70. Around the World and Finding Home

Back to medical school it was, which began seriously cutting into my retreat time, though it was very rewarding in many ways for other aspects of my practice, because it is about working hard to help people. Despite increasingly extreme educational hours, I did manage to practice a moderate amount, and as the dharma had been planted and the mortal wound that occurred at stream entry continued to fester, practice progressed. As practice deepened and began pervading more and more of my experience, I realized that all moments of perception must spontaneously realize emptiness, luminosity, centerlessness, selflessness, undifferentiated suchness, or whatever you wish to call it, and that this must be the all-the-time, walking-around way of being. About ninety-five percent of the field knew it, and chasing down the last few percent that didn’t know it became my focus. So, my practice changed in some ways, but kept basic facets of the Theravada in other ways.

I started to experiment with vipassanizing (seeing the three characteristics of) the sixth subjhana aspect of the fourth jhana (meaning the Boundless Consciousness sub-aspect of the formed fourth jhana). I played around with noticing all thoughts as colors of space, as textures of space, and practiced hard to see space in all of its aspects as utterly transient, spending time vipassanizing the fifth jhana itself. I sought to bring the light of clear, direct comprehension to layer upon layer of subtle illusory duality, trying to get at how to cause the last subtle layers of duality to untie themselves, to realize their true nature. If you are looking for a book that does a good job of explaining a modernized Tibetan take on the same basic practice paradigm, check out Loch Kelly’s Shift into Freedom, which explains the sutra mahamudra-based approach to practice and has close parallels to this phase of my practice.

I got very good at being mindful of all the sensations of my scalp and face. I was trying to get so good at noticing all the categories of sensations that could make up the illusion of a separate self or subject that nothing would be left to create this illusion, as that habit of clearly perceiving the sensations that made up the illusion would finally become automatic. There is much more that could be said of that period, but much of it would sound repetitive, so I will summarize: after much struggle and experimenting with practices and experiences that might be considered relatively fancy, and after getting very frustrated with all of that, I felt strongly that I had to do another retreat. So, I took some night classes and, in the fourth year of medical school, crammed all of my rotations together in the first semester, used weekends for residency interviews, and managed to graduate from medical school a semester early in December, 2002. This gave me a large block of time before residency to travel overseas.

The Second MBMC Retreat

As part of that trip, I went back on retreat from April 1–21, 2003, at MBMC in Penang, Malaysia, this time with Sayadaw U Pandita Jr. (again, not to be confused with the late Sayadaw U Pandita, with whom I never personally sat). Even though I have gone on retreats since, I still think of that as “my last retreat”.

I spent the first week basically flailing around, but it was not what most people would consider flailing around, though it honestly felt like it to me at the time. By “flailing around”, I mean I sat, walked, and paid intense attention to what was going on, and what was going on was cycles, stages of insight, Fruitions, jhanas, formless realms, nirodha samapatti a few times, on and on, more and more, faster and faster, with what felt like a high degree of clarity. In short, I had “skills”, as Napoleon Dynamite put it, but they were skills that I had become totally sick of, as I had done all those things countless times before over the years and none of it had resolved “the question”. I was basically rehashing old stuff and felt like I was getting nowhere, caught as I was in a sense of somewhere to get to beyond what was just going on.

After about a week of not impressing Sayadaw U Pandita Jr. at all with reports of all my various dharma experiences, he finally said, in so many words, “Yeah, okay, but at some point you are going to have to get your concentration strong.”

I was taken aback a bit, since, for all my frustration and sense of failure, I was still pretty impressed with myself and my abilities. Reluctantly, however, I took his advice to heart with my standard macho bravado, yet a bit humbled at the same time, and began a project of going back to extremely simple assumptions, trying to go for one hundred percent capture, not letting a single sensation anywhere in the entirety of experience go by without perceiving the three characteristics clearly. I did this from the moment I woke up in the morning to the moment I fell asleep at night. This was real Vipassana 101, just six sense doors and three characteristics, but with the seemingly preposterous goal of the true and final perfection of momentary concentration and investigation.

Medical residency was coming, which honestly terrified me, given the stories my dad had told me about what it was like when he went through it back in the day (though it wasn’t quite as hard in terms of hours by the time I got there, it was still difficult). Retreat time would be extremely hard to get for the next three years, and I had only three weeks on this retreat, which seemed too short. I was sick to the marrow of my bones of my current way of perceiving things, so those combined to produce a massive mobilization of heartfelt effort. After a week of pouring basically every last ounce of power into perceiving every single sensation everywhere in the entire field come and go on its own, it seemed that I could perceive nearly everything come and go, but the cycles continued, albeit now much, much faster, given the retreat setting. As the power spun up higher and higher, it got so that I was having a Fruition every few minutes even when walking. However, practice was still in many ways as it had been before other than the extreme intensity and rapidity of it, and this was profoundly unsatisfying.

I was also sitting with a teacher who seemed completely at ease and matter-of-fact with everything I brought up—cycles, jhanas, ñanas, paths, dharma theory, whatever—and although none of it particularly impressed him, he clearly seemed to get the key point beyond all of that. Again, he seemed completely comfortable, relaxed, at ease about all of it. This was the first time reports of my practice had gotten that response from anyone, teachers included, and it was such a breath of fresh air. Most of the time during interviews, Sayadaw U Pandita Jr. would tell a simple dharma story, typically about Burma, which he clearly loved, and then just sit there, smile, hold his hands wide, and say something welcoming and calm like, “This is very nice. Come on. Any time.”

He was clearly implying that he was simply inviting me into a very different way of experiencing reality from my current one. That was one of the most profound dharma teachings I ever received. Christopher Titmuss had articulated and embodied similar sentiments, but at the time I was sitting with him I didn’t have the capacity to comprehend them.

Untangling

On the seventh day of that second week of giving it everything I had, at about 2:30 p.m. or so, after a session of walking meditation on the second floor of MBMC, I was really exhausted from so much effort to clearly comprehend every sensation that arose and vanished. I decided to let the technique go, take a little break, and began walking across the floor towards a little table of beverages on the far opposite corner of that walking hall—the offerings included hot water, tea, hot chocolate, some Asian equivalent of Tang whose label I couldn’t read, etc. About halfway there, suddenly a suffering door Fruition happened, which wouldn’t generally be anything unusual, as Fruitions had been happening so often. However, the ripping away of everything didn’t have that creepy, violating feeling that the suffering door always had, and instead was oddly nice. This reflection on the memory of niceness in the entrance to Fruition was noticed immediately when reality reappeared as being completely different, and then attention latched onto something in that recognition as object, and everything flipped over, like something fundamental had untangled itself, and then came the realization, “Holy shit, this is it!”

It was amazing. It was what I had been looking for. I knew it was the answer: everything was just where it was. Cycles and stages and states were simultaneously irrelevant and yet any stage or state that arose was an integral part of that moment and thus the immediate solution to the problem. This moment was everything regardless of anything and because of everything. It just happens. It knew itself where it was all the way through. It satisfied like nothing previously did. It explained the core of the dharma and made it obvious in real time. In the seeing, just the seen. In the hearing, just the heard. In the thinking, just the thought. In the feeling, just the felt. Its pristine simplicity and directness were stunning. The cycles still occurred, but they had little relevance. Experience itself, as it was, however it was, was automatically it. As we will see, something in me contracted around this point shortly enough; but, for an hour or two, the utter simplicity of the pure sense doors doing their natural thing reigned.

True agencylessness is an acquired taste. I remember the first time that I fully appreciated that fact. It was during that first phase of being untangled. I was so excited by what had happened that I went into my room to sit on my bed. Then, without warning, the body got up and headed across the second-floor walking room towards the bathroom. Strangely, there was no obvious sense of where it was going, why, or what it was going to do when it got there. It went to the bathroom, picked up the laundry out of the little spinning dryer, took a drink of water from the sink, and headed back towards the room.

This out-from-control mode might have been utterly creepy had I been in a different state of mind. In fact, I have friends who report finding this phase of practice, in which we are just starting to appreciate the full depths of no-self, to be utterly disconcerting. I was lucky to be so fascinated and relieved by the fact of the answer not depending on any cycle of insight or jhana that I didn’t react badly to it, but I can totally get why someone experiencing that new way of being might suddenly contract rapidly back into the familiarity and comfort zone of the illusion of control.

Agencylessness

I thought I would pause here to unpack agencylessness, to explore how the illusory sense of an agent is created in the first place, and how to do something about that. The layers and qualities of mind that create the sense, “I am doing things” are many but not infinite, and so we can debunk them through clear, systematic practice. Focusing directly on these qualities of intentions and actions arising naturally based on causes can be very skillful practice. There are many teachings of the Buddha that address these aspects of practice.

First, we have some perception of intentions as they arise, but it is generally poor perception. That we know what we are going to do before we do it is powerful conditioning for the mind to get a sense that some “I” is performing the actions. However, while intentions arise on their own, naturally, causally, there is insufficient clarity to perceive that, so we get the sense that we are creating the intentions and so controlling actions. In Mind and Body, the earliest insight stage, those who know what to look for and how to leverage this way of perceiving reality will take the opportunity to notice the intention to breathe that precedes the breath, the intention to move the foot that precedes the foot moving, the intention to think a thought that precedes the thinking of the thought, and even the intention to move attention that precedes attention moving. Even before Mind and Body, one of the very first insights that practitioners have is that they can’t control their noisy minds; going deeply into this basic first insight, taken far enough, leads to wisdom.

The relationships between intentions and actions become much more obvious in Cause and Effect, when those who appreciate the remarkable ability to dissect how intentions lead to actions will be rewarded by clear insights into this process. Notice what happens just before you move, speak, or think. Keep attention phase-tuned to that part of the process, that intentionality that knows what is about to occur, that has mapped it out in space, thought, or language before you move, think, or speak. This sort of systematic practice that keeps focused on the sense of the locus of control and planning will set up the foundations of penetrating the illusion of agency.

As the Three Characteristics kicks in, practitioners will notice strange movements and tensions starting to show up in a way that is clearly not entirely in their control. Those who can get past the irritating sensations and hard pains and turn to the no-self aspect of that state will realize that so many sensations arise totally on their own, including the irritating tensions and strange movements. By the time of the A&P, many practitioners will be noticing all sorts of fascinating sensations, vibrations, pleasures, and other rapturous experiences welling up naturally, but many will be too enamored of these experiences to contemplate the remarkable fact of the natural, causal, welling-up itself. Still, if you know what to look for as you cycle through these stages, you can focus on that aspect, the aspect that debunks the agent.

Dissolution tears down so many aspects of the agent. So many aspects of experience are perceived to fall away, dissolve, disappear, and, if we notice that intentions themselves just dissolve even before they lead to actions—that couch-potato effect—then we can gain direct insights into that aspect of the illusion of the agent. The rest of the Dark Night brings up so many experiences naturally, though their unpleasant aspects and the fact that they are hitting so close to home tend to overwhelm many practitioners.

However, those with their eye on the prize of agencylessness will reflect, “Ah, so many experiences arising naturally, totally on their own!” This is gold when it comes to perceiving the naturalness of causality for core aspects of what seems to be the agent. All the protests, frustrations, negotiations, bargaining, strategizing: see all these arise naturally. Tune deeply into the intentions themselves driving those: this can be strangely powerful practice that recovers the clarity at the center that leads to something opening. Keep your morality strong when emphasizing agencylessness, particularly in the Dark Night.

Equanimity is a remarkable stage, in that it begins to encompass the whole layer of mind we are working on as a flowing, integrating, fluxing whole. In that layer are all the core processes, the subtle core intentions, the last holdouts against insight, the core illusions that maintain the sense that there really is some “I” at the core of what is going on. Contemplate those core processes, those last holdouts, those intentions that drive our practice, and perceptually integrate the very center of who you think you are with the rest of the flowing world. Finally, at Conformity, which is really the peak of Equanimity, we break through, even if just for a moment, and Fruition completely takes over after the perfect naturalness of the three doors.

At that point, we have perfectly glimpsed for just a moment not only the illusions that make up the agent, but also perceived that agent to cease, to be absolutely transient. In the restart of reality, we can notice how the illusion is re-established. That careful, meticulous, intentional focus of our investigative mind on the restart can finally convince us, layer by layer, that there truly is no agent and that causality and the lawfulness of reality are real and always have been. As these insights percolate through the layers revealed by each path cycle, we can finally be done forever with the illusion of an agent and never contract into that illusion again.

One thing I should mention about models that involve agencylessness, no-self, equanimity, and the like, as well as sitting through pain, pleasure, boredom, hunger, and all the rest, as is generally required on a serious course of meditation: there is a shadow side that is easily created from passivity, unskillful tolerance for situations that are suboptimal, and a lack of care for yourself and possibly others. With that pain in your chest you might think, it will pass, when perhaps being so cavalier about health is not an adequate plan of care. That need to clean your house, you might say to yourself, just more Mara, more samsara, not really needed. That relationship that you just let crumble—maybe it could have used just a bit more gratitude, attention, and love. You get the picture.

Most insight practices that are very direct, particularly very dry vipassana, as I was doing at that point on that retreat, have not only the potential to create deep wisdom but also have a strong potential to create these sorts of serious shadow problems. Stay on guard against this sort of apathy and self-rationalizing neglect when chasing any ideal such as this one. It is not that agencylessness isn’t a key part of the final prize. It is. But any action, any thought, any intention, any word: all of that was already agencyless and you had yet to realize it. All effort, all drive, happens on its own. Thus, like all the ideals presented in the models of awakening, beware of solidifying it into something unwholesome or detrimental. All right, back to the story …

Wobble and Fall

Speaking of contraction, an hour or two later, this pristine and oh-so-right way of perceiving started to break up and that clean space began to shudder, and then, before I knew it, it was gone. Reality had re-tangled. I had no idea why. I didn’t realize what was going on when it re-tangled, but the effect was glaringly obvious, and the cause would slowly become more obvious: my reification and subtle grasping at something that you would think is ungraspable, but, until one really gets something in the depths of that ungraspability, that “Holy shit, this is it!” reaction can totally derail that otherwise exquisitely clean perceptual mode. Because of this not-so-subtle attachment to detachment, I was back to states and stages and cycles and very subtle yet mind-bogglingly annoying duality. It was like having my heart broken by my one true love, like watching my best friend be murdered, like having my greatest treasure stolen, like the world collapsing into war and chaos before my eyes.

It felt like the worst thing my mind ever did, and my mind has done some pretty bad things. I did everything I could not to panic, but some degree of panic set in anyway. I was terrified I would never get it back. This derailed my practice for maybe an hour or two, and then, remembering what had gotten me there in the first place, I pulled it together, went back to core assumptions (six sense doors, three characteristics), started practicing again, powered up to total sensate comprehension again, and, relatively shortly thereafter, it flipped over, everything righted itself, the knot untangled, fundamental perceptual identification and division stopped, and it was okay, actually much better than okay: I was satisfied! Then, an hour or two later, it happened again, a shudder, a wobble, like a top spinning off-kilter as it begins to slow down, like a mud clot thrown into a clear, still reflecting pool, like some destructive warp in space caused by a bizarre alien weapon in a sci-fi movie.

Shortly thereafter, during a meeting with Sayadaw U Pandita Jr. about my practice, and while I was in the synced mode of attention, I said simply, “Cycles, stages, powers, experiences: they all come and go on their own,” and then I just smiled. He looked at me and said with a huge smile directed to the nun sitting next to me, “Did you hear what he said!?” like it was the most beautiful and important thing in the whole world, which it was to me at the time and still is.

So, the pattern went on, every few waking hours, for almost a week. Heartbroken, everything screwed up, cycles, stages, Fruitions, jhanas, formless realms, all utterly dissatisfactory. Then, after an hour or two of good practice on just what was happening: flip, wonder, amazement, happiness, rightness, satisfaction, centerlessness, effortlessness, immediacy, and peace. Then, an hour or two later: wobble and fall.

It is because of that week of gaining and losing that pristine centerless clarity that I can tell you for certain that the perfectly synced way is better, vastly better, and the other way, by comparison, totally sucks, despite how impressive all the stages and states and all that may seem. The difference is simply huge. Those days of alternating between the two radically different modes of perception made the meaning of fundamental suffering abundantly clear, with that period of practice driving the point home with sickening regularity every time the pristine mode would break apart. Somewhere in this phase, Sayadaw U Pandita, Jr. gently said to me, “You know, some people are arahants only on retreat.” Those terrifying words galvanized whatever else in me had held back.

Vimuttimagga

After just less than a week of going through what felt like a sequential emphasis during the distorted periods on the four foundations of mindfulness, first physical sensations, then aspects of vedana (the degree of pleasantness, unpleasantness, or neutrality of sensations), then mental qualities and thoughts, then finally attention itself, in that order (no idea why), it felt like everything converged in some complete and total way, flipped over, and that was it. This shift contained the deep and abiding realization that it was never not that way, that even the most screwed-up periods had been as they were even when they seemed that they weren’t.

I had barely done any teaching or writing in the few years before that retreat, frustrated as I was by an understanding that felt very close but was not quite there. Just after the thing synced up for the last time, during an interview with the Sayadaw, I mentioned this lack of teaching and said that I had thought about teaching again, and he looked me square in the eyes and said simply, “Good.” Then he told a long story about some monks in Burma and then at the end as a summary of the clear moral of the story said, “And that is why you shouldn’t go around saying you are an arahant or have powers,” and again looked me straight in the eye.

There were only three people in that room, the faith-follower nun, him, and myself. I clearly have not followed that second piece of advice, but then again neither did he, as he demonstrated powers on that retreat and clearly considered himself an arahant and would speak about it so clearly that it couldn’t possibly even be called veiled speech despite him never using the actual word.

I should mention something here about Sayadaw U Pandita Jr.: it was just great to have someone who wasn’t impressed or intimidated by my abilities, but instead just kept his eye on the prize and stayed gently focused on that. He was perfectly fluent and comfortable with map theory, fluent and comfortable with deep concentration, didn’t seem to care about the powers except as a diagnostic and teaching tool, and had an apparently unflappable steadiness to him in the face of all my descriptions of the wild and varied territory I found myself in during that retreat. My best advice: if you can find a teacher at that level, study with that one. There is much to be said for devotion to those worthy of devotion, which unfortunately is a pretty small number of teachers, but if you find a good one, an honorable one, an impeccable one, then devote yourself to that teacher by studying well, listening to and applying what they say, and practicing with everything you have, as it is likely to pay off.

All these years later the field has never destabilized again, the wobble never recurred, and things never un-synced. I knew when it happened that my vipassana quest was over. I had the answer I sought, and it has held up, event after event, challenge after challenge, cycle after cycle. There have been many interesting ways this insight has percolated through old patterns and relative issues. There have been many interesting shifts of perspective that have arisen from that integration process. However, getting that core insight in the first place is really the key point, the thing that made the difference I was looking for, and so hopefully this book will help inspire that in you, assuming you don’t already have it, as you just might, and if you do, good on ya! I give great thanks to the thousands of practitioners over the millennia who have preserved and transmitted these teachings for those of us living today. May we do our best to live up to their standards and find ways to continue to realize and transmit the dharma to those who come after us.

Thus, the answers are in Part One, as Part One states—in the initial, formal vipassana instruction—to be very clear about all sensations and to perceive all sensations arise and vanish. That is the high dharma that somehow hundreds of pages of this book come down to. It is that simple, at least from a vipassana point of view. That is the profound beauty of the dharma of the Buddha: it is excellent, straightforward, explainable, doable, immediate, based on very simple, clear hypotheses that are testable even early on in experience and continue to hold up all the way through to the end.

That is the story, at least as far as fundamental insight goes. Since then, there has been much more to learn about the first two trainings, particularly morality, the whole scope of relative skillful living in the world, and optimizing value and meaning, which, as I said, is an endless and limitless undertaking. There is much to relate on that front beyond what is recounted here, but, for the time being, this is hopefully enough to convey multiple practical dharma points, chief among them being that, while deep insights can be attained in this lifetime, and they beat the pants off not having them, each of the scopes of the three trainings shouldn’t be absolutely counted on to perfectly illuminate any of the others, even though they are definitely interdependent. All three trainings of morality, concentration, and wisdom are worthy of deep attention, study, and practice throughout our mortal, mammalian lives.