Buddhist Discussion Centre (Upwey)
Ltd.
Personal Self Habit, Phenomenal Self Habit -Part 1
John D. Hughes
Recorded
Teachings
Buddhist Discussion Centre
(Upwey) Ltd.
33 Brooking St
Upwey, Victoria
Australia
3158
A.C.N. 005 701 806
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488
Phone: (03) 9754
3334
Fax: (03) 9754 3334
email: wbu@bdcu.org.au
Disclaimer
Teacher: John D. Hughes
Date of recording: 25/6/88
Transcribed by Frank Carter, Alec Sloman,
and Julian Bamford
Checked by Leanne Eames
CD Reference
25_06_88T2S1i
File Name: 25_06_88T2S1i_JDHtranscribe.rtf
5 Day Meditation Course
Recording Title: "Personal Self Habit, Phenomenal Self Habit"
So the Meditation brings you to quickly realise that there’s no difference between the dead body in the cemetery and your own body, except your body is moving. Therefore when you realise that strongly enough, the mind moves into arupa meditation. The first one would be infinite space, space is infinite. The next one would be knowledge is infinite, but that's worldly knowledge, there's not much lokuttara knowledge always there. But you can find out a lot of things. But where you want to be is in the third arupa jhana, Sunyata, and because the, you've established convincingly that your body is already dead, that's there's no distinction between it and a dead body, any movements in the body you discount; you stop being fascinated with. So a dead body of course is destructive, it can do whatever it likes.
So we get to the third arupa jhana and we have to divide; that has eighteen levels in the Sphere of Nothingness and we’ve got to overcome the fascination of when the two parts of the mind strike there is a display of could be anything. So it is the, the two parts we want to examine are the personal self habit and the phenomenal self habit and these two minds, the personal self habit and the phenomenal self habit striking together produce all the phenomena.
So the base is, the base of what is misknowledge, not understood, is the two, these two types of self habit minds. Now when the phenomena occurs by the mind getting contact with something obviously because of the kamma, something will arise. We keep saying, because of our misknowledges, that something that is arising through our constant contact is a self. But in the Sunyata we are going to examine why we think it is a self. But we’re not going to look at the phenomena. Where you sit in the present is a space, in that space the past kamma is hitting and interacting with the future kamma. So the present is unreal.
In this meditation the past is real, because it has got a long, long history and the future is real because it has a long, long history yet to come, but the present is just like one thought moment, one thought moment, one thought moment, one thought moment. It’s so infinitesimal that we say the present is unreal. The past is real, the future is real and when we sit on this mind there's merely the past hitting the future. And that hitting point, which we call the present is where the phenomena is being produced. And that phenomena, spectacular as it is, we think is a self; but it's not. It's just phenomena only. So as to the manner, manner of this restatement, this, because there’s continual phenomena in the mind, and it's continually arising out of the striking of phenomena, it is the habitual sense that things are intrinsically objective. We think this is the way it is, because it's a habitual sense of saying “this is the way it is”, “this is the way it is”.
We also think they are intrinsically identifiable, because we’ve always thought like that. And we think they’re intrinsically real status. To de-tune the reality, we say the present is unreal. The past is real, the future is real, the present is unreal. It's like a wave on a water. The wave moves across the water. Water is water. If the water takes the shape of a wave, we are so fascinated by the wave we forget what we are really looking at is water. And we say “What do you see?”. And you say “I see a wave moving across the water” and I say “Look at the water”, “Water is water”.
There is another one in the Buddhist texts that says if you make out of gold a rupa image, like a body of Buddha, and you mistake the shape or form of the rupa, as a Buddha image, a golden Buddha, you might sit and look at it and then come to a view that oh, that is a real Buddha image. But it is gold, if that is melted down, gold flows back to gold. So out of that gold we can make any shape at all we like. And out of that habitual karma, driven by habitual karma, we make shapes. So sometimes we have human shape. Sometimes we have animal shape. Depending on our positive and negative kamma. Sometimes we have hungry ghost shape. Sometimes we have hell being shape. Sometimes we have deva shape, various heavens, six heaven worlds. And then sometimes we have no shape because we are born arupa. And then out of our arupa birth come, we fall back and then we have … so we are carried along, driven by the past into the future through this unreal present, because we say everything is intrinsically objective. But it is just phenomena of kammic disposition from two things, personal self habit and phenomenal self habit.
Now let’s look at the personal self habit. The past strikes the future, an idea appears, some phenomena, “I think I'll offer flowers to the Buddha”. Because I've done that a lot, because I've trained myself to do it, naturally that thought appears. I offer flowers to the Buddha, naturally. It is not natural for a lot of other people to do that. So they’re trained to do that, and then it becomes natural. So then people say, I say, offering flowers to the Buddha only because of past practice of dana. That is the truth. Other people say 'you' meaning they think I'm a Self, are offering flowers to the Buddha, who in turn they think is a Self. So a lot of errors occur. It's just, the fact is the flowers were there, the mind contacted them, what to do with the flowers?
Now today I went around the altar here, the altar, I put some dead flowers in the bin, I went into the garden, I picked some fresh flowers. That’s a thing I have done many times. Out of contact, the dead flowers were put away. Having contacted the dead flowers thinking ‘flower’, ‘flower’, ‘flower’, ‘flower’, this dead body, which is a dead body, was set to work to go out in the garden, secateurs, snip, snip, twice cut flowers, offered to Buddha habitually. So it is my personal self habit inescapably driven by my kamma to offer flowers to Buddha. Mind strikes light, I offer light to Buddha.
However knowing that is habitual and knowing this body like dead body,
is there anything better I can do? If I have developed stingy self habits,
mean self habits, jealous self habits, negative self habits, they have to
be destroyed. But if you like, I amuse myself. I'm amused, I'm content
enough to keep doing offerings to Buddha, Dhamma, Sangha. When will this
offering stop? When I’ve had enough, then I will stop. But never had
enough yet. Never had enough offerings to Buddha, Dhamma, Sangha. Although
I've done vast offerings, ever had enough yet. So I know I've never had
enough as a knowledge. So I continue on until the time is correct. When
the conditions arise I will go to higher meditation so forth, just
different meditation, and then I won’t interrupt my meditation to move my
dead body around to go and pick flowers. Because in higher meditation,
sitting in a higher meditation, with the body sitting like it, it's
dead
and cultivating the mind powerfully, it would be walking away from
the powerful meditation with something trivial, to offer flowers to
Buddha. So therefore, until the minds are clean enough and I’ve had
enough, I'll just keep learning the good things with a confidence, with a
certainty that sooner or later I’ll sit in the forest and do something
which .
So the personal self habit in this case, isn't too harmful to other beings, because normally, if I'm teaching someone, I wouldn't just stop teaching and run out and go and get flowers, so when I'm not getting flowers, people walk in the door with flowers anyway. So which is the highest? Not to teach and walk out in the garden, pick the flowers, put them on the altar. I also offered red candles, I also did water offering. Which is the highest self-habit? To do those dana, or to teach the Dhamma, which is the highest? Well, strangely enough, we couldn't say, it's an indeterminate question. Although in a conditional Dhamma we would teach. Dhamma dana is higher than offering flowers or water. As a conditional Dhamma we’d teach like that, but at a higher level we would say indeterminate. Why? Because, what is there to praise about habitual personal self habit?
And then you examine the personal self habit and find it is empty of any sort of existence. The personal self habit is like a dead man. We haven't got the equivalent in English. We can certainly draw the parallel of dead body and this moving body, moving body, dead body. But in English we haven't got language sufficient to distinguish between the mental personal self habit of dana, by a living mind, because we know, or we think we know that a dead mind doesn't do that. However, we’re completely deluded in this area, because even in death the mind reappears, driven by the personal self habit.
So for example, I was down a shop looking at a woman in a flower shop, I can't remember where it was. It might have been Knox City, perhaps, I don't know. No, it was at Boronia. Then I saw in this shop a couple of devas in the shop, that’s what drew my attention to it, and I looked in the shop, I was over there with Roger at Boronia here, in a part of the mall, and there was one human woman, who runs the shop. She had been an old deva, come to human birth, and was still tending the flowers, but had to use her living dead body, her moving, living dead body, to do it. Whereas a tree deva could just watch the flowers grow, much different. Is picking nails the best meditation you've ever done? Leave that dead body alone, don't touch it. Leave that dead body alone. I'm not training dead bodies, I'm not teaching you to play with your dead body that still walks around while you do that. You’ll never learn anything if you do that. Wrong mind.
So therefore, don’t move your body, just get it in and leave it there, it's dead, it’ll experience all those feelings, that's the property of dead bodies. Just ignore it, it doesn't matter what it feels like. Dead body? Terrible, doesn't matter. That's the property of a dead body, doesn't matter. Now this phenomenal self habit, well we’ll go to personal self habit, is an absolute, complete misknowledge. It is allowed to run on but you'll never examine the base of it. Because you are so impressed with the resultant phenomena, the resultant phenomena of the personal self habit clashing with the phenomenal self habit whereas this dead body has run out, brings flowers, offers to Buddha.
Duped by the phenomena, duped by the motion, which had to happen. There’s no effort ever been made, to look at the two parts, the personal self habit and the phenomenal self habit. Therefore ignore all phenomena. Now the personal self habit is formed out of kamma. There is nothing special about that, because everything you've ever done for an infinite number of lives, going back to the infinite past is formed out of kammic action. Going into the infinite future where you'll suffer, suffer, suffer again, be born again, die again. As far as the eye can see backwards there was no attempt to investigate personal self habit as a mind. There was no attempt to investigate phenomenal self habit as a mind, or as phenomena.
Now, water runs down a hill, phenomenal self habit. Every time we look at a waterfall, we say how beautiful, how beautiful, how beautiful. Which is which? The phenomenal self habit is water runs down a hill, makes the waterfall. The personal self habit says beautiful, beautiful, beautiful. Yet, if we put our dead body into the river at the top and it crashed to death down the bottom what would we say then? Would we say that water running downhill is beautiful, when it has just smashed our body onto the rocks below? Will we change our view about it then? What will we say then?
Well, if we then died then, took rebirth, and came back to the same waterfall, we would say out of personal self habit and phenomenal self habit, ‘this is a creepy place, this waterfall, it scares me’. And if we stood at the top of the waterfall, we’d probably get vertigo, or some psychosomatic illness, and we would withdraw from the top of the waterfall, because that's where we, this moving dead body, died last life. Then we would warn other people, “Don't go near the edge!”, “Don’t go near the edge!”, driven by personal self habit. A few lives later on, we forget. We go back to the same waterfall, we say how beautiful, how beautiful, how beautiful, how beautiful. We have lost our fear, through the erosion of time, of our personal self habit. We go to the top of the waterfall, we look down, we say how beautiful, how beautiful, how beautiful.
But what is beautiful? The water is not a self. It's the phenomenal self habit of the fact that water runs down the hill. What are we admiring? Water is water. If the topology of the land is such, the water must flow down the waterfall. We don't see water running uphill; we don't see uphill waterfalls because they don't occur as phenomenal self habit. What are we admiring? The fact is we’re admiring nothing in particular, but our personal self habit says beautiful, beautiful, beautiful, beautiful, of an empty phenomena in the phenomenal self habit side of the samsara. Water runs downhill. If we knock over the milk, water runs downhill, and spills over our kitchen floor. Do we say beautiful, beautiful, beautiful phenomenon? No, we don't. Same phenomena.
Water runs downhill, empty of, without any motive. There is no motive in the water running down the hill, it has no meaning. The water doesn't say “I will run downhill”, it just happens that way. We spill the milk on the floor, we say, a white milk waterfall would probably look quite nice if we could get it in the right state, we don't say beautiful, beautiful, beautiful. We say we don't like, we don’t like the phenomenal self habit of water running down the hill. If we cut our arm, and blood pours out and drips down our arm, we don't say we like the phenomenal habit of the liquid which is our blood, to run down our arm. What are we admiring? We are admiring something that is absolutely empty. And whether we say we like or we don’t like, it is personal self habit.
Therefore our ideas and views of opinions, our likes and dislikes, if you like, are empty, because they are pure personal self habit. So the phenomena, the phenomenal self habit of water or fire, we look at the fire we say ‘fire is beautiful’, because the wood is there, heat is there, wood must burn, totally empty of any intention. We admire the fire, we admire the fire, say “oh, what a beautiful fire you got there Spike”, “What a beautiful fire”, “Nice to see a fire”. If on the other hand, in our last life we had been burnt to death in bush fire or had that happen repeatedly we'd walk in the room and say “I fear that fire”, “I fear that fire”.
Our thoughts and opinions, our self chatter is personal self habit arising through striking phenomenal self habit. Our personal self habit is empty. Our phenomenal self habit is empty. The two interacting together produce a whole new set of anythings, yet we are blinded by the anythings and we don't look back to see our personal self habit as of the nature of Sunyata. And as long as we have personal self habit, and we'll always have one or another or another or another or another. And as long as we’re in the phenomenal self habit, another or another, doesn't matter where we run, it is the same.
So we’re in the samsara, our personal self habit appears, hits the phenomenal self habit of the rupa, and we get phenomenal, mental phenomena, whatever you like. If we stop looking at the mental phenomena produced by the striking of the two, and meditate again, we haven't got a word that says, like, we could easily graphically get into your mind a picture of the corpse walking, the walking corpse, but what can we say about the personal self habit mind? Can we get … ?
The next session of these Teachings is entitled 'Personal Self Habit, Phenomenal Self Habit
- Part 2'.