Buddhist Discussion Centre (Upwey)
Ltd.
Forms of Ignorance -part 2
John D. Hughes
Recorded
Teachings
Buddhist Discussion Centre
(Upwey) Ltd.
33 Brooking St
Upwey, Victoria
Australia
3158
A.C.N. 005 701 806
A.B.N. 42 611 496
488
Phone: (03) 9754
3334
Fax: (03) 9754 3334
email: wbu@bdcu.org.au
Disclaimer
Teacher: John D. Hughes
Date of recording: 24/6/88
Transcribed by Paul Tyrell &
Frank Carter
Checked by Leanne Eames
CD Reference
24_06_88T1S2i
File Name: 24_06_88T1S2i_JDHtranscribe.rtf
5 Day Meditation Course
Recording Title: "Forms of Ignorance"
Overcoming Forms of Ignorance
Suppose you had in your mind hate, if you remove the hate it doesn't necessarily mean there will be love and kindness or compassion. You could be on a neutral kriya mind, and this is where the language of English breaks down, because you assume that the absence of hate is love. But there’s a possibility, you can have this situation - a mind with hate, a mind with the absence of hate, a mind with love, a mind with the absence of love, now you've got to analyse, get an array on your mind and examine. A mind with hate, a mind with the absence of hate, a mind with love, a mind with the absence of love. And what you want to know, just as a slight beginning to attack that two by two matrix, is a mind with the absence of hate the same as a mind with the absence of love? So you've got to meditate into it. And you've got to develop precision of classification, so therefore you'd better generate minds that are very good at making matrixes to be able to look at columns and rows and to fill up the columns and rows. Now when you do that, we do this with pen and paper, or you can do it in the mind, when you do that you will come to some insight wisdom.
Now let’s take a simple matrix. Take a chess board or a draughts board, I think that's eight by eight, sixty four spaces. We’ll take it as a chess board rather than a draughts board because on a draughts board you can pile the draughts up one on top of the other which means you make a three dimensional matrix. So let’s keep it in your mind as a chess board where only one piece can be on one square at one time. Because remember in chess if you take the piece you take the other piece off and your piece occupies its position.
So if you look at the chess board there are empty squares because remember you start off with sixteen pieces on one side and sixteen pieces on the other. There will always empty spaces and then you put the chess pieces into the empty spaces. But when you move a piece it leaves behind emptiness where its position was. So the removal of something creates emptiness. So the idea of Nothingness or Emptiness or Sunyata is not as foreign to your mind as perhaps you think it is.
Now although the particular square might be empty at one point, it is on the emptiness that you can put the piece. So the emptiness of a Sunyata can support something. In this case the emptiness can support one chess piece. But the rules are it can't support two. Because if two, if you come to take a piece the other piece must go automatically. Chess has been said to be one of the most complex games you can play, although games like yin and a few other games are perhaps more interesting in some ways, but we’ll stay with a simple array.
Remember don't confuse the rupa form of the chess and the rupa form of the arrays because what we are talking about is a mind in arupa jhana, Sunyata, third arupa jhana, with no materiality in it. There's a different situation compared to the materiality. The analogue can't be pushed too far with the chess board but it will do as a start. If you take all the pieces off the chess board, you still haven't got to nothing as you can always put them back on again.
Now if you remove, if you washed your mind somehow and you removed hate on the array remember it could get stained with hate again. In fact, the Pali texts talk about stains; it’s one way of translating the word for a defilement.
Now what is staining the mind? What is contaminating the mind? Well it can't be physical objects contaminating the mind. It must be mind objects in mind. There must be in the mind array, the contamination must be mental objects such as vedana, feeling. Now if you stain the mind and you only shift something, did you shift it or did it just shift itself?
We start to argue now about the nature of Atta and Anatta. So, to remove something and then examine its absence you've forgotten that the measuring probe is now in that space. It's like the old problem that you have difficulty in measuring things in physics because you’ve got to put an instrument into the system and putting the measuring instrument displaces the equilibrium of the system or the non-equilibrium of the system, or whatever. So for example, if you had, as a simple case, a glass of water and you put a ruler into the water to measure the depth of the water, you have pushed some of the water out of the way and therefore what you read on the ruler is in error. You've got to allow for the volume of the ruler, the volume of the measuring stick.
So sometimes when you’re doing investigation of mental states the very mind that is doing the investigating comes as a contaminant on the thing you are investigating. And then you think you are alright but then, you've got to think again.
So it's this reinforcing or reification of a self, and as there is always two of these selves coming together with the analysis, to get to omniscience requires a lot of care. There's things and there's persons. Things could be just rupa, tables, chairs, trees, rocks, things like that. And then there’s what you call selves or persons, five groups appearing and disappearing. So there's the personal self habit which is your kammic habituated returning phenomena, and then there's the phenomenal self habit; the very fact that the objects in the samsara are objects in samsara. So they’re there whether you live or die you might argue.
And when the two strike together, it's like a spark
appears due to the contact, and what happens is you get fascinated by
the spark, by the feeling or whatever comes out of the clash of the
two. You get fascinated by the spark and you forget to look what two
things came together. So when you try this meditation strongly you get
an enormous amount of information. You might remember a million past
lives. Just as a sparking phenomenon. Like you strike two rocks
together, say a piece of steel and a flint, you strike them together
you get a spark. You are fascinated by the spark, so you strike again and
again to watch the spark. What you should have been examining is the
one rock and the piece of iron, or the flint and the iron, or whatever
you like. But out of habit kamma, when there is an intense phenomenal
display, for example if you’re looking up in the sky, you say "I
want
to look at the sky". Suppose it's daylight, a blue sky, "I want to look at
the sky", "I
want to look at the sky", then someone sends up like a
star shell or some big fireworks display. Pow!. And you see all this
phenomena. You forget that you’re trying to look at the sky, which is like saying you can't see the wood for
the trees.
And since in this sort of meditation two things are coming together there is always a production of something, it could be anything. It could be the most profound worldly knowledge you will ever see. It could be anything, it could be a whole stream of past lives, glimpses of phenomena, anything will come out of that. And to resist forgetting what you are doing, and to look at the by-product of the meditation, that is the misknowledge. Not to.
So the personal self habit and the phenomenal self habit, both of them, together, constitute misknowledge. So as the manner of reinforcing, reification, reasserting, "I am this" or something, it is the habitual sense that things have intrinsically objective, intrinsically identifiable or intrinsically real status, and so on.
Now to get to the ability not to be duped by the phenomena, that constitutes the biggest problem. So what you've got to do is seeing what brought about the need for such Teachings. Then you remember what brought it about was a Vow of Compassion in your life, that you'd be kind to other people.
And then you've got to make a deal with yourself, you develop enough Bodhicitta, you say look, I know it’s very fascinating that whenever I move my mind and it hits some part of samsara there will be a phenomena, there will be a display, but I've got to resist that display, I've got to really resist it, no matter how glorious it is, no matter what a fireworks show I get. I've got to resist it.
So one way of resisting that display is to take something fairly simple. You take naturally the simplest thing you've got is your own body. And you meditate like this; this body of mine, you say of your own body, is now alive and living. And then you meditate on a dead body and you say "that dead body is not alive and living". Well every one will agree with you at that point. It seems perfectly logical, it seems perfectly rational.
But then, you analyse a bit further. You say well "that dead body has no four groups, feeling, sanna, sankhara, vinnanam. It is four great elements only. So if I am going to make the investigation of four great elements in my own body and I ignore that it is associated with the other four groups, and I'm not struck by the phenomena of whenever I investigate the four great elements in my body and get contact with some phenomena arising, feeling or something else, which I attribute to the body through contact. Then, you start to meditate like this. This is powerful meditation. The body that is dead, the dead body, will not harm anyone, it will not kill, it will not lie, it will not steal, and so on. Whereas this body, these four great elements, under the influence of the defilements of the mind, is still mobilised and will do all those things.
Then you compare again the dead body. Now in Burma there is very powerful meditators, they have actually got the power to put their mind into dead bodies, you know like zombies if you like, this is true, and get them to move and walk. They are experts in black magic phenomena. Even some of the Buddhist monks can do that.
Then you intensify the meditation. And you say by analysis, there is four elements in that dead body, there is four great elements in this body. You come to the conclusion that this body and the dead body cannot, as body, as rupa I'm talking about, not as nama rupa, not as mind body, just as this body as body, rupa using Pali, this body and that dead body are no different because the dead body is four great elements, this is four great elements. The dead body is subject to dissolution, falling apart, but so is this one. You know, like kayanupassana.
Therefore you meditate again, to stop grasping at the phenomena produced by the meditator, and you say there is no difference between the dead body and this body. The only difference is therefore, therefore it is quite fit to call this a dead body. It comes back to the word “dead” you see.
Now what happened is it got emotional, it got emotional about the word “dead body”. But a dead body is four great elements. That’s all it is. And this body is four great elements. So it is presumptuous to call that dead body “dead” and this four great elements which is basically identical, “alive”. Therefore this, and you cut off all the phenomena that will appear, the psychic phenomena that will appear. This body is a dead body.
There are two sorts of dead bodies, one lies dead in the cemetery. But there is another sort
of dead body, this
one, that is capable of moving under mainly the negative influence
of the unwholesome actions.
Then you meditate strongly and cut off all the phenomena, because you are interested in rupa, body or form, and then when that knowledge is understood, you understand this is a dead body moving, whereas the other one’s in the cemetery unmoving. This is the same. There's nothing to be disgusted about. It's just the same, that's all. Because if you look at it as four great elements, it is four great elements, and so is the one in the cemetery. So this is a dead body, if you want to use an emotive word like “dead”, just like the one in the cemetery. Merely this one is under the influence of the other four groups.
And therefore you understand the power of the mind. The power of the mind can move around four great elements. Like a magician. When that meditation is complete, you in fact, when you cognate that fully, you become, you have a siddhi, you can move four great elements.
Now that, that part of the meditation Milarepa understood when he was with that black magician. So he conjured up a hailstorm and killed people. That is very unwise. He was in error because he was driven by unwise minds.
Now therefore if you want to go back to the beginning, you have to meditate so that you remove completely the defilements off your mind. Or you might fall into, by some karmic past, like Milarepa, you might run into some delusion. You might hit a powerful siddhi and then a defilement arises in your mind and then you conjure up a hailstorm and kill someone.
So it's no good, you've got to decide in your
mind, if you have compassion for other
beings, that if you're going to
use siddhis, which will develop. They come out of nowhere, apparently,
and they are there, they develop, they are by-products of Buddhist
meditation, they will develop. You can be certain they will develop.
But you must think out of compassion, if a siddhi develops and I have a
negative disposition because I’ve never bothered to clean the delusion, I could do harm
to others.
So therefore you meditate further like
this. Since the goal is not to train the body, which is
already dead, cannot be distinguished. The rupa as
rupa I'm talking about, don't get delusion. Since the body is already dead
but moving, and the other body is in the cemetery not moving, I'll use this dead body, which will
end up in the cemetery, I'll use the mind that is animating it to
remove the delusions from the mind and I'll only use the body for doing the good things, never
harming anyone.
So the body is running to the cemetery, already the same as dead body insofar as it’s only four great elements and by that meditation ...
The next session of these Teachings is entitled 'Personal Self Habit, Phenomenal Self Habit - Part 1'.