Ch.9 - The Subtle Material World

Consciousness Expressing Itself Outwardly as Form, Not the Other Way Around

The Fine Material Sphere

Every Time Consciousness Arises it Produces Subtle Materiality

Our Sense of Isolation and Suffering Ends with the Fading Away of I-Making

[This chapter looks deeper, beyond the realm of appearances, an investigates the subtle process that govern, condition and are expressed as life]

Consciousness Expressing Itself Outwardly as Form, Not the Other Way Around

Let us now look a little deeper into the mechanics and energetics that are going on in the background of our life that perhaps normally we do not recognise or understand. In order to really make sense of things, we have to understand principles that are not that obvious when we look at life as a physical body with consciousness arising in it. It is rather like the way that you cannot really get any grasp of what a computer does and how it does it by looking at the package, the box and the components it is made of.

You can open it up, you can take it apart, you can look inside but there is still no way you can understand how it can perform the myriad functions that it performs by looking at it structurally. It is absolutely the same with a human being. It is not until you understand the information package or the software package that it runs that you can even start to fathom how it does what it does.

What is more, without that software package it is a pretty useless box of flesh and bones in the way that a computer is just a box of plastic and metal without its software system. In short, consciousness is the software package, and you cannot make sense of life simply by examining it as an organic, physical phenomenon of which consciousness is a by-product.

We seem somehow to have come to such an extraordinarily materialistic perspective on life in our efforts to understand what life is, what consciousness is, what the mind is, what it is to be a human being, by looking at it mechanically, biologically, physically and trying to understand it logically. In the same way, if we simply examine the computer hardware and try to understand how it operates just by looking at it structurally to see what it is made of, we are not going to figure it out how it works.

So in order to understand life, instead of looking at it as a physical structure that grows from a sperm and an egg and forms and becomes conscious, we have to look at it as consciousness expressing itself in myriad ways physically. And you have to understand that the information that it conveys, that expresses itself as life, is a software package, not a hardware package. And then you might start to make sense of life.

When we meditate we start by paying attention to the obvious appearance of things, the structure, the nuts and bolts. That appearance of things is what we are focused on for most of the time in our ordinary consciousness day to day. Our perception is habitually focused on the appearance of things which is probably why we have come to the assumption that it is a physical universe that occasionally becomes conscious under certain circumstances.

We start out paying attention to the structure of our body – the hands, feet, arms, legs, heart, lungs, head and so on. When we first start to pay attention there does not appear to be much more than that there. But as our perception deepens our awareness starts to open up to say 10% consciousness (or 10% awareness) with the remaining 90% unconscious. As we go further we start to develop maybe 15%, 20%, 25% awareness in stages. As we get even more practised maybe we develop 30%, 40%, 50%. That which was not apparent to us gradually becomes apparent, in stages, as the capacity for direct perception develops though our practice.

The Fine Material Sphere

One of the things that becomes apparent as our field of perception becomes deeper is the subtle aspect of things. The Buddha called it the fine material sphere; I will just call it the software side of things, the information side of things, if you like. It is that which is going on in the background, which is not apparent when you look at it, but which is actually the cause for all of the functionality that expresses itself as life.

At that point we begin the journey into the exploration of the part of life that is not apparent to us normally. Even though we have previously struggled to perceive it, it has always sat behind the threshold of our perception, conditioning and governing life in previously unseen ways.

Take how we feel, for example. How we feel is something that is not that subtle but which frequently fails to make its way into our awareness. If we really pay attention at any time, without any meditation training, we can get a sense of how we feel. How we feel is one of the things that is conditioning our response to life at an unseen level. Just being asked the question, How do you feel?' prompts an opening up of awareness in search of something that normally we pay little attention to.

Once we do start to pay attention we realise that how we feel is a hugely textured and varied aspect of our experience, and one that is deeply conditioning us. We may, for example, have been feeling deeply sad for a very long time, without ever having noticed that this was the case; or exhausted, or anxious, or restless.

But the more concentrated we get in our meditation, the subtler our perception of what's going on in the background, the subtler our perception of this information side of things becomes.

One of the first things we start to realise when we begin to perceive the causal process in the background is that things do not just randomly happen to be the way they are. Once that hidden 90% of our experience that is going on behind the threshold of our awareness starts to reveal itself, we gradually start to get a textured sense, a much more multi-layered or multi-dimensional sense of our experience. We start to glimpse into an intelligent causal process behind the coming into being and the passing away of things.

So this we call the subtle material sphere. Or that is what it ended up being called. We are not just talking about consciousness here but the interface between our experience and the knowing of it.

This interface is the subtle material world, the expression of consciousness becoming matter. It is not until we start to see that and start to see it clearly that we can make sense of how things are. So as we get more concentrated, our capacity for what we call wise attention matures.

If we are able to quieten the mind by resisting the temptation to tell ourselves stories about what might be going on, so that the mind can stabilise itself ever more deeply upon its experience, it starts to see through the appearance of things to the causal process that is going on in the background.

So what do we start to see, when we realise that life is not just flesh and bone and the mind? We start to see the first signs of the process by which materiality and consciousness come into being dependent upon each other. We start to glimpse the principles by which they stand upon each other and depend upon each other. And then that becomes our investigation – what is going on, how did this body get here, what is this mind that we are entangled with, what are the laws by which it is functioning? And that is the subtle material world.

So I ask you, when you first start meditating, to start to feel within your body in a way that you probably had not recognised before that you could feel. The idea that we have, when we look at the body physiologically, is that the brain is the engine-room of the mind and everything pretty much goes on there.

The brain is just the top part of an information system that runs right the way through the body, our nervous system. But even the nervous system itself is still hardware. It does not perform any functions until consciousness arises in it. The moment that consciousness stops arising in it, the brain does not perform any functions and neither does the nervous system. So it is not until that current of life appears within the body that it becomes functional.

So we need to understand what consciousness does to that body when it arises there if we are going to understand how life functions. Otherwise we have just got to take it as a sort of quirk of the universe that this life principle springs into being when a sperm and egg meet. We seem to have been satisfied with that but it is still rather baffling that it should happen.

It is not until consciousness appears in the body that it becomes more than a lump of flesh and bone. At that point, all of a sudden, it is capable of doing myriad extraordinary things. A human being is the most complex expression of life that there is on the planet, but all of nature is an expression of life at one level. And consciousness, appearing and being present within that body, marks the sign that it is still able to express itself as a life-form. The moment it is cut off from that, the body decays.

So it is not our discrete sense of ourselves that is the real intelligence behind our lives. That is what goes on in our brains and makes us not only human but also extraordinarily difficult to live with. Those flowers in that vase do not have a problem getting on with each other because they do not have a discrete sense of themselves, but they are aware of their environment and responsive to it in the same way that we are.

We as humans have a discrete sense of ourselves, which is wonderful in many ways because it makes life an extraordinary mystery to get stuck into at a personal level. But it also makes us extremely difficult to get along with, because in our individual sense of ourselves we cannot help comparing ourselves to others, and goodness me, how that makes things complicated and difficult.

So this mind of ours arises in various ways within each of us and has a multitude of effects upon us. It is the appearance of our lower mind that can think and can try and fathom out, ‘Who am I? What does it mean that this has happened?’, that gets itself in a muddle and makes a mess of life. We often identify with our mind as the essence of who we are, but it is not this mind that marks us as alive.

We live on quite happily, and in many ways more successfully, when we are completely unconscious in sleep and even when we are in a coma. It is extraordinary that we have to spend a third of our life unconscious so that the higher intelligence behind our life can repair the havoc that our mind creates in the two thirds of our life when we are conscious.

What marks us as alive is the arising of a pure state of awareness that is not wrapped up with an idea of itself, that does not think, has no opinions or attitudes and does not reject or grasp our experience. It is the appearance of that consciousness within us that fires up or brings online the life process. It brings online all of the functionality that a human being is capable of doing, including the mental process and the capacity to think. None of the functions that awareness facilitates are facilitated by the development of this elaborate idea of what it thinks it is doing, which is produced by our mind.

The mind is merely an elaborator of the experience, not the experience itself. It seeks to add to the experience or take from the experience, and in doing so interferes with the flow of awareness through us. I often say to my students, ‘When you think, you lose awareness. When you are aware, your mind is completely empty, sky-like and clear.’ The mind arises within the body for as long as consciousness supports the life within the body. And the mind, being a function of the appearance of consciousness within the body, breaks apart when consciousness withdraws as we die.

So, there is an intelligence within the liver that has the capacity to metabolise food, there is an intelligence in your heart that knows when it needs to pump a little bit more or less, and so on. In fact, there are myriad functions that are the expressions of the intelligence that is sitting in the background of your life. This intelligence innately knows how to keep it all running and that is not your mind. It is not your idea of yourself and all of your ideas about things. Your thinking mind does not know how to do any of those things. It does not know how to metabolise fat, regulate your autonomic nervous system or your heartbeat or blood pressure. The appearance of your mind is a function of consciousness being present within you and the life faculty being intact. But the real intelligence in your life lies within that basic state of pure consciousness, and it is an intelligence beyond your mind.

I remember when I was younger I had to spend a few weeks in hospital in traction having broken both my ankles. Opposite me on the ward was a young man of 35 who had been in a coma for a few months, and a policeman about the same age who had had to have pins inserted in his toes to straighten them after too many years walking the beat. Over the weeks that followed I watched the family of the man in a coma come and go, and attend to him. Although he did not appear to be conscious of what was going on around him, there was a serenity about him. Certainly there was nothing about his presence that suggested that he was stressed, anxious or in any way vexed. The policeman in the bed next to him, however, was drawn and wan from the pain of what he was going through. He was irritable and restless, and looked altogether worn out by his experience.

Then one day, quite unexpectedly, the man in a coma came around. Obviously it was a cause for much delight amongst his family, and although it took him a few days to come around and get his bearings, he looked rested and refreshed. When speaking to members of his family as they came and visited over the coming days, all of them said without exception that he looked well and none the worse for wear for his ordeal. The poor policeman meanwhile found his entire stay in the hospital totally exhausting and when he was released he really looked as if he had been dragged through a hedge backwards.

The reason I share this story with you is because it highlights the fact that there is a level of awareness that functions beyond our conscious mind to keep the body functioning. It is this aspect of what we might call pure awareness that is the real intelligence behind our lives. We rest upon it when we are asleep and it refreshes and restores us. The life of the man who was in a coma was maintained by it while he was unconscious, so that when he woke up, his body seemed to have hardly decayed at all. Although he had bed sores, the nurses told me they were not nearly as severe as the sores of those who were fully conscious during a sustained period of being bed-bound. For all the time he spent resting in bed, that poor policeman looked far from rejuvenated by his time spent on the ward.

The point I am making is this: while awareness itself is the supporting faculty behind our life, the active mind that arises dependent upon that basic state of awareness actually only serves to interfere with the intelligence within that awareness itself.

Our active mind arises continuously throughout the day, and even at times during the night when we sleep. This active mind is another expression of consciousness, and it adds to our experience in various ways. It adds to it a flavour, a sense of 'it's me', an idea of what I think is going on, how I feel about it, and how I am reacting to what I am experiencing, while awareness itself merely witnesses the experience we are having, as it is.

Both these two aspects of consciousness as they appear within our body produce a subtle material field, a charge of life within you. Awareness itself produces an extremely coherent subtle field throughout the body, and the active mind arising within the body also produces a subtle material field, the coherence of which is utterly dependent upon the quality of that mind.

Every time that mind arises, regardless of what quality of mind it is, it produces within us this charge, an electromagnetic charge. That electromagnetic charge is the field that conveys, that conducts the currents of information that keep us functional. It keeps functioning all those extraordinary processes that mean that you can see, hear, smell, taste, think, move from here to there, paint a picture, sing a song, go for a run, fall in love.

That is a current of information that moves through us. And the intelligence within that current that vitalises us, that keeps us alive, that expresses itself as life within us, is governed by the integrity of that innate state of awareness as it appears within you. It is also governed by the integrity of this consciousness that is produced within this mind, that is a fluctuating and conditioned process that is going on constantly throughout our whole life.

Every Time Consciousness Arises it Produces Subtle Materiality

As I have explained, every time consciousness arises within you it produces subtle materiality and it produces a subtle electromagnetic field. And the integrity or what I call the coherence of that subtle electromagnetic field defines the integrity and coherence of your experience of being alive and how that feels.

When I teach you to meditate, one of our practices is to sit and practise leaving everything alone and being with everything as it is. I explain how the awareness that is experiencing everything moment to moment is like water. Water, when it is left alone, gradually, in stages, becomes mirror-like. As it settles naturally within itself it becomes mirror-like, and it is at that point and only at that point that it reflects perfectly.

That basic ground of your being, which is a pure state of awareness, always reflects its experience perfectly. This basic state of awareness is not in conflict with its experience. It is not grasping to hold on to it, nor rejecting it. That is the state of awareness that we rest in while we are asleep, and the state that man rested in while he was in a coma.

In our meditation we start to gradually enter consciously into that same state, but instead of being unconscious we are fully lucid and conscious. And at that point we start to glimpse for ourselves the most sublime experience of peace and luminosity. It is at that point that we understand exactly why it is that being asleep is so important and so refreshing. It is just a shame that almost all of the time we miss it.

One part of our meditation practice is to learn to recognise the basic ground of our being that is that state of pure consciousness, and the other aspect of our practice is to bring our lower mind, or our active mind, into alignment with that pure intelligence within that basic state of awareness.

If there is a part of our mind that is always reflecting our experience perfectly, like a mirror, how come we are still confused about what is going on within us and around us? How come we are in conflict with how things are? Because our active thinking, ‘I-making’ mind that also arises, moment to moment, as one of the functions of being alive, has become so entangled with its experience and its ‘I-making’ extravaganza that it is quite unable to let things be what they are. It has created, to a greater or lesser degree within each of us, a distortion of that mirror-like quality, so that the experience that we are actually having is no longer perfectly reflected into our field of awareness.

If you were to look at a reflection of the moon in a pool of water that was highly disturbed, that reflection would look nothing like the moon. In the same way our experience, reflected in a mind that is highly disturbed, looks nothing like the actual experience we are having. In our own virtual, inner world our ideas of what is happening to us can become vastly different from what is actually going on. Literally our sense of reality becomes distorted. The greater the ‘I-making’, the more fixated upon ourselves we become, the greater the distortion in the mirror of our mind.

In this way we start to see how it is. I am not disturbed by what I am experiencing. Physical discomfort is of course unpleasant, but I am not innately disturbed by my experience. I am disturbed by the way in which I react to what I experience and only by that.

It is not what is happening to me that makes me disturbed. It is how I react and continue to react and have reacted in the past to what has happened to me that has distorted the mirror-like quality of my mind so that I have become confused and unable to perceive exactly what is going on.

Our Sense of Isolation and Suffering Ends with the Fading Away of I-Making

The job we have before us is to untangle that tangled knot of ‘I-making’. The tangled knot of this mind that has become so enwrapped with formulating ideas of myself has placed this entangled knot of conditioning between my true nature and what I am experiencing, to the point that it is so distorted that I do not know what is going on. This distorting of the experience with our idea of ourselves is the cause of our confusion and conflict.

In order to untangle that tangled knot, the charge, the electromagnetic charge, that distorting principle produced by the thinking mind, I have to learn in stages to be with my experience as it is, and stop rejecting it, thinking it should be something else, or grasping it, thinking that it is mine and that I can hold on to it. If we want to rediscover the mirror-like quality of our mind we have to realise that, whether we like it or not, our experience of life is what it is and we need to learn to be with things as they are. That is what we call equanimity. And equanimity is the axis point of a balanced and harmonious mind.

So if we are going to make any sense of life we have to start by accepting that it is what it is. Because the moment that we do not accept that it is what it is, we are in conflict with the life of which we are a part. Because always and everywhere, regardless of what it is, it is just that. It will not show itself to us in its suchness as it is, it will not reveal itself in that mirror-like part of our being, while that ‘I-making’ mechanism continues to distort the experience that we are having by reacting to it with craving, attachment, clinging, aversion, ill-will and all the plethora of other responses that mean we are not able to simply be with it.

And of course when we first hear this we think to ourselves, ‘But hold on, how pointless and meaningless would that be without that ‘I-making’ in the middle of it, to make sense of it and to make it all feel worthwhile?’ That is the greatest Catch 22 of all. That is the paradox of life. In order to glimpse what is actually going on here we have to leave everything utterly alone so that we do not distort our perception of it. But in our distorted perception of things, nothing seems to be quite the way it should be, so how can we just leave it as it is?

And this is our mind in all its vanity. The idea that it is all about me and that it needs to have my sense of me in the middle of the experience in order to make it meaningful. That is the confused belief - that my experience is only meaningful on account of my presence within it. That is the ignorance at the beginning of the causal chain of suffering. It was by seeing this that the Buddha freed himself, it was by seeing this that Jesus freed himself from suffering. It is the seeing of this for ourselves, or more importantly when we see what reveals itself when our I-making finally stops, that frees each of us from suffering.

We have limited our capacity to be with things and have bent not just our experience but the world that we are experiencing to our will in our efforts to make it the way that suits us, thinking that this is the way by which we make life truly meaningful. In truth it does not become truly meaningful until the ‘I-making’ extravaganza stops being the focal point of our experience and we start to actually engage with life as it is.

It is not until the mind stops adding, stops taking, stops wanting it to be like this and not wanting it to be like that and starts to enter more and more completely into life, that the experience becomes complete and becomes satisfying. With the the fading of the sense of me comes the realisation that our experience is not at all dry and pointless and empty without me there. In fact, far from it, it becomes complete and in no way lacking. Our sense of vanity may well take a knock at that point, but our sense of separation or isolation comes to an end.