The Rabbit Hole of the Mind and the Three Doors to Liberation
The Three Doors to Liberation; Annica, Dukkha, Anatta
How Meditation on Annica, Dukkha, Anatta prompts the mind to relinquish its attachment
How to transform the state of Nibbida (Abhorrence)
The Flavour of Liberation
Our Natural State of Rest
[Discourse given on a Vipassana retreat in 2019 in which Burgs investigates the three doors to liberation so the yogi can start to identify which door will prompt in them letting go at any given point in their Vipassana practice]
The Three Doors to Liberation; Annica, Dukkha, Anatta
The Buddha identifies three doors to liberation. They are Impermanence (annica), Suffering (dukkha) and No Self (anatta).
So what are these three doors to liberation and how do we meditate on these three doors to liberation? He teaches us that through seeing impermanence, seeing suffering and seeing No Self, or either one of these, whilst seeing into them, we are prompted to let go in stages. That is why they are called the doors to liberation, because it is whilst seeing them that the door to the unconditioned opens, or our willingness to let go our attachment to the conditioned develops.
In essence the 'I-maker', which is what the Buddha's chief disciple Sariputta called the conditioned mind's tendency to create the illusory sense and idea of self, is the root of all the accumulated conditioning tendencies that afflict us. Our attachment to this idea and sense of 'me' or self, is the root cause for it's continued arising.
All of our desire and aversion is rooted in ignorance, the not seeing that self is an illusion. Ignorance is the not seeing Awareness as the ground of our experience and the whole of the mind as an illusory addition that distorts it and creates the perception of the experience being unsatisfactory or suffering. Ignorance is the being lost in the idea that my mind is having this experience, that 'I' am having the experience. It is being lost down the rabbit hole of the mind and its 'I-making extravaganza,' thinking it is reality. Once we get lost down there, all our attachment, all our aversion, all of our suffering, our renewed becoming in this round of suffering, everything, arises because we are lost in the illusion of self.
While intellectually we can quickly grasp these ideas, we have to build our genuine liberating insight up in stages as our meditative experience deepens and matures. As our insight deepens, we are able to look more deeply into the nature of our experience and see what it is made up of.
How Meditation on Annica, Dukkha, Anatta prompts the mind to relinquish its attachment.
To this end we start the practice of Vipassana, having done the preparatory work that constitutes the coming to Right View. By reviewing the impermanence of phenomena we reach a state within our meditation where we can directly perceive the arising and passing of material and mental states. Whether it is the condition of the body arising and passing or the mind arising and passing, the perception of impermanence comes to us quite quickly within the practice of insight. Standing on that perception of impermanence we are gradually prompted to let go to a greater or lesser degree depending upon the make up and characteristics of our conditioned mind.
Occasionally, seeing that everything is impermanent is sufficient to prompt us to give up all of our clinging and just let go our attachment to self entirely. But when there is a very strongly held sense and idea of self and who I am and what I want personally, rather than just the nature and habit pattern of attachment, then that strongly held sense of self is often willing to suffer anyway even knowing that everything is impermanent. We can see that sooner or later everything that is dear to us is going to be stripped away. We know we cannot have it forever but we continue to cling to it anyway, and continue to suffer on account of that clinging.
Seeing impermanence alone will only rarely prompt us to let go entirely and without any remainder to the point of realising the cessation of suffering. So in the face of the insight that knows impermanence there is that far that we can let go, and there is that point beyond which we can't. At this stage we have to look into our unwillingness to let go. This is the point at which we need to review the mind to stalk and identify where our unwillingness to let go is coming from. We look at the sense and idea of myself and the nature and character of our mind and where it comes from. And through reviewing it and upon reflection we can see for ourselves that this 'I', this idea of myself, was never willing to let go. And even though we may have seen that everything is impermanent and it's futile to be attached, we are still not willing to let our attachment go.
We see the conditions that we put on our attempt to free ourselves from suffering: “This much I'm willing to let go, and this much I'm willing to suffer on account of my attachments.” It's almost like a contract that we've made with ourselves. We can see the degree to which we were never going to let go.
At this point we have to break down this unwillingness to let go. This is done through further development of insight, until we see the suffering in the unwillingness to let go that we couldn't see by only seeing impermanence. In stages our insight dislodges more of our attachment. This is the gradual process by which, as insight matures, we are prompted to let go more, and in stages.
Some of us will get to the point where we can see the affliction and suffering, and growing tired of it, we let go. Others will get to this point but on account of our attachment to the idea of ourselves we continue to cling and continue to suffer. We might then say to ourselves, “I've done enough Vipassana. I've let go as much as I wish to. I'll take that and I'll carry on with this attachment that remains.” Or we continue to practise Vipassana more deeply and we look again. We recognise the things that remain in our basket of clinging that are the things we are unwilling to let go. We break it down again to see what is the ground for my unwillingness to let go? What is the ignorance? What did I not see? What is the wrong view that upholds my willingness to suffer on account of this?
At that point we have to break down this mechanism by which perception of 'self' and the experience of ‘No Self’ arise. It's not just bare attachment that is the cause of our suffering. It's attachment that is rooted in our idea of ourself. It's attachment that is justified on account of my an idea of myself to which I still cling. Similarly we also justify our aversion or anger on account of this. Sometimes we might even see that we've actually defined our whole idea of ourselves in terms of our very suffering. We see how doggedly entrenched we are in this sense and idea of me and the lengths that I will go to, and the suffering we are willing to endure to uphold it.
At this point our suffering is not pushing us hard enough. We dig our heels in further. We are unwilling or unable to go further. And hanging on to our suffering for dear life, having practised all that Vipassana, we are still unable to let go.
At that point we come up against our pride. We see how we have defined ourselves in relation to this position we are not willing to yield on. And so we see that our suffering is rooted in attachment to views. We are willing to suffer this much to uphold our view. This is what we call being view-rooted.
At this point, gradually, arduously, we have to try and break this view-rootedness down. We really have to unpick this mind in great detail if we are that insistent on not letting go either very deep rooted attachment or aversion, which are upheld by our clung to ideas of self.
This practice of being pushed along the path by our suffering requires that we come to recognise that we are actually suffering, because quite often we are suffering greatly without recognising it. When asked how we are, we might say “I'm all right,” but we aren't happy, we have just surrendered to our numbness. That is another aspect of ignorance; to not see our suffering, or to think we are happy when we aren't.
This is the blind spot. We can't see what is right in our face. Suffering will push us to a point where we are willing to let go, but sometimes it will push us to a point beyond which we feel we can't let go. Even to the point of, “I can't bear this any more, but I can't let go.”
How to transform the state of Nibbida (Abhorrence)
This is the spiritual crisis, the existential crisis: even though I can't bear my dukkha any more, I can't bear the idea of letting go because I'm basically terrified. And no matter how hard your suffering is pushing you, it's not pushing you hard enough to let go. That's a place of real suffering. We're overwhelmed by the nature of suffering but we still can't let go. This is the reason for most people's despair and the reason we collapse back into ignorance so that we can at least pretend to ourselves that we aren't suffering. The Buddha describes this as Nibbida, an overwhelming sense that this is all just suffering but I cannot yet free myself from it.
At this point it is really important that we aren't just pushed from behind by the pain of our suffering, but that we are pulled and propelled forward by the flavour of liberation, because only that has the power to uproot that fear we have. It is when we don't have any idea or sense or taste or glimpse of where we're letting go into or what it's going to be like when we do let go, that we are unwilling to go further.
This is where we have to have the meditative experience, or at some level have an experience of the cessation of suffering, even if it's only the momentary cessation of suffering. We can then look into that experience and learn where our relief from suffering lies. Only when we experience that profound relief, that profound sense of liberation, that profound sense of ease and the joy that comes with it, can we start to see, when we break that experience down, that the experience that is free from suffering is also rooted in the absence of those things that I'm unwilling to let go. And even more importantly it is rooted in the momentary absence of the sense of myself at the centre of the experience.
The Flavour of Liberation
When we reflect on the flavour of liberation and we feel it work upon us, this feeling of liberation now starts to pull us in a way that helps to get us beyond that place that our suffering was pushing us to, that we couldn't get beyond before.
At this point some people may be able to get enough of a taste of the flavour of liberation that opens them up in such a way that a new conviction arises in them, “Yes! That's where I want to go.” But even then on account of attachment they will go so far, only to fall back. And so we have to break down the experience of suffering even further.
Some people will get a very clear sense of their suffering but not get a clear sense of the flavour of liberation, so they're pushed very strongly by suffering but not pulled strongly by the happiness and relief that comes from its cessation.
Each of us, as we mature through our meditative experience, must develop both our direct experience and relationship to the flavour of suffering and the nature of it, and the flavour of liberation and the ground for it. We're pulled, we're pushed, we get pulled more strongly, we get pushed more strongly until we reach a point where those things that remain in my basket that I was not willing to let go, that held me at the point beyond which I didn't go - we now taste the longing for that relief and so we do become willing to let them go.
Gradually that longing for relief becomes greater than our willingness to uphold our idea of ourself and its suffering, and so it begins to surmount our fear of letting go.
And now we reach a position of greater willingness to let go. We have broken everything down and seen; this is attachment and the suffering that is born of attachment, this is aversion and the suffering that is born of aversion, and even if we are not free yet, we can see why.
And why is it? It's because of attachment to my idea of myself. We know it but we still have to let it go. We know we're suffering but we haven't let it go.
At this point we come back to the cushion, having at some level made a contract with ourself, “OK, I'm going to let this idea of myself go now,” whatever aspect it was we couldn't let go before. Or if we're ready, we might even let go the whole thing.
And as we sit on the cushion and we enter a little more deeply into the experience of the momentary cessation of suffering, through entering into the state of deep concentration or entering into the state of pure uncontrived awareness; either through genuine absorption concentration or through a deeper capacity to enter that natural state of rest, we are able to do this because our inclination to smother our experience with self and its proliferation of mind stops briefly during these experiences. Now our willingness to let go is greater than it was before we had these experiences of the momentary cessation of suffering. We gradually get closer to the experience of cessation, to a point where eventually we can let this whole mind go and watch it come to cessation. This is the point where deep serenity practice and the relief from suffering it brings momentarily, needs to be developed and explored. from this we get our first taste of the flavour of liberation. Even if it is only momentary, we begin to know what if feels like. Prior to this point we could only speculate what it might be like to be free from suffering. And of course in the mere intellectual speculation we do not experience any genuine relief. It is at this stage that our initial attempt to practise Vipassana will need to be supplemented by genuinely deep experiences of meditation absorption or a direct experience of bare naked awareness. Ideally we would need to develop both of these.
We have to see that this is not a linear process. The maturing of insight is not a linear process. There are many, many factors that make up the mind of each one of us, whether we are rooted in strong aversion and weak ignorance and weak attachment or whether we are rooted in strong attachment, strong ignorance and weak aversion, for example. Whether we are very strongly attached to views, whether we are not attached to views, whether there is very strong intercepting, hindering kamma, whether there is very strong supporting kamma, whether pride is strong and attachment to self is relentless or whether it is weak, the maturing of insight it is not a linear process.
The mind is deep. The mind is profound and hard to understand. Even though it's a nuisance, it's deep and mysterious. Similarly this sense and idea of self is complex and multi-layered and it took a long time to accumulate all of these tendencies that bind us to suffering.
Whilst practising there are various tendencies arising in the mind strongly or weakly at different times. While one is prevalent, by practising a certain way, we make progress and let go to a point. With that prevalent quality of the mind having been relinquished, our mind starts to function slightly differently than it used to and now we are less driven by one thing but still driven by others. We have let go to a degree but we are still suffering to a degree. And so we progress along the path step by step, stage by stage.
Practising in this way, we dismantle one core structure of the ego at a time and free ourselves of that much suffering that was rooted in that core structure.
It's likely to be the case that at different stages along the journey, developing insight into impermanence will take you down the line to a point. Then insight into suffering will take you further and then seeing No Self will cause a quantum letting go. And then maybe you come back to see impermanence again, more deeply than before and it serves again to prompt in you a letting go. This is how the path unfolds.
You can't map out the path of liberation through insight in a predictable, linear way. Even what you appear to be made of and driven by now, may not be what you are predominantly driven by in three or four years from now, having let go some of the structures of your mind.
This is why we have to always be willing to return back to the experience itself, and within the experience get a sense of what it is that I'm feeling, how am I perceiving my experience, and the way it's prompting me. You have to let the experience itself be your teacher. It's an entirely experiential process. None of it's going on at the level of concrete understanding, non of it is merely intellectual. Even though as you go through the process, you can look back into it and understand it, no one has ever freed themselves of suffering merely by understanding the teaching. And it is so important to realise, know and accept this for ourselves. We have to transition away from seeking resolution through views and understanding, towards a quantum liberating experience itself. While it is possible to free ourselves from suffering without understanding fully how it happened, it is not possible to free ourselves through understanding alone.
You can't anticipate how the process will unfold for you personally with the mind, because you don't know what's going to fruit kammically within you today, next week or next year. You might not even know what is fruiting in you now. There is no liberation in the mind. There is only liberation from the mind. With insight we see that the whole of the conditioned mind is suffering, and the whole of the conditioned mind comes to cessation in moment of seeing Nibanna. There is no mind present in that moment. Only naked Awareness remains. The cessation of the active mind is the cessation of suffering.
This is why we have to learn the practice of Vipassana in stages and in a timely way. The most important thing at the beginning is to develop the right meditative attitude, because within your experience, you could be furiously meditating on impermanence while completely smothered in self, just going round and round in circles sitting with it day after day, week after week, month after month, even your whole life, knowing that you're suffering but not knowing the flavour of liberation or where it lies.
Then its just a question of trying to wear yourself down. That is a very painful process. There is very little bliss in it. But be ware of one thing, the door to liberation does not open through the unwholesome mind door. It opens blissfully through the wholesome mind door. We have to find a bliss in letting go. That bliss does not come from being pushed by suffering alone. It comes from being pulled ever onwards by the flavour of liberation and the ever greater relief it brings.
What we are trying to do here on these retreats, is lay the foundation for our attitude and approach, knowing that we're going to need to develop all kinds of layers and levels of insight through many different meditative practices that are going to prompt a deeper letting go that is borne of that skilful approach.
The key is this: if you are able to recognise right at the beginning that in the nakedness of the experience as it appears within bare Awareness itself, there is no suffering, then we can swiftly come to see that all of the suffering appears within the mind as it arises to grasp at the experience. If right at the beginning, by setting your practice up well enough and laying the ground, you can spot the very moment that the mind impinges upon Awareness and see that as the moment of the arising of suffering, you become convinced right away that anything you add to the experience or take from the experience with the mind diminishes it and afflicts you in some way. This is the sharpest insight of all.
Our Natural State of Rest
It might take a long time to come to a definitive conviction upon this insight but if you can establish and set up your meditation correctly and learn it, and rest in the natural state of Awareness as such, we can observe that it is the arising of the mind and not the arising of the objects within that experience that cause the affliction. We see that any disturbance in that natural state of rest is only ever caused by the reaching out to grab, or the shrinking away with aversion, of the conditioned 'I-making' mind.
Once the Natural state of Awareness has been pointed out to us, usually by the teacher, and once we have a definitive experience of it; once we learn for ourselves to recognise it and enter into it, then we practise abiding in that state of natural rest. Resting within Awareness itself we experience the momentary cessation of suffering for as long as we can leave the experience alone with the mind. We have a taste of the flavour of liberation right from the beginning. We sit in that state, and we watch the momentary cessation of suffering end, and the arising of suffering begin with each moment that the mind invades the experience. If we can meditate like this we can watch the arising of suffering and see the ground for it. Now we can see clearly for ourselves that it is the grasping at our experience with an aspect of mind, and thereafter any form of holding onto it by the mind with clinging that is our suffering. Only this.
The ability to actually do this stands largely upon our preparatory work, but regardless of how much of that each of you have done, you are all able to get a reasonably clear sense of what I'm pointing out from within your meditation. As the Buddha said many times, “in the seeing there is only the seen, in the feeling there is only the felt,” and then we add the mind to our experience and it becomes suffering.
We have to learn to observe how the mind itself merely arises within Awareness, and in doing so momentarily becomes a part of the experience, but the mind is not having the experience. It is only occasionally there, it is only conditionally there...and then it's gone. In the same way that my voice as I am speaking now is arising within Awareness... and then it's gone... and now only the experience remains. Just the experience with nothing added. There is the experience without the mind added, which rests effortlessly within itself. It is not in conflict. And then the mind arises to grasp at the experience and in doing so creates the illusion of conflict and the illusory and conditioned experience of suffering.
It's easy to exhaust ourselves within our meditation in the same way we exhaust ourselves in the daily life. It's important to keep working at remaining in that state of rest, because that's your real equanimity. It's the losing that state of rest that is the loss of your equanimity. Re-establishing that state of restful ease is re-establishing your equanimity. So don't push yourself to the point of exhaustion. That state of natural rest is what we are letting go into, until everything that has the nature to arise comes to cessation and we see it come to cessation.
So what if you were to just let go now? And save yourself the long journey down the rabbit hole of your mind right at the beginning, recognising that it's just a rabbit hole. Awakening doesn't lie at the bottom of the rabbit hole, it comes when we realize we are lost in the rabbit hole and we come up for air, finally into the fresh air, back into the vast expanse, the blissful luminous expanse of Awareness itself. Wouldn't that make the whole thing a lot easier? What are you looking for down the rabbit hole? What are you holding on to? Why? There is no resolution, no an answer to be found down there… Just let go.
