some day', we may think 'What a depressing person. Let's not
invite him again to our house.' We don't want to think about death, we want to think about
how wonderful life is, how much pleasure we can get out of it. So as meditators we reflect
on getting old and dying. This is not being morbid or sick or depressing but it's
considering the whole cycle of existence and when we know that cycle then we are more
careful about how we live. People do horrible things because they don't reflect on their
deaths. They don't wisely reflect and consider, they just follow their passions and
feelings of the moment, trying to get pleasure and then feeling angry and depressed when
life doesn't give them what they want.
Reflect on your own life and death and the cycles of nature. Just observe what delights
and what depresses. See how we can feel very positive or very negative. Notice how we want
to attach to beauty or to pleasant feelings or to inspiration. It's really nice to feel
inspired isn't it? 'Buddhism is the greatest religion of them all' or 'When I discovered
the Buddha I was so happy, it's a wonderful discovery!' When we get a little bit doubtful,
a little bit depressed, we go and read an inspiring book and get high. But remember,
getting high is an impermanent condition, it's like getting happy, you have to keep doing
it, sustaining it, and after you keep doing something over and over again you no longer
feel happy with it. How many sweets can you eat? At first they make you happy and then
they make you sick. So depending on religious inspiration is not enough. If you attach to
inspiration then when you get fed up with Buddhism you'll go off and find some new thing
to inspire you.
It's like attaching to romance, when it disappears from the relationship you start
looking for someone else to feel romantic towards. Years ago in America I met a woman
who'd been married six times, she was only about thirty-three. I said, 'You'd think you
would have learned after the third or fourth time. Why do you keep getting married?' She
said, 'It's the romance, I don't like the other side but I love the romance'. At least she
was honest, but not terribly wise. Romance is a condition that leads to disillusionment.
Romance, inspiration, excitement, adventure, all those things rise to a peak and then
condition their opposites, just as an inhalation conditions an exhalation. Just think of
inhaling all the time. It's like having one romance after another, isn't it? How long can
you inhale? The inhalation conditions the exhalation, both are necessary. Birth conditions
death, hope conditions despair and inspiration conditions disillusionment. So when we
attach to hope we're going to feel despair. When we attach to excitement it's going to
take us to boredom. When we attach to romance it will take us to disillusionment and
divorce. When we attach to life it takes us to death. So recognise that it's the
attachment that causes the suffering, attaching to conditions and expecting them to be
more than what they are.
So much of life for so many people seems to be waiting and hoping for something to
happen, expecting and anticipating some success or pleasure or maybe worrying and fearing
that some painful, unpleasant thing is just lying in wait. You may hope that you will meet
somebody who you'll really love or have some great experience, but attaching to hope takes
you to despair.
By wise reflection we begin to understand the things that create misery in our lives.
We see that actually we are the creators of that misery. Through our ignorance, through
our not having wisely understood the sensory world and its limitations, we have identified
with all that is unsatisfactory and impermanent, the things that can only take us to
despair and death. No wonder life is so depressing! It's dreary because of the attachment,
because we identify and seek ourselves in all that is by nature dukkha --
unsatisfactory and imperfect. Now when we stop doing that, when we let go, that is
enlightenment. We are enlightened beings no longer attached, no longer identified with
anything, no longer deluded by the sensory world. We understand the sensory world, we know
how to co-exist with it. We know how to use the sensory world for compassionate action,
for joyous giving. We don't demand that it be here to satisfy us anymore, to make us feel
secure and safe or to give us anything, because as soon as we demand it to satisfy us it
takes us to despair.
When we no longer identify with the sensory world as 'me' or 'mine' and see it as anatta
(not-self) then we can enjoy the senses without seeking sense-impingement or depending on
it. We no longer expect conditions to be anything other than what they are, so that when
they change we can patiently and peacefully endure the unpleasant side of existence. We
can humbly endure sickness, pain, cold, hunger, failures and criticisms. If we're not
attached to the world we can adapt to change, whatever that change may be, whether it's
for the better or for the worse. If we're still attached then we can't adapt very well,
we're always struggling, resisting, trying to control and manipulate everything and then
feeling frustrated, frightened or depressed at what a delusive, frightening place the
world is.
If you've never really contemplated the world, never taken the time to understand and
know it, then it becomes a frightening place for you. It becomes like a jungle: you don't
know what's around the next tree, bush or cliff -- a wild animal, a ferocious man-eating
tiger, a terrible dragon or a poisonous snake. Nibbana means getting away from the jungle.
When we're inclining towards Nibbana we're moving towards the peace of the mind. Although
the conditions of the mind may not be peaceful at all, the mind itself is a peaceful
place. Here we are making a distinction between the mind and the conditions of mind. The
conditions of mind can be happy, miserable, elated, depressed, loving or hating, worrying
or fear-ridden, doubting or bored. They come and go in the mind, but the mind itself, like
the space in this room, stays just as it is. The space in this room has no quality to
elate or depress, does it? It is just as it is. To concentrate on the space in the room we
have to withdraw our attention from the things in the room. If we concentrate on the
things in the room we become happy or unhappy. We say, 'look at that beautiful Buddha
image', or if we see something we find ugly we say 'Oh what a terrible disgusting thing'.
We can spend our time looking at the people in the room, thinking whether we like this
person or dislike that person. We can form opinions about people being this way or that
way, remember what they did in the past, speculate about what they will do in the future,
seeing others as possible sources of pain or gratification to ourselves.
However if we withdraw our attention it doesn't mean that we have to push everyone else
out of the room does it? If we don't concentrate on or absorb into any of the conditions
then we have a perspective, because the space in the room has no quality to depress or
elate. The space can contain us all, all conditions can come and go within it. Moving
inwards, we can apply this to the mind. The mind is like space, there's room in it for
everything or nothing. It doesn't really matter whether it is filled or has nothing in it,
because we always have a perspective once we know the space of the mind, its emptiness.
Armies can come into the mind and leave, butterflies, rainclouds or nothing. All things
can come and go through without us being caught in blind reaction, struggling resistance,
control and manipulation. So when we abide in the emptiness of our minds we're moving
away, we're not getting rid of things but no longer absorbing into conditions that exist
in the present or creating any new ones. This is our practice of letting go. We let go of
our identification with conditions by seeing that they are all impermanent and not-self.
It is what we mean by Vipassana meditation. It's really looking at, witnessing, listening,
observing that whatever comes must go. Whether it's coarse or refined, good or bad,
whatever comes and goes is not what we are. We're not good, we're not bad, we're not male
or female, beautiful or ugly -- these are changing conditions in nature which are
not-self. This is the Buddhist way to enlightenment; going towards Nibbana, inclining
towards the spaciousness or emptiness of mind rather than being born and caught up in the
conditions.
Now you may ask, 'Well if I'm not the conditions of mind, if I'm not a man or a woman,
this or that, then what am I?' Do you want me to tell you who you are? Would you believe
me if I did? ... What would you think if I ran out and started asking you who I am? It's
like trying to see your own eyes, you can't know yourself because you are
yourself. You can only know what is not yourself and so that solves the problem, doesn't
it? If you know what is not yourself then there is no question about what you are. If I
said 'Who am I? I'm trying to find myself', and I started looking under the shrine, under
the carpet, under the curtain you'd think, 'Ven. Sumedho has really flipped out, he's gone
crazy, he's looking for himself'. 'I'm looking for me, where am I?' is the most stupid
question in the world. The problem is not who we are but our belief and identity with what
we are not. That's where the suffering is, that's where we feel misery and depression and
despair. It's our identity with everything that is not ourselves that is dukkha.
When you identify with that which is unsatisfactory, you're going to feel dissatisfied and
discontented, it's obvious, isn't it? So the path of the Buddhist is a letting go rather
than trying to find anything. The problem is the blind attachment, the blind
identification with the appearance of the sensory world. You needn't get rid of the
sensory world but learn from it, watch it, no longer allow yourselves to be deluded by it.
Keep penetrating it with Buddha-wisdom, keep using this Buddha-wisdom so that you become
more at ease with being wise rather than making yourself become wise.
Just by listening, observing, being awake, being aware, the wisdom will become clear.
You'll be using wisdom in regards to your body, in regards to your thoughts, feelings,
memories, emotions -- all of these things. You'll see and witness, allowing them to pass
by and let them go. So at this time you have nothing else to do except be wise from one
moment to the next.