-Ajahn Sumedho

When you contemplate the Four Noble Truths and use them as your paradigm for practise, it becomes clear that the third and fourth truths are definitely the realization of the unborn or the unconditioned (nibbāna). Much of the meditation taught within Theravada Buddhism these days is vipassanā (insight) meditation and in this the Three Characteristics of Existence ― impermanence, unsatisfactoriness, and non-self (anicca, dukkha, anattā) ― are given tremendous emphasis. These three characteristics are common to all phenomena and they are for reflection. It isn’t a question of adopting these three words and projecting them onto experience. Some people do try to do this. They hold to these particular concepts and interpret their experiences through their belief in them rather than taking the concepts and reflecting on experience. I just want to emphasize that the way is through mindfulness, intuitive attention and openness, rather than through grasping concepts, ideas, doctrines or positions. I see many people who practise insight meditation getting stuck in continually noting the impermanence of phenomena.In that, however, the reality of cessation tends not to be realized in any practical way. Because of that it seems that a lot of the in-sight meditation centres in the West have resorted to other ways of helping people to come to the realization of cessation and the unborn, and there is a great deal of interest in Tibetan Dzogchen, Advaita Vedanta, and the teachings of Poonjaji. The whole point of these teachings is the realization of the unborn or the deathless, or we could say ‘ultimate reality’. Now, when you use words to refer to something that doesn’t exist, it can remain abstract. 

So, for us, the unborn can be just another abstraction of the mind and we wonder what it is or where it is, whether it is really true, whether there is really such a thing as the deathless. And the more we try to analyse or think about it in this way, the more we limit ourselves to the conceptual mind and the conditions of the mind that we create. At our ordination as monks in the Theravada tradition we have to say we are taking on the monastic form for the realization of nibbāna. But what does that mean? What does it mean to realize desirelessness, cessation, emptiness, or non-self (virāga, nirodha, suññatā, anattā)? These are all abstractions; they are words that point to but cannot define. Realization therefore has to come through intuition. This is what I emphasize and encourage now in the way that I teach. I see that people often don’t have enough confidence or trust in their own experience of emptiness and non-self. It is so easy to fall back into the questioning mode ― ‘What is it?’ ― and want to objectify it in some way, want to pin it down or turn it into some kind of mental object that can be verified and proven, maybe scientifically. 

When we use such words as ‘existing’ or ‘not existing’, they convey this sense of something coming up, existing, and then disappearing and no longer existing. Some years ago when the ‘God-is-dead’ fad came into being, I was just becoming a monk (bhikkhu) in Thailand. A Thai magazine, I remember, had this striking headline: ‘God is dead!’ That is rather a strong thing to say, and it certainly created all kinds of emotional reactions at the time. Some people didn’t really care about it, but others felt it was a real attack on their basic belief and what they depended on. If God is something created, something that arises and ceases, then of course that means that God dies. The word ‘God’ ― one of those words that we take for granted ― can, however, be put into the category of the unborn, the uncreated. Even in Christian theology, Christian mysticism, the realization of God is through non-attachment, through letting go rather than through finding somebody called ‘God’ that comes and goes in one’s life. Generally, in Christianity, God has been given anthropomorphic qualities, so this makes it personal, makes it like a father figure, a patriarch ― God the Father. And on one level that creates the sense of a personal relationship. We can all relate to the idea of a father, because that is the cultural conditioning we have had. So we assume that God is some kind of heavenly father, some powerful figure. But the reality of this moment still keeps it as some kind of abstraction of the mind. ‘Where is it? Where is He?’ the feminist movement asks, ‘Why does God have to be a He? Why can’t God be a She?’ And this is a valid point. But why do we have to define God with gender at all? In Buddhism they don’t have this problem because ‘God’, as it were, has never been anthropomorphized; it is not given any kind of human quality, or any quality whatsoever ― except that of awakening to the reality of this moment. 

When we emphasize the characteristics of conditioned phenomena, then, what happens? The mind goes from one thing to another, as in thought. When we get lost in thinking, one thought connects to another, and the thoughts proliferate. And if I use thought with some kind of logic, I see right now in this room, for example, that that is Robert and that is Catherine and that is Rocana; I go from one to the other. Yet the space between Catherine and Rocana is also present. But that can go completely unnoticed because the interest lies in the conditions which have qualities and that can cause some kind of emotional reaction in consciousness. Beings that have not awakened to the unborn but are simply looking at life through the conditioned experiences they have, perceive life in a very dualistic way, always in terms of right and wrong, good and bad, male and female, black and white. These qualities become the deciding factors in their lives. There might be the logic there of ‘do good and refrain from doing evil’, but in terms of understanding the way things are, they are caught in the death realm, in things that exist, that arise and cease, come and go. Their lives are often fraught with suffering because they cannot keep anything as a permanent possession. When they put their faith in another person, for example, and want that person to be there for them all the time, there is always a feeling of loss when he or she goes away, even if it is just for a while and then come back again. Inevitably, also, there is the death moment and a sense of loss when what they have depended on is dead. So what does one do if one’s refuge is in another person? or in an institution? or in a way of thinking? or in family life? or in a political view? or in anything which is subject to change, to birth and death? 

Unawakened human beings (what we call puthujjanas in Pali) are forever suffering because their lives are threatened by the things that influence consciousness. They can’t hold onto anything; they can’t sustain anything. They may be able to sustain an illusion, of course, which is why their demands on life are sometimes just for stability, just for something they can count on ― ‘Don’t act too strangely, don’t do something eccentric, don’t go funny. Keep this illusion that everything is all right and everything is going to be all right. And then in the afterlife when we die we will all go to heaven and have a Leicester Summer School up in heaven all the time!’ though I think that even that could be quite boring after a few weeks. The Buddha pointed to suffering as the first Noble Truth: ‘There is dukkha (unsatisfactoriness).’ When you go to interfaith meetings and meet people from theistic religions, you discover that a lot of them find this first Noble Truth rather depressing. They tend to see it as some kind of positioning we take on life, and think we believe that everything is unsatisfactory (dukkha). If we do grasp that view (which is a misinterpretation of the first Noble Truth) then of course we will feel obliged to interpret everything in that way. And I have met people who have felt that looking at flowers is dangerous because ‘after all they are just going to wilt and die! You get attached to them and then they fail you in the end.’ That is a kind of perpetual wet-blanket approach to life which leads to depression. And if you keep up that kind of attitude, you are just going to feel that there is no purpose or meaning to your life. But recognize that what the Buddha was really doing was taking this most ordinary condition that we all experience and putting it into the context of a noble truth rather than regarding it as a horrible fact, as some kind of miserable statement about life or some pessimistic view. Notice the word ‘noble’ in noble truth. This is a truth to be realized. We are not told to grasp or believe this truth; it isn’t a belief; it isn’t a dogma; it isn’t a metaphysical truth; it isn’t the ultimate reality. It is a very common human experience of loss, identifying with that which is unsatisfactory, with change, with the delusions we create, and the expectations and assumptions we make about our lives. In Buddhism there are what are called ‘the heavenly messengers’ (devadūtas), and these are old age, sickness and death. Rather than seeing these things as depressing spectres that come to us and scare us, we can see them as messengers. What does that mean in terms of our own experience of life? What devadūtas have we encountered? We all have, haven’t we? We have all experienced loss ― maybe seen our own parents getting old, getting sick and dying, maybe see ourselves getting old and are now experiencing pain and sickness ― this is common to all human beings, and there is nothing wrong with it; it isn’t bad. 

The point is to see that the conditioned realm is something to contemplate and understand rather than to make assumptions about it or try to control and bend it to our desires and will. The more we try to control the conditioned realm, the more disappointing it will become, until we finally feel despair, fear, depression and all the negative mental states that can dominate our conscious experience. Whatever we love and cherish is inevitably subject to death. And when something we love dies, we feel grief. In noticing this ― in taking up the first Noble Truth (the truth of suffering) ― we are willing to learn from it instead of just feeling frightened and averse to it. If we try to get rid of suffering, deny it, push it away, run away from it, we can never really understand it; our reactions will always be some kind of resistance to any possibility of understanding. Understanding means there is a willingness to suffer. This isn’t any form of masochism, but a positive sense of trust, a willingness to look at our own sense of despair, inadequacy, fear, loss, or grief, in a way that is not just thinking about it, but noticing that it is ‘like this’. Then, as we examine these mental states ― by understanding them, accepting them, and embracing them ― we begin to see that they also cease. We begin to realize that we can’t sustain them. Even though we might feel we will never get over the loss of our loved one, we can, actually. We notice that there are moments when we think of that person and feel grief, and then there are moments when we don’t think of them. We may not notice those moments of not thinking of them, however, because we assume that we have this state of grief as a continuous mental state. If we are willing to trust in our own awareness of this grief, then, we will recognize that it changes. So, in accepting grief, we are no longer clinging to it; we are no longer saying it is mine or making value judgements about it. We are instead willing to feel and understand the grief, willing to be with it, willing to let it be what it is, and then what happens is ― it ceases. As we then observe the cessation of grief, we can mentally note that the absence of grief is ‘like this’ In the third Noble Truth, then, there is cessation or the absence of a condition that existed but is no longer present. Now, how do we realize this? ― because this is a reality. We realize it by intuitive awareness. If you think about this too much, you can’t really be with it; you just get lost in your own logic, reasoning, associations, and the sense of yourself. But if you are willing to accept something for what it is ― allow it to be the way it is ― you look at it through wisdom and understanding rather than through some personal distortion of it. As long as you feel grief in terms of ‘I am grieving and grief is mine, how can I get over this grief? What should I do about it? Life will never be the same again’, you are proliferating. One of those thoughts will connect and you will be caught in perpetuating feelings of grief and projecting it onto your experience of life. You will then see the things around you through this veil, through this distortion which you adhere to. 

In the second Noble Truth, the insight is to let go of the cause of suffering, which is attachment to the conditioned, the born. This attachment is the result of not understanding. It is like a habit we have and don’t even know we are doing it. We are certainly not intentionally thinking, ‘I’m going to hold onto this grief no matter what!’ We usually try to get rid of grief, try to brush it aside or do anything to distract ourselves from it. This very desire to get rid of it, however, is attachment out of ignorance. It means we are not willing to learn from the heavenly messenger; we are merely trying to deny or resist it. So, letting go of suffering isn’t a rejection out of fear, out of denial or ignorance, but is through understanding it. 

Letting go isn’t throwing or pushing suffering away, but letting it be. You let this feeling, this emotion, be in the present, be what it is, and that takes a certain trust in your ability to bear with suffering, unpleasantness, pain, misfortune, failure, and all the disappointments of life. Now, when we explore our conscious experience, when we look at it closely, we notice space, like the space between Rocana and Catherine, for example. This doesn’t sound like anything very important, so you might say, ‘Well, what is there to look at? It’s just space.’ But we are noting reality. When I look between these two people I can see the space between them with my eyes. It isn’t that I am making it up. And if I start observing space just on a visual level, the result is a sense of spaciousness (because space doesn’t have any quality to it except spaciousness). Within the space there can be blue and red, men and women, and chairs and tables, and these have certain qualities and properties to them. But all you can say about space itself ― in terms of experience ― is that it is spacious. This is a way of training ourselves to notice the way it is, a way of letting go of just the habitual tendency of going from one thing to the other, of admiring particular qualities or being appalled by the unpleasantness of conditions. At this moment, therefore, we are not interested in analysing, comparing, or making anything out of conditions. We are letting them be what they are. We are opening to space and seeing that it contains us all. Space isn’t just here or there, it is everywhere, it permeates everything. So by doing this we might begin to get a little more aware, a little more insight into the unborn which is here and now but which we don’t notice. Space is an obvious one, of course; we can visually contemplate it. And by just taking ‘space’ as a word that points to the reality that exists here rather than as something to grasp, means that we are not taking a particular interest in conditions. I don’t have to ask you all to leave and remove the furniture, or feel that the room is in the way, or wish for the building to be torn down ― it isn’t a matter of destroying or annihilating anything ― it is rather that awareness begins to expand and give this sense of infinity which we might not yet have become aware of. Before I ever meditated, I remember reading enigmatic statements like ‘Eternity is now!’ and thinking, ‘But where is now?’ 

Everything in my mind that was associated with now was time-bound, like my personality, for example. The sense of myself as a person is a condition, and the body also is a time-bound condition. It is like this building. I can find out how old this building is, follow its history, try to understand this whole place in terms of when things were built, when the botanical gardens first appeared, how they were developed and so forth. I can take an interest in that side of things, but that is taking an interest in time-bound conditions. The flora and fauna in these gardens are certainly interesting and fascinating in themselves, but if I remain on that level, something in me will be bound to those conditions and will not see through them or beyond. By exploring conditioned phenomena in terms of impermanence, unsatisfactoriness and non-self (anicca, dukkha, anattā), and by doing that in the right way rather than by just believing in the ideas of them and projecting them onto experience, I start noticing the assumption I make that people are the perceptions I have of them in my mind. 

On a meditation retreat in Amaravati many years ago, I asked everybody, ‘Where is your mother right now?’ and people responded with comments like, ‘Oh, she’s in Norfolk,’ or wherever. But I was trying to get them to question the perception ‘my mother’ and to recognize that, actually, the perception ‘mother’ is always in the mind. You have a memory, you have a perception, you might even have an image of your mother in your mind, but those things are here and now; you have created them; they are memories that come and go according to conditions. But is that perception really your mother, or is it just what it is ― a perception, a memory, a thought, an image? And when you let go of that perception, where is your mother? For me right now I don’t know the answer to that. The perception of my mother is that she is dead and the priest said she is in heaven. But I don’t know. I do, however, know that I don’t know, and I know that I don’t need to know. I no longer need to hold to some view about my mother being up in heaven with the Lord as a way of making myself feel all right in this present moment. It isn’t that I don’t care, but I am willing to admit the limitations that I am under as a human being, as this conscious experience of being a human entity. In the practice of meditation, then, we are beginning to awaken to the way we happen to be within the limitations of this human state. We can assume we have a common bond of humanity, a common ground in many ways, but each one of us is a unique individual entity. Different habit patterns, different cultural identities, different ways of thinking, different emotional conditions are being experienced now by everyone, and it is beyond the ability of each of us to know everything that is going on in everybody in this room, at this moment. But I can know the mental states and emotional conditions that I am witness-ing at this time. And as I allow the mental state to be conscious rather than simply reacting to it or trying to control or ignore it, I begin to notice that I can’t sustain that state. I begin to see that it changes very quickly, and that if I don’t feed it with thinking and judging, it ceases. So, if I stop thinking and just observe, just notice, just trust in my ability to be fully attentive, awake and conscious, then it is ― ‘like this’. 

Now, I have referred many times to my use of the ‘sound of silence’, a practice that I have explored over the years. I have found it a very helpful way of reflecting on experience. When I let go of everything and am just in a state of pure presence, pure being, pure awareness, I recognize this kind of vibratory background sound ― or is it a vibration? In terms of perception, it seems like a sound. That is how I experience it in terms of labelling it or explaining it. And yet unlike ordinary sound, it has a continuity, a vibratory quality to it which sustains itself and is the background to all other sounds. Right now I can be fully present with this ‘sound of silence’ and still be talking and looking at you because it is like an embracing background; it has this sense of infinity, boundlessness, like space or consciousness. In other words, I am not caught in the manipulation of my thoughts and emotions reacting and playing with the conditions that arise in consciousness, but acknowledging and recognizing pure subjectivity. In terms of this moment, then, it is absolute subjectivity, yet non-personal. If I start claiming it in terms of ‘it is mine’, I am creating a person that owns it. If I don’t do that, however, if I refuse to think, create, or make anything out of it, then it is what it is. Noticing the ‘sound of silence’, I simultaneously notice that other sounds arise and cease within it. If I listen to the sound of a stream or a waterfall, for example, I can actually recognize the ‘sound of silence’ behind it. And as I tune into the ‘sound of silence’ and begin to rest in it more, I notice that the sound of the stream or waterfall is enhanced. Rather than cancelling out or obliterating all other sounds, the ‘sound of silence’ seems to enhance and support them. I can hear it in the background to music and to noisy machinery like a chainsaw or a lawnmower. Now, wanting to claim that as some kind of attainment, comes back to this sense of ‘me’ being somebody who has something. But there is no need for claiming! The point is to trust in this ability we all have of attention to the present moment. Eternity is now. 

The Buddha’s teaching is the teaching of awakenedness. The word ‘Buddha’ actually means ‘awakened’, and in the Thai Forest tradition they have this mantra4 ‘buddho’ which is the mantric form of ‘Buddha’. The Forest ajahns ― Ajahn Mun for instance ― used to call it ‘the one who knows’. But it isn’t like a person that knows something; it is just a knowing, merely the reality of knowing.

It is an interesting time now in terms of this English word ‘consciousness’ because it is being examined most thoroughly. The tendency, however, is to regard consciousness as some kind of brain function and to define it as ‘thinking’; its opposite being ‘unconsciousness’. Unconsciousness is often used to mean not thinking or not being awake. In that case, unconsciousness means that consciousness no longer exists for us and is not operating in this particular form. To me, however, instead of looking at consciousness in such a limited way ― as some kind of mental function of the brain ― it is more that ‘this’ is the experience of consciousness, that consciousness is the natural state of being, and that these particular forms are ways of experiencing it. We have this subject-object experience. So, in terms of right now, the subject is here and you are the object; you are in consciousness. But you are not in my brain; it isn’t something I can claim as any kind of creation of my own on a personal level; it is simply ‘like this’. I can see your face but I can’t see my own face. You can see my eyes but I can’t see my own eyes. I can see your eyes, but you can’t see your own eyes. You don’t need to see your own eyes, of course, because ‘seeing’ is the point. And ‘knowing things as they are’ is the point, rather than trying to find out who it is that is knowing. That is another question. What is it that knows? Who is it that knows? What is behind all this? We want to find out. Is it God or is it ultimate truth? We want a name for it in some way because the level of conditioning that we have wants to define things, wants to hold things in forms, in perceptions. If we don’t have those forms and perceptions, then we tend to dismiss, ignore, reject or even feel frightened by this experience of the unborn. In order to appreciate the first Noble Truth (the truth of suffering), we of course have to awaken to it. The point is, we might know we are suffering because we don’t get what we want, so we see the suffering through personal interpretation. We blame it on others or the world; or we get angry with God for creating us and making us suffer like this; or we just blame ourselves: ‘It’s my fault I’m suffering.’ When we awaken to suffering, however, we don’t interpret it in these ways; we merely see that it is the way it is; we begin to accept and allow things we had previously resisted, rejected and run away from. And once we begin to appreciate this, we can actually trust awakened awareness ― an awakened intuitive sense of the present ― as something to develop and cultivate in life. We can be aware that our own body at this moment is ‘like this’, sitting is ‘like this’, breathing is ‘like this’, feeling hot or cold is ‘like this’. We can be aware of our mental state ― whatever it is ― because all things are embraced within this vast open acceptance, an awakened acceptance of this moment.

‘Eternity is now’ does not, however, mean that any of these conditions is eternal. Each one arises and ceases, and you quickly notice that. But if you trust the awakened state and cultivate it, you will see that that lasts beyond the length of the condition that you are experiencing. This is why I advise and encourage you to trust it. As far as meditation is concerned, people tend to see themselves in terms of either attaining or not attaining. One thing I commonly hear is, ‘I’ve been practising for years and I don’t think I’ve got anywhere; I don’t think I’ve attained anything.’ In that case, the basic delusion has never been really penetrated. That ‘I’ve not achieved anything yet’ is a created thought in the present. By becoming aware that that is a created thought, however, one no longer believes such a statement or any thoughts about oneself being the reality. One begins to sense the infinite instead, the unborn, the unconditioned, the deathless in which one no longer limits oneself or binds oneself to the death-bound conditioning that one has. One begins to realize that liberation is through letting go, through allowing life to flow, through openness and attention.