ENLIGHTENMENT IS WITHIN YOU by Bogoda Premaratne

ENLIGHTENMENT
IS
Your Birthright

Part I – Theory

Discover
By Dissolving
THE DELUSION OF SELF

Discussed by
Bogoda Premaratne

Birth right is one of those rights that belong to you and to me in being born in this world as human beings. Enlightenment is something that you are entitled to; it refers to something you already have.

In the precious stone, that quality of luster, the glitter, and the brilliance is inherent; but it requires to be systematically cut and polished to reveal that quality of great value. Similarly you have to uncover your own Enlightened state of mind by removing the accumulated 'debris' and cutting and clearing the 'over-growth' you have been nurturing, for how long you do not know.

Enlightenment is not something invented by the Buddha. He is one among those who discovered it within themselves and proved to the world that it is one of those nature's gifts granted universally to every human being born into this world.

When false constructions of the mind, foremost among them being that of an 'unchanging self' with its accompanying emotional prejudices against 'others', and permanent concepts formed under the influence of that deluded self are removed from the mind, with the help of wisdom that displaces ignorance; it is then that the underlying Enlightenment will be revealed.

Enlightenment is similar to the 'Intuitive state of mind' within which direct perception of 'actuality' occurs. It is well-knwon that some scientists and philosophers were gifted with the intuitive faculty enabling them, occasionally, to see truths by having dispensed with conceptual thinking and reasoning.

If you equip yourself with a sharp and perfect instrument in the form of purified mind that has the capacity of penetrating into any subject or circumstance ; isn't that better than filling your mind with every branch of knowledge that keeps emerging everyday from everywhere?

That at least will help maintain your emotional equilibrium.

ONE’S OWN EXISTENCE–

The World’s most Important

But the most neglected

Subject of Study

“DELUSION OF SELF” appearing in the title of this book is likely to cause you concern.

• You might wonder “Is this writer trying to tell me that I am living under a delusion all the time? Am I suffering from delusion? Am I really sane or insane?

• How can anyone say that whatever I think, whatever I say, or whatever I do, happens under the guidance of an illusion?”

• ‘Yes’, the writer is deliberately tempting you to ask yourself this kind of question; to compel you to raise doubts in your own mind, as to the true nature of your existence.

• Because all your life you have been taking yourexistence for granted, it never occurred to you that it is worth devoting some time, trying to understand the nature of your own life and living experience.

• When I began writing this material I had to make up my mind whether I should be telling things to you, having you in mind as reader or listener, or whether I should address the general public. In both cases this writer is aware of running the risk of being judged as one conceited with his knowledge, and arrogantly telling things to other people, assuming that others do not know what he knows.

• How can I be sure as to what you think of me, the writer, or what you feel about yourself, or what other people generally feel and think about themselves?

• So finally I decided to tell you and the general public about what I have learnt from other sources, particularly the Teachings of the Buddha, in the way I have understood, and what I have come to know through my own living experience; assuming, perhaps that you and they might find some common ground, as life and living experience are things common to all human beings.

• This is based on the fact, that the only knowing about which one can be certain, is one’s own feelings, one’s own thinking, and one’s own individual and personal points of view.

• Whether that knowing is right or wrong is a different matter, that has to be judged with reference to some authority, like the authentic Teachings of the Buddha.

• Nothing in this world can be known without the individual point of view. But individuals are discouraged from paying any attention to that most significant fact of their own life, and that is, their own private and personal, individual point of view.

• There was a time when I never saw my existence as a problem worthy of study. I thought study of subjects like Education, Psychology, Science and Law,was more profitable than to be subjectively engaged in unraveling problems of my own personal worries, emotions of love, hate, and anxieties and so forth.

• For the most part, I was concerned with the affairs of the world. I was ignorant of the fact that the world I know, is a world of my own making, and that in turn, I am being conditioned by that world of my own making.

• All that I studied in the name of education is designed to take my concerns away from the problems of my individual and personal life, and force me to concentrate on things called objective - things of the world - outside of my individual, personal life.

• All of the scholarly writings that I have been reading all my life, encourage me to ignore my personal and individual points of view, and instead, deal with things of general interest, things of common interest, things of public interest.

• Education’s objective is to distract me and everybody from taking a look at the interior of one’s own personal, individual existence as a self.

• Look at what you and I call entertainment.

• All that we do for entertainment is a deliberate attempt on our part to be fooled by feeding ourselves on our imagination, in order to forget the realities of our personal concerns.

• Look at all those habits you and I have cultivated in order to anaesthetize ourselves from the pain and the fear of having to face domestic, occupational and personal realities.

• Why don’t you and I be brave, and be determined to face these problems of existence squarely once and for all?

• Why don’t we want to learn the art of cultivating familiarity with the interior world of our own individual, personal existence?

• Why are we not willing to acquire the skill of solving these inner problems of existence once and for all, through an internal examination of our own mental behaviour?

• Have you not heard of that Noblest among human beings, the Buddha, who subjected his own life to experiment upon, in search of a way to free all humanity from its existential suffering?

• Do we doubt the fact of his liberated existence that was set before the whole world as an example?

• Are we unaware of the fact that he has clearly explained the method that enabled him to liberate himself from all suffering connected with life and living experience?

• Then why aren’t we taking the trouble to test check on our own, the validity of that method?

• The problem is that you and I cannot get some other person to do that for us, or by praying to the Buddha or some higher power to do that on our behalf.

• You and I have to do that ourselves, applying that tested and proven remedy to our own personal life.

• The teaching or the recommended method consists of the barest minimum of guidelines sufficient for us to follow in practice.

• Whatever knowledge you gain through reading this material has to be interpreted and understood in terms of your personal experience of living, and the liberation is to be experienced personally by yourself.

• What the writer is attempting to do in these pages is to take you through that teaching,theoretically in Part I, leading up to its methodology in Part II, provided you have the will to read through patiently, and contemplatively, making sure that at every stage, you are with the writer trying to understand what is being expressed in words.

The Need FOR

LOOKing Beyond the Word

At the very start of these discussions the writer appeals to the reader for sympathetic approach towards words and phrases that are being presented before the reader’s mind.

• There are reasons for making this plea.

• The method adopted by the writer in presenting his material appears to be more like discourses, but he prefers to call them discussions which mean examining by argument and debate.

• It is true the writer enjoys freedom from being interrupted by comments and counter-arguments by the reader,

• but he makes it a point to raise them on behalf of the reader and provide reasonable responses.

• One reason for pleading for consideration is that the reader accustomed to reading English as a language is likely to find himself or herself on unfamiliar ground as regards vocabulary that is specific to the subject-matter.

• It is common knowledge that subjects or disciplines develop technical terms specific to them, and professions proudly display their exclusive mastery – for example, those in the fields of medicine and computer science.Ordinary mortals have no access to their language.

• If the subject matter under discussion is to be assigned to a particular discipline -we would like it to be psychophysics - dealing with general relations between mind and body, leading to practical application in treating the universal malady of existential suffering.

• In that context, the connotations of some of the words go beyond their primary meaning with implications of conditions specific to the discipline.

• But be assured, the writer has taken great pains to have such implications clarified.

• There is a general admonition issued by the Buddha to all those who listen to the words he uses in his teaching.

First requirement was ‘to listen’ to the words uttered by him or his disciples who were themselves enlightened.

• This might raise a problem today. Where are the Enlightened ?

• But no. It is not a problem.

• The enlightened disciples had memorized every word spoken by the Master and had it all transmitted from generation to generation through what is called oral tradition.

• After four hundred years of this unbroken tradition, about five hundred enlightened monks of Sri Lanka had assembled and committed the Master’s teaching into writing.

• Forty five volumes were compiled and copies despatched to most countries in East and West Asia. It is these from which the writer has derived inspiration.

• The second imperative in the Buddha’s admonition was that on hearing the word of the Master its meaning should be realized by referring it to one’s own ‘y¯ni’ (y¯niso-manasikŒra).

• This may sound strange, but it has a deep meaning, and the Second Part of this material is devoted entirely to clarification through practice of what is meant by this phrase.

• By way of a tentative explanation, we would say–

• the literal meaning of ‘y¯ni’ is the womb – the organ within which a being is conceived and nourished till it comes out into the world.

• Thus it is an emphatic way of saying that the moment a word comes in contact with your ear or the eye let it impact and fix itself firmly in your mind, and keep watching how it grows stage by stage -

• Keep looking at the material forms that get pictured in your mind, the feelings generated, leading to the conceiving of associated thoughts, ideas, notionsandviews, and the arousal of fresh memories.

• Take special care not to allow these reactions to distort, disfigure and deform the original meaning connoted by the word.

• If we are interested in un-covering the state of Enlightenment lying beneath our living experience, we are asked to cultivate this habit of considering things in the way they actually operate within our own existence, as and when they are actually operating.

DIFFERENT WAYS OF GETTING KNOWLEDGE

• What is the purpose in examining different ways of acquiring knowledge ?

• It must be understood that we are not attempting to belittle or under-rate the value of traditional or conventional systems that have developed along with human civilization.

• We are only examining them to see if there are any limitations or imperfections in them in the light of our main objective of going for knowledge essential for spiritual liberation,

• We do that with the expectation that it will lead to an appreciation of the more difficult, but the most essential technique for gaining knowledge necessary for release from existential suffering.

• There are several ways available for us to acquire knowledge.

• The method that has become popular from the ancient times is that of listening to others who speak of what they know or what they have experienced.

• With education, we are now in the habit of acquiring knowledge through reading and studying views and theories that others have expressed as true, based on their knowledge and experience.

• But originally, whoever came to know of anything, did so by looking at, and noting things that were actually happening. That is known as observation of facts or events that result in personal experience.

• As, of course, we cannot get all theknowledge we need to get on in life, through our own observation and experience, we do have to depend on ‘books and men’ to acquire some of the most essential knowledge.

3 : 2

Truth at the levels of Reality and Actuality

The whole purpose of our dealing with so much theory on what is ‘truth’, what is real, what is actual, etc., is to bring out the fact of what is unreal – and therefore absent, and abstract, is what our mind has conceived as a permanent, pleasurable, ‘Self’ the most dangerous and disastrous delusion of our own making.

We are all interested in knowing the ‘truth’ regarding the world and the nature of the world.

• Most of us are interested in knowing the ‘truth’ regarding the material things of the world – the world that we see, hear, smell, taste, touch and think about. For that purpose we study various branches of Science: physics, chemistry, biology etc.

• Some of us are interested in knowing the ‘truth’ regarding man’s existence in this world. We want to know ‘the what’, ‘the how’ and ‘the why’ of everything that goes to make up our existence in this world. For that purpose we study philosophy.

• Some of us want to know if there is a purpose higher than just living on this earth; or if there are higher powers in control of our destiny, and if so, how we can get their guidance in living this life? For that purpose we study and practise religion.

3 : 3

What is Truth ?

How do I judge if what I Know is ‘true’ ?

I have been taught that for something to be true it must agree with ‘facts’.

• If available facts go against it, it has to be judged as false.

• Then the question arises as to what a fact is.

Fact is an event that is certainly known to have occurred. Something that is not mistaken.

e.g.: ‘The fact that fire burns’is something that is unmistakably true.

3 : 4

Facts can be subjective or objective

• In making judgments based on facts, one has to be mindful of whether the supposed facts are subjective, or objective.

• Subjective means coming from the self, or existing only in someone’s mind.

• Facts can be influenced by what one feels or one’s personal opinion.

• Then we say it is subjective. Its opposite is objective.

• Objective means having existence outside the mind, facts un-coloured by personal feelings or opinions.

• When a witness in a case gives testimony under oath ‘to speak the truth and nothing but the truth’ what he means is that he will speak of “what he saw with his own eyes”.

• This too is open to doubt as there could be subjective interference between the point of his seeing and the point of his putting in into words. That explains why the lawyers have to debate on whether he speaks the ‘whole’ truth or ‘half’ the truth.

• There is a theory known as ‘subjectivism’, which means that all knowledge is subjective.

3 : 5

What is real ? What is ‘reality’ ?

Real means actually existing, that which is true as opposed to that which is fiction. Fiction is that which is an invention of someone’s mind.

• When we say ‘existing’ it means a thing that is present,or an event that ishappening at this moment in time.

• Real must always be understood in terms ofwhat is present, in opposition to what is absent, but real can be present in someone’s imagination.

• Real is objective, and not an event that is subjective. Real is something genuine, and natural.

• Real life is life that is lived by actual people; not life that is acted by actors and actresses in a drama or in the movies. The actual character represented is ‘absent’.

For the most Part We are living in Imagination

Imagination should not be considered as something wrong or bad in itself. It is one of those normal and essential faculties that nature has bestowed on the human being.

• It is an extremely powerful faculty of ours, meant to be used purposefully for our benefit, but very often misused for our own detriment.

• Most of the time we are living in a world of imagination. But although it is one of those principal elements that go to make up our living experience, we live in ignorance of its presence and the way we are being governed by its sinister operations.

• Therefore we should learn to recognize imagination as such, particularly knowing that it can mislead us.

When we say ‘you are imagining things’ what we mean is that the thing on your mind, or the thing about which you are speaking exists only in your mind.

4 : 2

How does imagination behave within our living experience?

• Things we see, hear, smell, taste, touch, and think about, whatever is present before the senses and revealed as such by consciousness, are all recorded and preserved in our mind as mind-pictures.

• These-pictures can be of things that had never been in existence, or of events that had never occurred. As you know, artists are free to create fantastic things out of their imagination.

• What we call a thought, an idea or purpose or design or opinion are all mind-constructions that have been sketched in our mind, and therefore things in imagination.

• When we picture things that are not present before us, or absent at this present moment, we are picturing them in imagination.

• When we are clinging to a false idea or a false belief that also shows the power of imagination- imagination deliberately designed by us to deceive ourselves.

4 : 3

Imagination holds good for both

true and false

• Even if there is nothing real existing at this moment corresponding to the thing imagined, the thing imagined can be as real as real could be.

• When a young man or young woman is engaged in admiring the mental image of the fancied one, it makes no difference whether the physical form is around or not; the romantic mood is actual.

• The strange truth is that an imaginary object can generate emotional feelings very much more pleasurable (or unbearably unpleasant) than in the actual presence of the object.

• Imagination is man’s preoccupation with drawing still pictures of ‘things in motion’ on the canvas of his mind;

• The things that are pictured in our mind need not exist anywhere on earth.

• Notion of self is one such imaginary concept with which nothing can be found to be matching.

4 : 4

Objects in Imagination

The sense-objects pertaining to the six senses, as we had experienced sometime in the past, can actually be experienced in imagination.

• Not only the visualobjects, but the words, or the sounds and tunes of music we had listened to, the lingering fragrances of things we had once smelt, tastes we had got addicted to, particular feelings onceexperienced through body contact, thoughts, ideas, views and opinions we had once formed in our mind, can all be recalled, recollected and enjoyed going over them in imagination. That happens most of the time without our being aware of it.

• We do not see how some of these imaginary notions, ideas and ideologies our minds have embraced, are taking us for a ride and landing us in great trouble.

• All that is the work of our Faculty of Imagination. It is a Department functioning within the Basic Component of Mental Formations – one of the Five Basic Constituents of our living experience.

4 : 5

Our World of mind is crowded with ‘absentees’

For a little while, just take a look at what is happening in the world of your mind. You will find that almost all of the things that your mind is dwelling upon, are things that are actually absentat the moment,not on the things that are actually present before your senses.

Why is that?

• That is because imaginary things are far more satisfying than the things that are actually present before your mind.

• A thought, a notion, anidea, and a concept are much the same thing.

• Conceiving implies ability of the mind to observe several items of sense-experience, and to recognize a quality common to all of them, and then form one idea out of that common characteristic. Thatidea becomes a concept.

• When you take a concept or an idea or even a thought by itself, it is only a creation of the mind, by the mind, in the mind, and is confined to the mind.

• Actuality is a process–a movent in experience.

• A concept, on the other hand, is a fixed un-moving still picture formed in the mind.

• The most influential negative factor is that these, thoughts, ideas and opinions are all possessed and distorted by a “notion of the-personality-of-a self” which is actually non-existent but mind-made. It is also a ‘fixed’ entity of the mind.

• Any creation of the mind is abstract.

• Even if it is based on some concrete object perceived by the senses, it is only a mental image or an idea separated and withdrawn from the object that exists outside the mind.

• It is not even a photographic representation of the object, because when anything is seen, heard and becomes a percept of the mind, it is immediately clothed with a feeling - pleasurable, unpleasurable, etc.

• Mind has the freedom to create whatever it likes out of what it perceives.

• As a result of education, books, radios, cinema, television, and so on we tend to build up artificial concepts of what life is, and these concepts are grossly misleading, and are no satisfactory guide at all to real life.

• How many people derive their ideas about love from the cinema, the television or books of fiction?

No wonder they run into difficulties when they begin to meet love in the actuality of marriage.

4 : 6

Distinction between Reality and Actuality

Real and Actual, Reality and Actuality are identical in meaning.

• They both refer to something that actually exists as a thing or occurring as a fact.

• They both refer to things currently present and objective, not merely apparent – that is, not enough to be clear to the senses or to the mind. Real and actual means a great deal more than that.

• Then where is the distinction ?

• The distinction is in the emphasis that has been placed on the process of experiencing that which is real or actual within one’s own living experience.

• The real can be known and understood as matters of knowledge of unlimited things and events that occur out there in the world.

• But Actual is reality that is actualized within one’s own living experience. It is realization in action.

• The reality out there in the world, or described and explained in words by speakers and writers become constituents of one’s living-experience, and as such call for knowing and seeing in precisely the manner they come to light, or express themselves within one’s own living experience.

• That is actualization of what is real.

• This process of realization demands insight into the causes that make things happen, or make things come into being and the way the existing conditions are sustaining them at the present moment.

• That is the sole theme that will be discussed and put into writing in Part I (theory) and Part II (practice) in this documentation.

IGNORANCE AS OPPOSED TO RIGHT UNDERSTANDING

What am I ignorant of?

It is quite clear that Nature has imposed restrictions on human intelligence and memory,for reasons best known to Nature. Nature blocks us from having direct access to the ways in which Nature is functioning within this life which we claim to be ours.

• Just imagine if those of us who have no doubt about the present existence being a rebirth of the previous one, were to live with the memories of all that we did, and what others did to us – what a mess this life would be!

• We are basically ignorant of the ways in which Nature is using our life in the way we experience life.

• This mental habit of not taking notice of things that are involved in our living experience has resulted in our ignorance, in our not knowing.

• This is what we call ignorance, not knowing what makes things happen the way they happen.

5 : 2

Ignorance leads to Imagining Things that are not True to Nature

Let us see what that means.

• Mankind, for centuries had been witnessing and experiencing the phenomenon of day followed by night, and night followed by day, without ever knowing how or why that happens. Anything that is observed or noticed by our senses is called a phenomenon.

• Rain and thunder, wind and storms, floods and droughts, were conditions under which people were compelled to live.

• Birth was a fact they took for granted. Birth was invariably followed by sickness, disease, and death.

• They had absolutely no way of knowing the actual causes and conditions behind these natural events.

• In the living experience of our primitive ancestors everything that happened was seen and understood as being made to happen by somebody, some living creature, like the way they themselves were doing things in their day to day living.

• Their daily experience had taught them that nothing good or bad happened unless somebody made it happen.

• This kind of non-knowledge or ignorance led our ancestors to formulate and spread all manner of unreasoned views, beliefs, opinions and theories within their communities.

• They imagined, therefore that events like day and night, rain and thunder, and the diseases and disasters that came upon them must be actions of some super-human agents, possessing power beyond that of any human being, preferring to remain invisible.

• The life of our ancestors in the midst of these calamities was one of endless misery and suffering for which they were not responsible and for which they had no remedy.

• They were compelled to imagine that some invisible living beings were making these things happen.

• Some things that happened to them were believed to be the work of the spirits of their dead relatives, or the departed leaders of their community.

• Some of these unseen but imaginary agents were raised to the level of deities, or higher beings, and some to the level of gods respected for having power over certain specific happenings on earth.

• At the latest stage this concept of invisible super-human power was raised to the level of One God, the Highest Being, the Maker of, and Ruler of all things.

• Then some thinkers among them convinced the ordinary people that these super-human beings, deities or gods were benevolent powers, and if people offer sacrifices and prayers with faith and reverence, they would intervene and avert any disaster and bestow happiness on the faithful ones.

• At the same time these leaders who knew what they were doing, claimed to be the favoured ones of the super-human powers and the only ones who knew the language of communication with these divine super-powers.

• This was howreligion with a priestly class of leaders came to be organized in response to a much needed demand on the part of the people who did not know why they suffer.

5 : 3

We have no knowledge of our own Life

• The unacceptable truth is that you and I do not know even our own ‘self’ or our own lifethat you and I say is our personal and private experience.

• On what basis are we making that statement?

• How much personal knowledge do you have of this body, and how much are you taking for granted?

• See how much you are assuming to be knowing about your own body, with very little to support your assumption.

• Think of your own body, your physical body which you regard as your personal property.

• What you know of your body is mostly the accumulated bits of information, that other people like scientists and medical specialists have written and spoken about. Very little of it is your personal knowledge or experience.

5 : 4

‘You’ have nothing to do with your vital organs.

• You have heard about and read about organs or parts of your body on which your life is totally dependent - things named heart, lungs, kidneys, the liver the stomach etc.

• Since you look upon your body as your personal property, these components also must necessarily be viewed as your personal property.

• If they are your property, then you must be the proprietor who owns them. Are you?

5 : 5

Your heart is not even aware of the fact that ‘you’ exist.

• Are your organs working according to your instructions, under your guidance, supervision, management and control? Are you their manager?

• What kind of supervision or personal control do you have over their functioning?

• We say ‘absolutely nothing’. We say you know next to nothing about how these organs function, or what makes them function.

• You are only being fooled into believing that you are the actor, the activator, the agent the master behind the functioning of all these physical components of your living experience.

• You think they are all working on your behalf; on Your Majesty’s Service.

5 : 6

Life – My Life and Life in General

You and I are ignorant of the laws governing our own life. Are we not?

To understand the meaning of ignorance in its relation to living-experience, we need to observe the way ignorance expresses itself, in the way we think, in what we believe, in what we speak and act.

• This is the standard method to be applied in understanding any word or phrase used in connection with life or living experience; that is by observing how it behaves in our own living experience.

5 : 7

To be ignorant is to have no knowledge of something or other.

• If I do not have knowledge of something or the other, it is the result of my ignoring, giving no attention to, or not taking into account that something or the other.

• Then what is it that I am ignoring in the course of my living experience?

• One thing is that I am not taking any serious notice of the role of nature in the functioning of my life.

5 : 8

You and I take our ‘life’ for granted

• There is no doubt you and I know a great deal about our life. Perhaps you and I think that is all we need to know. That is what we meant by ‘taking for granted’ that one knows all that one needs to know about something or other.

• Think for yourself whether this is true or not: “of all things in this world, it is my life, it is my-self, that I am most familiar with. The subject that I know best, that of which I understand everything, that which is my own, my personal and private life”.

• “My life is what I am actually and truly experiencing. What more can anyone else tell me about my life, something of which I have personal and private knowledge and understanding?”

5 : 9

Life in General

It is true that you and I have some knowledge and experience in living our personal and private life.

• Are you the only man or woman living in your family, in your community, in your country, in your world?

• What about other people’s life? Life in general?

• Do you know, actually and truly, what your friend, your wife or your husband thinks about you, feels about you - exactly in the same way that you know what you think and feel about him or her?

• Have you ever given thought to this kind of problem? Has that ever been a problem to you?

• When you say “Oh! I know him very well” If someone were to ask you “what do you know about him?” you will realize how much you have assumed, how you have given yourself more credit than you have a right to.

• You have taken for granted that whatever you think is right, whether it is about yourself or about some other person.

THE PRESENT WRITER’S SOURCE OF KNOWLEDGE AND UNDERSTANDING

• If nature has blocked our mind from seeing the causes and conditions that make things happen in nature, how are we to overcome nature’s restrictions and gain vision into things as they actually are?

• We said that if someone were to discover and reveal things to us, that would be a different matter.

• Think of the names of those scientists and medical researchers through-out human history, some of whom discovered the laws of nature, and others who applied these laws and invented things and developed technology to make our living experience free from a great deal of worry and suffering.

• You and I are now in a position to read and discuss these laws and their application in technology and medicine, without you and me having to go through all that hard work the pioneers had to go through.

• Our concern at the moment is of a different kind. That is the most fundamental problem relating to our life and living experience; briefly the problem of our existential suffering.

• Science, philosophy or even religion could not come up with a final solution for this problem, until the arising in this world of a very special human being 2630 odd years ago.

At this stage we acknowledge that we are basing our discussion on what the Buddha had discovered and taught us regarding human life and living-experience in general.

• What the Buddha discovered are the causes and conditions responsible for human suffering, which have been, and still are hidden from the view of the ordinary human intelligence.

• In other words this conditioning is not directly accessible to our intellectual understanding.

• You may not be willing to accept that statement at this stage.

• It is like our having to discuss the laws and conditions governing the phenomenon of day and night as discovered and explained to us by scientists of a past era.

• We do not have to go through all the hard work of observation, study and research that led them to their findings.

• Up to the time of the Buddha, as it is today, according to the belief of a large majority of human beings, the cause for man’s arising in this world was attributed to the Will of a personal God.

• God himself was believed to be an unchanging, undying, all powerful super-human personality.

• If that were so, the question in the minds of the few who dared to question was why should man, the creation of such a benevolent God, be subject to so much unbearable pain of mind and body ending in death?

• We come to the story of a pioneer who conducted research in this area, subjecting his own body and mind to test the validity of every hypothesis, every idea that occurred to him as a possible method of overcoming ignorance and gaining insight into what is true.

• After six long years of arduous work on his own mind and body, he gained vision into the laws governing man’s birth, growth, decay, disease and - the cause of endless sorrow, lamentation, pain, grief and despair that human beings are subjected to.

• He not only discovered the causes responsible for man’s suffering;

• He also discovered that the intuitive wisdom into the actuality of living experience, that he developed was condition sufficient to put an end to his own existential suffering for ever.

• This is the reason behind the statement that “ending of ignorance is the ending of all suffering”.

• He realized that he had once and for all put an end to all suffering as far as he was concerned.

• In his experience of Enlightenment he realized that each individual, by oneself, had to go through a process of mental purification in order to transform oneself from a state of total ignorance to a state of realizing the ‘truth’ that leads to the attainment of freedom from suffering.

• The biggest problem he was then faced with, was to deal with a population conditioned to follow the easiest way of depending on others- on imaginary deities and gods who had to be pleased through rites and rituals, offering gifts and prayer in order to receive their love (grace) and help to save themselves from disaster (salvation).

• Then he spent time developing teaching methods to help other people realize what exactly he himself had realized.

• He formulated a program of action comprising of eight courses that each individual person is obliged to follow, if he or she has sufficient confidence in what the Teacher was offering.

• What is of historic importance is that he has revealed to us in detail the method that helped him gain what he was looking for: freedom from all suffering.

• He made it freely available for all humanity to try it out in their own living experience, and achieve that vision and understanding he himself gained.

• Before long he had a large following who had qualified to be held up as living examples of perfection in purity, and realization of total freedom from existential suffering.

This is all the Resource Material on which we are basing our discussions.

6 : 2

A Royal Prince in search of a method of Liberation for all Humanity

Twenty five centuries ago (2630 years ego) there arose a very special human being in the region to the south of the Himalayan mountains in India.

This exceptional human being became deeply concerned over the existential suffering of humanity in general.

There was no reason for him to be worried about his personal life. He was the only son born to a royal family, a family of a Maharajah, the ruler of an independent territory in northern India. Until he reached the age of twenty nine he lived a life of comfort and luxury and had no occasion to think of other people’s suffering.

Most unexpectedly, when he was confronted with the reality that every human being born into this world was destined to suffer sickness, disease, old age and death, it brought about an emotional shock within him.

It was further aggravated when he was disillusioned with what he had been conditioned to believe – that whatever happened to man, good or bad, must be accepted as the Will of a Creator God, all powerful but benevolent.

Prince SiddhŒrtha as he was named, was determined, even at the risk of his own life, to find a way of redeeming humanity from its existential suffering.

How was he going to do this?

First he would have to do a search and find out if there were any persons of wisdom who could teach him how to stop human beings going through sickness, disease, old age and death; persons who could teach others how to live forever.

The belief was current among religious communities in India at that time, that there were persons of deep wisdom and experience who were venerated as rishis or sages who had answers to that kind of problem.

The way to qualify to be a sage was through the practice of yoga. Yoga meant a system of hindu philosophy and practice, practice of self- control designed to be united with powers that are above those of ordinary human beings. To become, or to be, a yogi or an expert in this system one had to take to asceticism, which meant living a life that does not give way to enjoying the desires and pleasures of normal men and women.

Prince SiddhŒrtha, as he was known decided to take to asceticism. One fateful night he took a last look at his wife sleeping with their new-born baby, and left the palace. He went in search of teachers reputed for their attainment in yoga and meditation. He mastered all the branches of yogic practice and meditation that all these teachers could teach, but he did not come across what he was looking for - a tested and proven remedy, for once and for all application, effective against all forms of mental and physical suffering that goes with living experience.

He did not come in direct contact with any divine or superhuman intelligence that could reveal answers to his questions. He realized that there was no teacher who could lead him to that, and that he would have to do the search on his own.

He went back into the forest and subjected his body and mind to extreme levels of severity in self-denial and ascetic practice. But even then he met with no success.

Towards the end of six years of self-torture, he came to the conclusion that extremes in torturing the body or in pampering the body would not lead to the perfection of the mind. He decided to give a trial to what he called via-media or the middle path in regard to practice of yoga – meditation.

Within that condition of physical and mental harmony, he hit upon a very simple technique of meditation – centering attention on the nature's gift of breathing in-and-out.

According to his own words, this technique, supported by his previous experience on similar lines, stage by stage, his mind reached a level of extraordinarytranquility free of all obstructions.

This was an intuitional attainment of pure consciousness at the deepest level of his sub-conscious mind.

We shall discuss in detail the practice of this method in part ii of this book.

HOW DO I RECOGNIZE AND UNDERSTAND NATURE ?

NATURE EXPRESSES ITSELF

IN THREE STAGES OF EVOLUTION

i. MATTER

ii. MATTER plusLIFE

iii. MATTER plus LIFEplus CONSCIOUSNESS

Matter

What do we understand by matter?

• The planet earth, the sun, the moon and the stars, and all material things on earth we see, such as sand, stones, rocks etc., are the most obvious forms of matter.

• The very foundation of my living experience –that is my physical body is altogether a Nature’s construction out of matter.

7 : 2

Matter plus life

The second level of Nature’s evolution is exemplified by the trees, the creepers and plants thriving on this planet earth.

• There is no question of matter being the basic element comprising plant life.

• The question is how has the element of life got incorporated into matter creating plants and trees treated as ‘live’?

• Matter is a substance that can be seen with my eyes or touched by my hands.

• But life is that invisible, immaterial force that makes it possible for certain material structures recognized as organisms in which various elements are made to work together in an organized manner, that is, one elementconditioning the other, in order to continue functioning, to continue growing.

• With the ceasing of this vital force the entire organism dies.

• Vitalism is a belief that there is a controlling force in living things that keeps plants, animals and human beings continuing to grow.

• A tree, for instance, is born out of a seed, or a root or a cutting, and grows, decays or gets old, and finally dies. These are the characteristics common to all living things. That is the way life makes itself visible to us.

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Matter plus Life plus Consciousness

• It is this additional faculty of consciousness that makes all animal and human creatures different from dead matter and plants and trees that are ‘alive’.

• Consciousness is a highly complex faculty that Nature has endowed upon all animal and human beings.

• By complex we mean that consciousness is not a simple element that exists or functions in isolation. It is inseparably associated with every thing that goes to make up what we call our life, and every function involved in what we call our living experience.

• In the absence of consciousness I will know nothing at all of my physical body or of the world outside, or of my mental life.

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Consciousness

Consciousness is a word which means a very special faculty that ‘reveals’ to my mind, or ‘brings to light’ everything that happens in my own living experience, such as everything that the senses perceive, resulting in feelings, thoughts, knowledge etc. all of which depend entirely on consciousness.

• According to this natural hierarchy, we said, that man and beast both belong to one and the same category.

• In the following pages we shall discuss why and how man should necessarily rise above the level of the animal, and then proceed beyond the level of common humanity and attain to a level that is described as special or ‘Noble’ state of being, a state of existence free from all conditions of worry, anxiety and suffering.

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The function of consciousness

When you are awake, when you are seeing an object, or hearing a sound, in other words, when you are experiencing anything at all, it isconsciousness that reveals, brings to light or presents that object of experience to your mind.

• It is similar to light – sunlight or any other form of light that enables the eye to see objects.

• When you are awake you are fully conscious.

• As long as you are alive you are conscious.

• In deep sleep, or under anesthesia, or in a feint, consciousness has not left you; it is only suspended; temporarily kept out of function.

• For consciousness to be a part of your living experience, there has to be an object that is being revealed.

• Object does not mean only a material thing; all things of mind like feelings, things perceived, intentions etc., are also objects of consciousness.

• If any object is present in your living-experience that means consciousness is revealing that object to your mind.

• If a visual object is present in your living-experience, there has to be some light; if there is light in contact with your eye there has to be some object that is being revealed.

• Consciousness discriminates or works separately with each of the five senses; it doesn’t mix what it sees with the eye, with what it smells with the nose.*

• Whereas consciousness associated with the ‘mind-sense’ reveals a coordinated picture of all of the information brought in separately by the separate senses.

NATURE IS ONE THING;

HUMAN ACTION IS SOMETHING ELSE

Nature means everything that happens on this earth, other than what man on earth thinks, says and does.

• What is the distinction?

• You and I, as human beings can imagine all that happens on this earth,

• But can we, or do we understand anything at all that is happening on this earth?

• Understanding requires that you and I know the laws governing the Nature of whatever happens on this earth, as well as the laws governing the nature of life that man leads on this planet.

8 : 2

Nature is a System

• The way to understand Nature is by watching the way Nature behaves, by observing the ways in which Nature expresses itself, by looking at the variety of things and events through which Nature expresses itself.

• Nature is defined as everything that happens on this earth, other than the things and events for which man alone is responsible.

• Among the kinds of things and events we look upon as natural are the sun, the moon and the stars; the trees, plants and the creepers, the rocks and the mountains, the rivers and the oceans; the natural events such as the day and night, the rain and the winds, floods and droughts, all of the animals roaming this planet.

• Naturalism is a philosophy that does not take into account what are called the supernatural and spiritual, and as such man himself is a product of Nature.

• Nature is a highly complicated system in which many things have been assembled to work together in groups.

• All the wealth that Nature possesses can be considered under four divisions on the basis of their structure:

Namely (i) Earth or solids, (ii) Water or liquids, (iii) Heat or temperature and (iv) Air.

• These terms by themselves are not important. What matters is my ability, your ability, to recognize them in the variety of ways each of them functions in the world outside, and more particularly within our own living body.

8 : 3

Nature’s Involvement in my

Living-experience

Nature’s role in our life is the basic, the most important, fundamental factor in the functioning of our life, but you and I are in the habit of taking for granted what Nature is doing to keep us alive.

• You and I do not even want to see, and accept it as a fact, and so acknowledge it.

• You and I do not want to give any credit to Nature for the contribution it is making to keep us alive.

• You and I have no interest in knowing and understanding those immaterial driving forces working behind the scenes to keep us alive.

• Let’s look at our attitude towards the vital organs, such as our heart and the lungs that work incessantly, with no stopping, whether by day or night, only to keep you and me alive, with no effort or approval on our part, not even knowing, leaving aside appreciation on our part.

• Is that not enough for you and me to understand the role played by Nature in keeping our life going?

• As a matter of fact, it is Nature that ignores you and me. Nature has no respect for you or me, however important and respectable we think we are.

• If you do not like to accept this as true, think of this: ‘Does your heart or any part of your body ever think or feel anything at all about your status in society?

• Does your stomach behave in a manner worthy of the respectable position you are holding in the business world or in the political field, or your status as a government servant?

8 : 4

Materiality and Mentality that make up My Living Experience

My life, my living experience comprises of two segments: each dependent upon the other.

One of matter or materiality; the other mentality functioning through the interaction of several factors confined to the mind, but fundamentally based on matter.

8 : 5

Nature is all matter –

And matter does not suffer

• Materiality or anything composed of matter, solids, liquids, heat and air does not experience livingor even feeling.

• Plants and creepers that are alive; rocks, stones and mountains; rivers and the oceans that are lifeless, do not see, hear, smell, taste or touch; have no sensations or feelings of emotions and sentiments of love, hate, desire or aversion; no pride or prejudice, no preference for this person or that person; do not think, do not imagine or construct views, opinions and theories; do not experience joy, pleasure, pain or suffering of any sort.

8 : 6

Materiality involved in my Living- experience cannot, and does not feel Pain or Pleasure

• My body that includes the five sense-organs is made of matter, all the objects outside perceived by my five sense-organs turned towards the world, are all composed of matter. They are completely devoid of pleasure or pain.

• Watch that irritation on your back, or your headache or pain in the knee.

• It is not the material or physical body that feels the pain, but the consciousness that links the body-sense to the mind-base.

• If there is no consciousness to reveal that feeling of pain, there will be no pain felt.

• The doctor can make me insensitive to, or unconscious of any pain by giving me an anaesthetic.

• The thing over there that you and I see is not trying to please you or me or to displease you or me in any way.

• The pleasure or un-pleasure that you and I are experiencing at this moment is not a quality or a characteristic of the material objects we are seeing or thinking about.

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Material Structure of my body

Let’s look at the 32 parts into which the Buddha has analyzed the human body.

• Let’s see if we can recognize whether each of them is more of solid or more of water and then see how air andheat are involved in their functioning within the body that is alive.

• The earth-mode or the solid-mode of the structure of my body can be seen through the following:

8 : 8

The earth-mode

May be Internal or External:

“The hair of the head, the hair of the body, nails, teeth, skin, flesh, sinews, bones, marrow of the bones, kidneys, heart, liver, pleura, spleen, lungs, intestines, mesentery, stomach, undigested food, excrement, or whatever other thing is hard and solid is internal is called the internal earth-mode.

8 : 9

Water-mode

May be Internal or External:

Whatever is liquid, become liquid that is: bile, phlegm, pus, blood, sweat, fat, tears, serum, saliva, mucus, synovial fluid (the fluid that lubricates the joints), urine, or whatever other thing is liquid, becomes liquid is internal water mode.

8 : 10

Fire-mode

This too may be Internal or External:

Whatever is heat, that by which one is vitalized, that by which one is consumed, that by which one is scorched, that by which one has munched, drunk, eaten, and tasted is fully digested, or whatever other thing is heat, become heat is internal fire-mode.

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Air-mode

Air-mode may be Internal or External:

Whatever is air, become air is internal: winds going upwards, winds going downwards winds in the abdomen, winds in the belly, winds permeating the limbs, in-breathing, out-breathing, or whatever other thing is air, become airy is internal.

We may fail to see the order in which the listing goes from the outermost visible solids to the innermost invisible solids and then moving on to matter that is watery, matter that is fiery, and matter that is airy.

• The Buddha’s purpose was not teaching us anatomy, but to lead us to realize the insubstantial nature of our body which is being caused and conditioned by impersonal, impermanent, natural elements, and as such cannot be identified with a permanent, unchanging entity of a ‘Self’ or Personality.

• Insubstantial means not having an independent existence of its own, but existing entirely on the strength of other conditions which are themselves insubstantial.

• It is meant to make you and me disillusioned with this body with which we are so charmed and delighted, with which we have fallen in love.

• You and I see the body – the product, but not the most essential elements that are determining the product for what it is - without which there can be no body.

• Does it ever occur to us how we deliberately ignore these facts of naturewhenever we look upon a body with desire and lust?

• Suffering involved in my living experience includes my having to undergo pain of mind arising from the unsatisfactory structure and the way of functioning of this physical body.

• The entire field of medical science is there to provide knowledge and ways of applying that knowledge to alleviate, to make less or remove altogether my physical suffering.

• Suffering that my mind has created for itself, through its ignorance, is much more serious; and that is the kind of suffering that can be removed by converting my ignorance into wisdom.

• Thus it is essential that you and I develop a comprehensive understanding of what we are actually experiencing as suffering.

• Why we are saying that is, that under modern civilized conditions of living, we are discouraged from displaying the slightest pain of mind; and instead we are provided with ample opportunities to forget and suppress our emotional feelings of pain.

• It is a fact that very often I feel my whole body as one bundle of aches and pains.

• That represents only one aspect of the un-satisfactoriness of the very nature of the physical bodythat you and I have inherited.

• I am ignorant of the fact that it is not the physical substance of the body that is in pain, but consciousness that permeates the whole body that conveys a sensation of the body-sense, to the mind-sense through the brain.

• The brain supported by the heart is presumed to be the physical base for the mind-sense.

• An anaesthetist can easily block that path of communication.

THE ACTUALITY

IN THE BUDDHA’S TEACHING

Conditionality – the law that governs

the functioning of all nature

including my body and mind

The Buddha’s insight into the nature of things, or in his deep knowledge of how things actually happen, he saw that all things in the universe, including human beings themselves, and their affairs, as well as their thought processes are brought about by specific causes and sustained by specific conditions and they have nothing whatsoever to do with supernatural forces.

The Buddha was concerned with the fact of human suffering, and revealing the surest way of releasing mankind from that state of suffering.

Where is suffering to be found? Where does suffering operate? Where does suffering originate? Where do we have to work to bring suffering to an end?

• The answer is in my own living experience; in your own living experience; in one’s own living experience, and not in the things over there in the world outside that we see, hear etc.

• As such the Buddha’s teaching recognizes whatever we actually experience with our six senses as being ‘real’.

• The world we observe with our senses is known as the empirical world. That is the world that we actually experience. It is real and substantial in that sense. That is the world that the Buddha’s teaching deals with.

• When we use the word empirical, we are referring to experience – experience gained through observation, that is through seeing and noting. Empirical rejects theory. Empirical is opposed to rational.

• What we experience with our senses is substantial. By substantial what we mean here, is the fact of having a material base.

• Theory presents before us accounts or views based on reasoning, for example on what may be the cause of, or what may be the relation between certain facts or certain events. It must be emphasized that rationality or reasoning is different from experience itself.

• We admit that what we are saying are not things that we have discovered on our own.

• Like all those principles in science and medicine that others have discovered and made available for us to study and use in application, this law of nature known as CONDITIONALITY or CAUSALITY has also been discovered by that pioneer discoverer, the Buddha.

• There is one big difference. He did not want us to believe, in fact he admonished us not to accept anything he taught as true, merely because of our faith and confidence in him.

• He wanted us to test by ourselves, within our own living experience, the correctness or otherwise of whatever he taught.

• For that purpose he has explained in great detail, for the general information of all humanity, the method of uncovering the truths of nature, in the manner that he himself succeeded in doing.

• He has prescribed that method as a compulsory component in the teaching curriculum that he has designed for us. We shall discuss this at a later stage.

• The Buddha developed within himself a technique of intuition or insight through which he could come in ‘direct’ contact with the Nature of all things.

• He gained knowledge through that ‘direct seeing’ of what actually happens in Nature.

• He discovered or rather ‘uncovered’, the fact that all things in the universe, including human beings, and their affairs as well as their thought processes, are being brought about by certain specific causes, and sustained by specific conditions, and these had nothing to do with any superhuman power.

• A cause is what produces an effect. Causality or Causation means a doctrine(a theory or a set of beliefs that has been established) to the effect that everything exists depending upon a cause or causes.

• Condition means a thing upon the fulfilment of which depends the fulfilment of another.

• A condition is what is essential for the existence of some particular thing or particular state of affairs.

• A condition is a decisive factor in the existence of some particular thing.

• Condition is a reason that is sufficient for a particular thing to happen.

• A condition is something without which that particular thing cannot happen, or cannot exist. That is why it is called a determination.

• So we prefer to call this teaching The Doctrine of Conditionality.

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Let’s take a simple example

that might help making it clear.

When you get a headache, you wish to know the relation between this condition of headache that is actually felt, and the possible cause that could have brought it about, in order that you may get rid of it, or prevent it happening again.

• Exposure to the hot sun, eye-strain, lack of rest and sleep, or indigestion or any one of these could have caused your headache.

• Between a cause and its effect there can be a time lag, for instance, it may be that you broke rest last night, and you developed the headache this afternoon.

• Similarly, you plant a seed today, and you will see a tree bearing fruits several years later.

• There you see the causal relation between the two events spreading over a period of time.

• This is an instance of a cause maturing itself into an effect over a period of time.

• It is the same causal relationship that exists or operates between any intentional action on your part, and its result, effect or consequence that will follow.

• On the other hand, your indigestion and your headache can be said to be conditional.

• Indigestion is the existing condition for the existing headache, they both are present together, at the same time, and when the indigestion is ended headache also ends.

• You cannot now undo an action you committed in the past. Past has passed away. How can you undo now some act you did some years ago, or in one of your past births, if you have developed that insight that can reveal your previous existence. What was done was done.

• But you can undo a present conditionthat is sustaining or is maintaining a present effect, even if that be the effect of some act you committed in the past, provided, you recognize that condition. Do you see the truth of this?

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Nothing in the Universe is Created.

All things in the Universe are Caused

FORMULA OF CONDITIONALITY

The Buddha has presented to us a very brief formula in which this causal principle has been expressed. It will prove to be of great benefit if this principle is kept in mind, and is rightly understood.

• Its understanding depends on your ability to interpret its meaning in relation to anything and everything that occurs at a given moment within your living experience.

• Understand that a principle means some basic truth that should be used as an essential instrument of reasoning in order to make certain things clear.

i. When there is ‘This’ – This is.

ii. With arising of‘This’ – This arises.

iii. When there is not ‘This’ – This is not.

iv. With cessation of ‘This’ – THIS ceases.

• We have indicated the subtle distinction that exists between ‘This’ and This, with a particular purpose in mind.

• There is one aspect of my living experience of which I am aware, of which I am quite conscious, of which I am knowledgeable, at the moment of experiencing. Examples are : My body that I am seeing and I am feeling, the objects I am seeing with my eyes, the sounds I am hearing, the things I smell, the things I taste, the things that are in contact with my body, and the ‘things’ that appear in my mind as mental images, thoughts and ideas.

• Those obvious elements of experience are high-lighted as this.

• Those aspects of my living-experience, aspects that my mind is ignoring, which are hidden from my view, for which I have no direct access –

• in other words, the causes and conditions such asignorance, consciousness, perceptions, conceptions responsible for the origination and existence of such states of pleasure and pain etc., are shown like ‘This’

e.g.–When there is (‘this’) consciousness –

there is (THIS) feeling of body.

With arising of (‘this’) consciousness –

there arises (THIS) feeling of body.

When there is no (‘this’) consciousness –

there is no (THIS) feeling of body.

With cessation of (‘this’) consciousness –

the feeling of (THIS) body ceases.

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(i) When there is ‘This’ - This is.

e.g. When there is ignorance as condition– the notion of ‘self’ exists.

• Here two things are shown in a particular way in which one thing is related to the other.

(i) ‘THIS IS’ refers to anything ‘that is existing.’

• For anything to exist, and to be worthy of being mentioned, it has to get involved in the experience of a living being.

(ii) This refers to whatever you are experiencing at any given moment –

• whatever you are seeing, whatever you are hearing, whateveridea or whatever view that is being held in your mind.

• You can have no doubt about what you are experiencing at this moment; nor can we say that you are ignorant of what you are experiencing at this present moment.

• What you do not know is that what you are experiencing now is possible, only because-there are certain other things on which this depends, things that must necessarily, essentially, exist along with ‘this that is present’.

• It is not a case of one thing merely keeping company with the other.

• It is a case of this thing that is before me, this experiencing of seeing, this experience of feeling, or whatever experience that I am going through, at this moment is being conditioned by something else, by something other than this.

Question: If what is being conditioned is different from what conditions it, then why doesn’t the formula differentiate between ‘that’ and ‘this’ rather than saying ‘this’ and this?

The formula deals with conditionality applicable to our living experience.

• It refers to two things that happen at once in our living experience; one is that which is existing at this moment. The other is the ‘same that’ which gives birth to the succeeding moment; let’s call it origination.

• If anything is existing at this moment, it means there is ‘this’ that is conditioning and sustaining this thing that is existing.

• Living-experience is a continuous movement in which one state of mind and body is constantly ‘changing over’ and ‘becoming’ another state of mind and body.

• That is when ‘this’ arises this also arises. That which causes the arising of something new, is the same thing ( with some subtle change) that was existing in the previous moment.

Please try and understand.

What my mind directly ‘sees’ are the ‘THINGS’. The THINGS make their appearance in my mind as fixed entities that are at rest, unmoving, still images of things, permanent and lasting, easy to be kept on record in my memory.

• What my mind ignores, or does not want to see ‘is that’ actuality of that seeing or hearing, actually what went on in my mind in order to create that thing in my mind.

• For instance, the series of events that enabled the mind to recognize the material object that was perceived; the feeling of pleasure or un-pleasure that arose, and the processes that led to the creation of an experience within my mind. These causes and conditions have been continuously arising as one state and ceasing in order to give birth to a new state until the mind created a permanent image out of that impermanent process.

• In this manner there are twelve factors built into what is known as Dependent-together-Arising into which our living-experience of this very moment has been analyzed, by the Buddha.

• The process of actuality is a case of one thing becoming, or one state of affairs ‘changing into’ or‘trans-forming’ itself into another state of affairs.

• If you separate and differentiate them and say “this is different from that” it can mean “one thing arises and ceases, allowing time for some other things to arise in its place”.Conditionality is not that.

• Look at the way your heart is functioning. Is there a moment when it ceases to exist, or ceases to function, and is waiting for something to arise and cause its revival?

• Those ‘somethings else’ on which existence and origination are dependent, are the most important conditions of which you and I are ignorant.

• Fortunately the Buddha has told us what those conditions are.

• The formula applies to all things of living experience in general.

• It is meant to be applied to each item of your living experience, and to see what is being conditioned by what.

• Conditioning is Nature’s way of functioning that has to do with the specific qualities of both factors – the conditioner and, that which is being conditioned.

• We have to acquire knowledge as to what that conditioning is; it is different in each case.

• This thing that I am experiencing right now, just cannot go on unless those other things are also there as processes of arising and ceasing whilesupporting, sustaining, or maintaining this thing, even though for that brief moment that I am experiencing it.

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Cause and condition

Do these refer to two different things? If so what is the difference? Or are they the same?

In terms of whatactually happens, causality and conditionality are the same.

• But, we used the term cause to make you understand that the present experience of yours has been brought into existence, by something else. Withthe arising of – ‘this’, this also arises’. That ‘something else’ has been the cause that made this happen. If that cause did not arise, what you are experiencing now would not happen.

• We used the term condition to make you understand that what you are experiencing now, is being maintained and sustained by some other thing or things that are existing together with what you are experiencing . “When ‘this’ is – ‘this’ also is”.

Please Note : What we are trying to impress upon you is the importance of learning to look at life and everything that goes with experiencing life as actualities and not as things not as finished products of the mind.

• Our attachment to things outside and things imaginedin our minds has made us completely ignore and overlook the fact that all our life is one of actuality that keeps moving on and on –

• rather than of things – that are at rest. Whether what we experience as our physical body, or what we call our mind and everything going on in our minds are all arisings as one state of being and ceasing or changing over to another state of being, known as ‘transient’or ‘transitory’.

• This is not evident in the material things, or in themental concepts the mind has constructed.

• We can see this happening only in the psychological components or constituents of so-called permanent things and fixed notions, ideas and views that have been conceived by the mind.

• This is what this formula of conditionality has been designed to teach us.

• We differentiated cause and condition only to help you understand that whatever you are experiencing right now, is totally dependent on other elements, both for its origination and existence. This is conditionality that you are not directly aware of.

• The way the statement has been worded in the language of the Buddha, the cause, in this instance, does not refer to something that occurred in the past, produced this effect and then moved away from the scene.

• We should also understand that the words cause and condition do not represent unchanging, fixed entities. All things in living experience are subject to change as they go on continuously changing from one condition to another.

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What is called Ignorance is actually the Ignorance of Conditionality

• We have used so many words in order to impress upon you the extraordinary role played by conditionality working behind every item of your living experience.

• What is unfortunate about the nature of our mind is that our mind cannot have direct access to those conditioning factors, and how that conditioning process works.

• That is what is called ignorance;my own ignorance of the actual nature of my own mind that is responsible for all my suffering in this life.

• Actuality operates not only in the sphere of mental experience but also all operations of Nature are governed by actuality of causes and conditions.

• Ignorance of the actuality, that is the causes and conditions behind the functioning of Nature wasthe factor that eluded the understanding of our ancestors regarding who or what was behind the creation of day and night.

• Actuality refers to causes and conditions operating behind everything we experience.

• We say ‘behind’ because they work ‘behind the scenes’ that we are being entertained to.

• It is this actuality of causes and conditions (i.e. conditionality) that nature has very smartly hidden away from everybody’s view.

• Nature has very good reasons for doing that.

• Just imagine, if all those vital organs – the conditions without which your life cannot be, that are being hidden inside your chest and belly, were made transparent; so that their most fascinating and ceaseless operations would be visible to everybody around you.

• Do you think anyone will fall in love with you?

• If not what chance is there for nature’s policy of propagating the species?

If you want to understand the true nature of anything that exists,

• look for the causes that have come together to create or originate that thing, and the conditions that are working together to sustain the existence, for the time beingof what has been created.

9 : 7

(ii) With arising of‘This’ – This arises.

• We dealt with those things that you are experiencing at the present moment; things that are clearly and readily perceived by your senses, things about which you have no doubts whatsoever, and the fact that they are being sustained by some other things of which you have no knowledge at all.

• Now the question is; how did those things that you are experiencing, actually come to be?

• Sustaining is different from originating.

• According to the way this principle is formulated, it doesn’t say that one ‘thing’ arose first, and from that the other ‘thing’ arose in course of time; as in the case of a seed being buried in the soil, and in course of many months or years the seed developing to be a tree laden with fruits.

• What it says is that one thing arises, and as it arises it causes something else also to arise.

• As one thing happens it makes something else also happen.

• This is an actuality to be seen and realized in one’s living experience of each moment.

• This is what we call a cause, arising together with what it creates.

• A case of ‘dependently arising–together’ with the thing on which it depends.

• Behind everything that is happeningin your living experience, there lies that which made it happen.

Look at this.

• Yesterday you were concerned with a problem that affected the people in your area. You intended to write a letter to the Editor of the local news paper. You went through the stages of thinking about it, rehearsing the sequence of ideas, drafting, typing, and finally posting the letter.

• Do you not realize that the original intention that pushed you into action or motivated you to act lives on in your mind (undergoing changes in regard to its power of influence over you) even after you completed your task?

• The original intention kept arising, changing or transferring itself into the typing of that letter. It did not come to cessation.

• Our mind, however, has no direct access to that which is actually causing the thing that we are experiencing.

• I am asked to develop the mental habit of looking behind the sight I am seeing, behind the sound I am hearing, behind the idea that occurs in my mind, and ‘uncover’ the causes that are creating it, and the conditions that keep it going.

• In which direction am I to look? Not in the direction from which the sound is coming, or not at the thing that is before my eyes, But in the direction of my own interior experience of living that is responding to, or reacting to what is in sight, or what is being heard.

• That is: consciousness of matter, consciousness of feeling, consciousness of perception and consciousness of thinking, all of which together make up ‘my’ living-experience of the moment.

• Otherwise I will be allowing myself to be fooled by what my senses are perceiving and consciousness is revealing.

{Rather than being mesmerized by that pretty figure you are gaping at, why don’t you learn to shift your conscious attention from the external object, to your internal consciousness that is covering and conditioning that experience of seeing and feeling.

It should be noted, however, that consciousness cannot be conscious of itself. It can be recognized only through the things that consciousness brings to light. They are the matter, feelings, percepts and concepts etc. That is what makes it difficult for you to shift your eyes or rather your attention away from the material figure you are gaping at}

9 : 8

(iii)When there is not‘This’ – this is not

This fact of what is not, should be looked at together with what is.

When‘This’is – this is

When there is not‘This’ – this is not-.

• This statement emphatically brings out the relationship that exists between ‘this’and the other (‘this’).

• Whatever I am experiencing at this moment, by way of feeling, perceiving (perceiving means: seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching, being conscious of objects and forming ideas etc.) are not things that exist by themselves, are not events that are happening on their own.

• Their acting–together or togetherness is emphasized by the fact that, if the supporting conditions are not there, if they are absent, there can be none of those desirable or undesirable things that go to make up my living experience at any moment.

• It is left for me to realize the importance of those conditions that are actually making me live with no knowledge or awareness on my part.

• This fact of togetherness or the interaction or inter-relatedness of things of experience teaches me something that I am unaware of.

• That is that the causes that brought about what I am experiencing, don’t go away, leaving me to enjoy or suffer what I am experiencing. They cannot go away because ‘the conditioned is what is built out of the conditions themselves.

9 : 9

(iv) With cessation of‘This’ – This ceases.

• It is easy for us to understand this teaching from the long range point of view of our own life; that is looking at life from the time of our birth up to the time of our death.

• Only things that we have to be concerned with, are the conditions essential for the upkeep of this life, from moment to moment - from day to day.

• The conditions essential seem to be the requisites of food, clothing, shelter and the medical needs. These are no big problems now-a-days, for most people, any way; not for those of you who are reading this material.

• The statement ‘With the ending of‘This’–This also ends’ gives us the clue as to what should be done, if we are seriously concerned with putting an end to all of our existential suffering, suffering involved in the way we experience life.

‘This’has to be ended.

• The preceding three statements made clear what ‘This’means:

• If there is anything that I am experiencing right now, it is made possible by the presence of

‘this’ ;namely a condition.

• A condition is something or some situation without which a given event never occurs.

• This present experience happened along with the happening of something else. That means there is something that caused this experience of mine.

• If those conditions that make it continue to exist, even for a moment, are absent there is no way I can have this present experience.

• Bringing to an end that which is responsible for my suffering is not impossible.

The ‘cessation’ mentioned here refers to the total extinction of all conditions that have the potential to go on continuing even after the break-up of this physical body at death.

• The arising and ceasing - the moment to moment transience or transformation that we dealt with in the I^st, II^nd and III^rd phases of the Formulation referred to our current living-experience.

• The Phase IV refers to – the possibility once-and-for all of the discontinuation of all conditions that can cause the arising of another existence.

• It is true that your living experience is built and sustained by causes and conditions. If it were said that these conditions are integral to and inherent in what has been conditioned, then their removal and bringing to an end would be impossible.

• My face is made up of my mouth, nose, eyes, and ears. If these are effaced then there can be no face.

• But the kind of conditions that link the current existence with the next birth are psychological in nature, and are effaceable, can be obliterated never to arise again, and reach what is called an unconditioned state. In other words state of Enlightenment or Nirvana.

• But this would not be much of a deal for those who believe that the current existence is all they have, and even if there is going to be another birth that too would be a perpetual carnival just as the present one.

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The way to end my Anger

• If I am angry, that anger cannot go on without being supported and sustained by consciousness (of some object)perceived by me, as undesirable, and therefore deserving to be annihilated, destroyed.

• Then that thing –that consciousness(of an object)in my mind is to be looked upon as the essential factor, as the essential condition, as the decisive factor that decides, as the determination that determines that this(anger in my mind) should exist in this manner, and in no other way.

• That is the condition on which this thing (my anger) dependsfor its existence.

• The more I think of it the more angry I get.

• On the other hand, If I have cultivated the habit of shifting my attention from those external objects that stimulate my anger, (that person or that event)

• and instead attend to the internal causes and conditions that are active within my own living experience, namely: the consciousness of the outside person or matter, the consciousness of perception of that object, and the consciousness of the accompanying feelings, the anger will definitely come to an end.

• This is a case of eliminating the non-knowledge (ignorance) of the actual conditions causing my suffering.

• The proof of my ignorance of the actuality,- my habit of ignoring the actual conditions responsible for my anger, is shown by the fact that I concentrate my anger upon the visible object or the person outside.

• Had I been wiser, I would find some sensible way of correcting the blundering individual, if that is the case, rather than subjecting myself to so much self-torture.

9 : 11

What is it that causes Pain and Pleasure ?

• My pleasure or your pleasure is not in the objects that you and I are seeing; my aversion is not in that heap of muck that is seen; my delight is not in the rose I am looking at; my desireis not in the face that I am admiring.

• Matter does not need to depend on me or you to exist; matter can exist on its own.

• Matter can exist in total independence of my consciousness of seeing, hearing, feeling, or thinking.

• But there can be no living experience for you or me without matter getting involved in it.

• Is it not a matter for serious consideration why we direct our greed, lust and hatred towards ‘things’ material, mental constructions out of matter that is dead?

9 : 12

Ignorance of this natural law of conditionality is the fundamental cause of my Existential Suffering

• Non-knowledge and non-recognition of this Natural Law in the way it operates within (my) living experience has created the delusion that all of this living experience is ‘Mine’, ‘I am the one’ responsible for everything that happens within this living experience (of mine).

• Ignorance of this Natural Law has created the notion of “I - Me and Mine” as the Self, as the Ego, as the Person, as the Personality, who owns, and who is responsible for everything that happens within this living experience.

• That is the reason for ‘living experience’ being expressed always as ‘My’ or ‘Your’ living experience. There is no other way of speaking or writing about it.

• Living experience has beenidentified as my self; which means all that I experience is identically the same as my self, my ego, my ‘personality’. I am in the habit of personalizing everything that I perceive, feel and think about.

• Living experience, on the other hand, is totally under the control and domination of an insensitive, unfeeling, impersonal, causal process that is responsible for its creation.

• Can you expect anything other than sufferance of conflict and disappointment from a situation, where a notion of a Self, imagined to be permanent and unchanging, identifying itself with things in life that are being conditioned by a causal process that incessantly goes on changing and transforming everything in one’s living experience ?

• There is a way of coming out of this self-created predicament. That we shall be discussing in Part II of this book.

If you follow the instructions, and keep systematically removing the impurities from your mind, there will certainly arise a moment, when you will be seeing all your living experience as nothing but natural, impersonal, interactions of causes and conditions, absolutely free of your mind’s fabricated ego or self, that converts natural phenomena into personal sufferings of pain and pleasure. That will be Freedom Perfect, Bliss of Emancipation, described as Nirvana.

9 : 13

Existential suffering – What is it ?

Existential has to do with the conditions attached to this life by its very nature. If we say existential, it has to do with living experience, it means that it refers to what my mind makes out of my life.

How does life’s suffering express itself in the individual’s living-experience?

• Sorrow, lamentation, pain, grief and despair are a few of the words that describe the conditions of suffering that all human beings would desire to put an end to.

• The very thought of inevitable ageing and death, when applied to oneself, is the worst pain we all would like to avoid, if there is any possibility.

• It is that possibility that the Buddha has confirmed through his teaching and his example.

• Thedifficulty is that it requires to be actualized by oneself through one’s own living experience. That requires effort and exertion.

• The ordinary human being, conditioned from time immemorial to beg and pray for such things to be conferred on oneself, by the grace of invisible super human Beings, will naturally resist and reject such demands for effort and exertion on the part of oneself.

What is it that you and I are asked to bring to an end?

What is it that we would like to end?

There can be no mistake that what we want to end is whatever that causes and conditions our unhappiness, our suffering.

• The Five Basic Components of my living experience are conditioned, and in turn they condition my living experience.

• So does it mean that it is my living experience that I am asked to bring to an end?

• How am I to do that?

• Then where is the one who experiences that bliss that results from liberation from suffering?

There certainly is something that can be ended without putting an end to my life.

• There is something that has been caused and conditioned – something that has been originated and is being sustained, making my journey through life most un-satisfactory,

un-pleasurable and un-happy.

• It is the Delusion of Self that you and I are asked to bring to an end to free ourselves from all suffering.

• It remains for us to discuss

What this ‘Self’ is –

Why it is regarded as a Delusion –

What are the causes and conditions responsible for originating and sustaining this delusion ?

And how can ‘self’ be brought to an end, in the face of very serious opposition from my own Self ?

THE PROBLEM OF IMPERMANENCE

The biggest problem for which the human mind has been compelled to find a solution, is that of impermanence of life.

• It should not be difficult for anyone to realize that ‘things’ are not permanent, or not eternal, or not ever-lasting .

• One sees most ‘things’ passing away, and there is no difficulty in inferring that all things will pass away in course of time.

• The changing nature of life, in its birth, old age, disease and death, causing grief, lamentation, and sorrow, are obvious enough to strike even the average intelligence.

10 : 2

The impermanence we are concerned with, is in relation to an extremely subtle realm, that which we take to be our own being, mental and physical, which alone entails suffering.

• Most minds would prefer to go through life, thoughtlessly shoving these under cover of temporary pleasure, or at best reconciling themselves to the suffering deemed inevitable, about which nothing can be done.

• There must yet remain some rare minds that would want to probe into the whole situation and look for a solution.

• We count you who are reading this material, to be among those rare minds.

• The problem of impermanence is not one confined to the impermanence of the objects of the world outside that I want to possess and enjoy. If I lose one thing I can obtain another.

• The problem is really the conflict between the arising - changing - ceasing actuality of all my sense- perceptions and the permanent concepts my mind constructs out of them.

• One thing pleases me this moment, next moment it displeases me, and I want something else.

• The impermanence blocks my desire to possess and enjoy the things that please me, the things I wish would last for ever. I want the things that displease me to get out of my life for good.

• When everything I experience is so short-lived, and goes away so fast, how can I derive any satisfaction out of anything?

10 : 3

This very Moment is of Momentous Significance for All of Us

The word ‘moment’ refers to ‘a point in time’, or ‘a short space of time’.

• The word ‘instant’also has the same meaning.

• When we say ‘a point’ in time it suggests that a moment is ‘static’, at rest with ‘no movement’.

• That notion is put right by the word ‘momentary’ which means “going on only for a short time”.

• Also the word ‘instantaneous’ says “taking place without waiting an instant”.

• These Dictionary definitions are not of value by themselves, unless we examine how they express themselves within our own living-experience.

• Let’s do that –

• Can I experience ‘a point in time’ in the way I experience my life?

• I feel that I am alive, all the time I am awake.

• I know that I see things, hear sounds and thoughts arise in my mind.

• I am aware of some body-functions such as breathing-in-and-out, and the beat of the pulses.

• I cannot recognize any ‘point in time’ in these functions that I experience.

• What is ‘momentary’ about them?

• Am I right when I say that they “go on non-stop”?

• Does my breathing run on like an express train?

• Does my heart beat run on like the running of the motor-car engine?

• In a way ‘yes’, because if they stop my life ceases to exist.

10 : 4

Meaning of Moment

from the Point of View of ‘Conditionally”

• Is it not more correct to say that these body-functions, and mental events which I experience as ‘non-stop’, are really things that “move on changing from one condition to another” as meant by the word ‘transition’ or ‘transitory’?

• Is it difficult for me to see them as “having short existence and quickly going by” as expressed by the words ‘transient’ and ‘momentary’?

• One thing is clear; that these are not things ‘fixed’, or ‘static’ in the sense of being ‘at-rest’ un-moving. They are processes of “operations that go on with a number of changes connected with one another”.

• Nature has completely blocked out our vision from this actuality, for reasons best known to Nature, making not only you and me, but all mankind suffer as a result of not being able to see this actuality.

• If some attractive object shows up for a moment, and then vanishes from sight, and then reappears after a little while in a different guise or form, can you appreciate the beauty of it?

• Your attention will be engaged with a particular sight at this moment, then that will vanish and some sound will draw your attention. That too will vanish yielding place to some horrible image of something that surfaces in your memory. The next moment something else will occupy your mind wiping out all the previous mental pictures with their accompanied feelings.

• Every time, a new percept catches your attention means, that you are pleased one moment, the very next moment something that displeases you crops up; and the next will make you neither pleased nor displeased.

• Every time your eye blinks, or every time you breathe-in or breathe-out, youenter into a new experience, with a new set of Five Constituent Elements of Experience (consciousness of matter, feeling, perception and thought conceptions)

• Now just consider whether this is a happy and pleasurable way of going through life; all kinds of feelings arising - ceasing and arising, giving you no chance to take anything in hand, to make it ‘stay put’ for a little while.

• For you to embrace an interesting object, it must stop running.

10 : 5

It is not the object of your attention that keeps running non-stop, but the entire

Five Constituents of your own living experience.

• Is it difficult for you to understand, that in order to enjoy something perceived by the senses (a sight, a sound, a smell, a taste, touch or idea), it has to be held, or taken in hand, in order to continue paying uninterrupted attention to it?

• The transitory, transient, impermanent nature of your living experience goes on in complete opposition to your wishes and your sense-desires. But you don’t see this happening that way.

10 : 6

Our mind has learnt several tricks

to overcome this

natural behaviour of our mind.

• One is to bundle up, and tie up these moving, restless elements of existence into thoughts, ideas, concepts, views, opinions, notions that can be held in mind as relatively unchanging, un-moving stable entities. Things that exist by themselves in opposition to the percepts that arise only to cease.

The main reason for, or the actuality behind, this unceasing change, the impermanence of the mental constituents of experiencing itself, (feelings, perceptions etc.) the instability of everything we experience, is the fact that all these that we experience are caused and conditioned by other elements.

• These other elements are the ones that arise and cease, and as the constituents arise and cease these constituted things must necessarily change their nature, their form gets transformed. They don’t cease altogether, merely because some of their components have been arising-changing-and ceasing. The result is that the constitued thing becomes un-substantial-cannot be “a thing-in-itself”.

• There lies the justification for the mind to grasp and hold matter, feeling, percepts and conceptions the Five Constituents of Living experience and to personalize the whole thing, so that some pleasure can be derived from living this life created by insensitive materiality of Nature.

10 : 7

Where is this happening? Is it something I can see? is it something I can experience?

It happens within your own living experience, But hidden from your view; one of those things of which you and I have no direct experience; of which we are ignorant.

• Buddha has given us the method of gaining that direct view.

• Until then we can describe it, if possible to be intellectually grasped, to be conceptually visualized.

• But we must accept the fact, that intellectual conceptualization will not do for right understanding.

• This kind of change or impermanence in the nature of our living experience can best be understood by the way our physical body is functioning, particularly the vital organs.

• Think of the way your lungs are functioning to keep you alive. You can realize this as an actuality, by learning to watch your in- and-out- breathing. They are the conditions without which your body cannot exist. If your breathing comes to an end, that is the ending of your precious life.

• Watch your breath ceasing and ending. In-breath ceases, only to allow the out-breath; out-breath ceases, only to allow the in-breath;

• The air that comes out, is not the same air that you took in. What is there to prevent you from breathing-in some poisonous gas?

• Can you understand what we mean by saying that ‘the breath’ is not an entity that exists by itself; not an entity that is permanently fixed, that remains unchanged even for a moment?

• Can you visualize that your breathing-in-and-out is caused and conditioned by the expansion and contraction of your lungs?

• So we say that breathing is dependently arising and dependently ceasing on the action of the lungs. Similarly the functioning of the lungs is dependent on its in-take of air from outside.

• The fact of arising is the same as its momentary existence. Birth means the same as bringing into visible existence. Ceasing implies change into a different form, i.e. trans-forming.

• The action of the lungs is caused and supported by a variety of other conditions.

• All conditions, in turn, arise and cease depending on the arising and ceasing of other conditions.

• When we use the words ceasing and arising you get the impression that something is destroyed and some other thing is created.

• You can understand that no such thing happens in the way yourheart or the lungs or the kidneys are functioning uninterruptedly, without their coming to a stop and waiting for new organs to appear and take their place.

10 : 8

Are you the Agent who is Manipulating

this extraordinary Function of the

Vital Organs? If not who?

• The lungs are made to function by some other factors; so we say “functioning of the lungs is dependent on natural causes and conditions that are not visible to you, of which you are ignorant.”

• Similarly you are ignorant, or un-aware of the causes and conditions on which your happiness and suffering are dependent.

When a thing has arisen, why won’t it stay for good?

When a thing ceases, why won’t it stay ceased for ever?

• When something is pleasant and satisfying, naturally you would want it to go on for ever, but what if it is unpleasant and unsatisfying? Do you wish that also to go on for ever?

CONDITIONALITY, CAUSALITY,

CAUSATION TRANSIENCE, IMPERMANENCE AND CHANGE

THEY ALL MEAN THE SAME THING.

You may want to refer to the Dictionary to get at their meaning.

• That is alright, but what is more important is to become aware of their actuality within your own living experience.

• How can causation be explained as change or impermanence?

• Causation we explained as the arising of one thing being the cause for originating something else;

• and the existence of that which was originated, being sustained by that which brought it into existence.

• If you are trying to understand the universality of causation and impermanence by watching the origin and existence of objects in the world outside, such as a tree in your garden, or the running of your automobile engine, most likely you will be disappointed.

• Instead of that, if you turn your attention towards the functioning of your mind in the act of looking at the tree, in the act of being aware of the consciousness involved in seeing or perceiving, consciousness of the mental image of the tree, consciousness of feeling, and consciousness of thoughts and ideas etc, you are definitely experiencing the actuality of origination or arising and ceasing of mental elements which, in fact, is causation and impermanence.

• We repeated consciousness to impress upon you, that if it were not for your consciousness- the most essential condition that reveals whatever thing that you are experiencing, there can be no ‘existential’ universe for you. But of course, you are unaware of that actuality.

• Consciousness is the cause responsible for making me aware of my physical and mental components (origination)

• My physical and mental components are the conditions necessary for consciousness to show itself up (in existence)

• What is actually happening is a process of one state of mind changing or transforming itself into another state. Trans-form means changing its character, or becoming different in form.

• Once it serves as a cause to give birth to a particular state of mind, then it serves as condition to keep it existing for an instant, until it falls away changing thereby the nature of the conditioned. It is the conditioning factors that constantly keep arising and ceasing - thereby changing the state, the nature, the form of that which is being conditioned.

• When it comes to the new origination the cause and condition are a collective operation of the previous stages, namely: consciousness of body and mental components will be the cause as well as condition for originating and keeping alive the six sense-bases.

• When we speak of origination and existence depending on other previous states, as a matter of actuality, there is no destruction of one thing and creation of another.

• There is only an unbroken chain of events in sense-experience; one coming after the other, as a process of uninterrupted continuity and within that stream of uninterrupted continuity there occurs change.

• Thus impermanence, or change cannot be separated from the Nature’s actuality of causation or conditionality.

• For example your physical body is constituted by a host of conditions. Food supply, water supply, air supply, blood supply. The quality of life changes from moment to moment, i.e. arising, changing and ceasing. Accordingly the nature, the quality of the body keeps changing, transforming, falling ill – getting well etc., until finally dying.

• Death doesn’t mean ending of all conditions.

• The craving to go on existing, along with other mental accumulations have not come to extinction.

• These conditioning factors will cause the arising of a new birth.

11 : 2

When an action ceases,

what makes it arise again?

Let’s see if that can be explained through a practical example.

• I want to give an answer to this question you raised.

• Wanting, intention or motivation then is an over-all guiding condition.

• By way of answer, an appropriate thought comes to my mind.

• That thought gets established in my mind as the center, as the theme for the response I want to develop.

• That wanting or intention of mine, using the tool of attention, roams around this theme in search of other ideas and words to express the meaning of that central thought.

• Then what comes out are the words – words that are spoken or get written- a physical action.

• When the action of typing is on, the guiding condition of my original intention of wanting is not there looking over my shoulder, and interfering with what I type.

• It has ceased being active for the time being, but it has not left my mind for good. It remains behind in the background as the main condition supporting and sustaining my action.

• So is the role of the central theme - one time an essential condition. It has ceased to be active but settled down as an article of memory, arising occasionally to remind me that I should keep to the chosen track.

• If my attention had got stuck to the theme as a permanently fixed entity, my mind would not have been able to move around and search for ideas or words to express those ideas.

• Let’s see the way that impermanency or transience expresses itself through the process of my typing this material.

• The mind decides (intends) on an idea to be expressed. The decision is caused by a wish, a desire (craving) for something the mind likes to express.

• Then decides or intends on the form (the concept) of the sentence to frame that idea.

• Then intention using the tool of attention looks around for words to compose that sentence, and finally begins the action of typing. I typedirecting conscious attention to the first letter of the word that I have in mind, and that attention ceases the instant the first letter appears in print.

• Then arises the notion of the second letter needed to build that word.

• In this process conscious attention arises and ceases, and arises again, but within an uninterrupted continuous stream formed out of the pre-determined conditions dictating from behind, until the whole sentence is completed.

• If at any stage the conscious attention remains stuck to one letter or one word, unable to move beyond that, you can imagine what that would be like. Then nothing gets done; life stands still.

• So do you not see that this natural law of impermanency– arising and ceasing of all things, is meaningful and purposeful?

11 : 3

It is not wise to be unhappy because all things are impermanent

All Nature is totally dependent on the universal Law of Impermanence.

• If it were not for this nature of impermanence can we speak of movement, growth, development, evolution, dynamism and even experience?

• Our concern is with human suffering and what causes human suffering. And so impermanence or change must be understood in that context.

• Anything that makes me happy or miserable is an item of experience - a thing noted by the senses converted into a perception of the mind-sense.

• They are the ones that the mind gets hold of as desirable or as undesirable; they appear to the mind as ‘things’ (dhammŒ) that have become articles of possession of the self that I am.

• If they are pleasurable, I want them to remain unchanged, permanently with me. If they are undesirable, intolerable they must be annihilated.

• What is not visible to me is that the actuality, the reality of the elements that have gone into their make-up, how they come into existence in my mind, how they behave or express themselves within my mind. -

• It is the Constituents of this experience, the component parts of this mental object that go on arising, changing from one state to another in order to keep that mental object ‘alive’ in my mind.

• mental objects are kept alive by an un-ceasing process of seeing or hearing, (as the case may be) recognizing, and building mental concepts out of them.

• So these constituting elements are for ever arising-changing and ceasing affecting the mental object so constituted.

• But the mind, unaware of all this, conceives a permanent object and identifies the mind’s own view of an unchanging permanent self with this mental object that is being conditioned and maintained by arising-changing ceasing elements.

• Can you expect anything other than frustration and disappointment from such an unrealistic ‘affair’?

• When the constituent elements change, that necessarily affects the constituted thing; old spare parts may be replaced with new ones. The product does not come to an end.

• The baby transforms to be a child - the child grows up to be a teen-ager, teen-ager becomes a middle-ager and from there begins the process of decay of the physical constituents.

• The individual, the ‘person’ has remained the same through all these phases of change.

• Even physical death does not mean the end of the process – There are psychological elements such as craving to exist, will to live that will provide continuity for this being until the delusion of self is completely dissolved.

THE CONDITIONALITY THAT TRANSFORMS INSENSITIVE MATTER

INTO MAN OR WOMAN WHO

SUFFERS PAIN AND PLEASURE

12 :1

How a simple experience gets started.

Please try to recognize the following process within your own experience:

(i) There is the eye, that is one of the five sense organscomposed of matter

i.e. matter imbued with life.

(ii) The visible matter or material forms outside strike the eye through the medium of light.

(iii) That awakens the visual-consciousness that reveals visual objects.

• The coming together of (i) the eye (ii) the external object and (iii) visual-consciousness brings about or conditions (iv) contact.

• Contact functions in two stages:

• Initially contact causes a natural state of sensitivity or sensation paving the way for a state of perceiving and recognizing the sense-object.

Contact in its initial stage, comprising the consciousness of a visual object that is in the world outside causes a(v)sensation.

• This sensation attracts (vi)the attention of the mind-sense.

• (vii)The mind-sense takes charge of the data brought in by the eye-sense and moves on to what is called (viii) perceiving.

• Perceiving or perception absorbs the qualities of the object extracted by the eye-sense. What is called attention plays a role in this action.

• It is (ix)Intention or volition that directs and guides (x) attention to assess the qualities of the object that is in sight.

• This act results in getting to know more about the object.

• As a result of the mind’s act of perceiving, the original sensation, for the first time develops into a deeper emotional state of feeling.

• The way that happens is of paramount importance. There are sense-perceptions flowing in from the six sense-bases, all the time we are awake. These percepts lead to the second stage of contact.

• This represents the crucial stage of the external, impersonal, material, objective world perceived by the six sense-bases, entering into the interior world of mentality in order to initiate what is called experience, beginning withperception accompanied by feeling.

• Contact is the moment of materiality getting a footing on the mental life of the individual in order to give birth to the Delusion of a Self.

(xi) To feel is to be conscious of, by being in touch with, those qualities of the sense-object.

• Consciousness of Feelingis a very strong state of experience. Feeling has a tendency to go beyond the limits of the qualities of the object perceived by the mind-sense plus (eye-sense, in this instance).

• Feeling immediately arouses the mind’s (xii)instinctual desire or craving to hold on to that feeling permanentlyas a crutch to (xiii) continue existing i.e to be, to become.

• Feeling cannot continue without some-thing of substance - concrete or imaginary, tobe clinging on to.

12 : 2

Desire to-be, to become

• The primary instinct of an existing organism is to continue existing, to continue living, to continue to-be, to go on becoming as opposed to dying.

• For the mind to be, to become, the mind has to be consciously holding on to something, to attach, and cling to something or other.

• When I am in a good mood, or a bad mood, I feel I am living, I am existing as a fact.

• That means my mind, at that moment, is consciously holding on to something that could be felt as ‘real’.

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Why is it essential for the mind to be holding on to something to feel that one exists?

• All those causes and conditions that preceded feeling moved on so fast, according to their transitory nature.

• The nature of the consciousness of that visual image, the resulting consciousness of sensation and perception, were all so transitory, transient, impermanent - arising and passing away within my mind so fast, yielding no substance that could be touched to derive any satisfaction.

• (You) could not have been even aware of them happening, although we asked you to try.

• But when the process reached this point of feeling, that was the only thing ( you) felt you could easily become aware of.

• Towards this end, feeling compels or conditions (xiv)craving (i.e.strong desire) to apply the brakes on this fast arising and vanishing sense process, and to stop and halt its unceasing movement for a while,

• in order to get at an object that could be felt, experienced, and enjoyed.

• That is brought about by craving, desparately hanging on to, clinging on to, the totality of all of those elements of: sense-object, sensation, perception, feeling, thought processes etc.

• Please note:-

• That these elements are the Five Basic Components of your living experience.

• That means, your whole life, in its entirety of body and mind, is being subjected to, is being brought under the control of, craving to be.

• Clutching and grasping all of them in one bundle, halting their movement for a moment- (it only seems so) a moment that appears to last for ever.

• That is thehistoric psychological moment of creation, a coming into being(xv) of an ego, a self, a person who will henceforth dominate the entire living experience, converting natural, impersonal, incidents (both internal and external) into one personal affair of (yours), with all the suffering involved, but mistaken to be pleasurable.

12 : 4

How the external objects of experience

get ‘personalized’

• You can see the actuality of this conversion in the way the totality of the Five-Constituents of your Living-experience is being gripped and held by the tele-drama, or the cricket match you are watching, the story in the novel you are reading, in the moment of your ‘enjoying’ the sensation of smoking or imbibing liquor. These are outstanding samples; but every moment you have a sense-experience,it is this attachment that happens, without your being aware that you are being victimized by craving for sense-pleasure.

Following is an attempt at further clarification of the previous discussion.

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How can that Mental activity of Holding to Constituents of Living-experience,

result in the Creation of a Self, an Ego,

a Personality?

It is important that you and I learn to look at every single experience of ours, psychologically in terms of ‘being conscious of mentality’depending on materiality, and materiality depending on mentality.

• Very briefly it means to be conscious of matter, feeling, perception and conceptions that have come together to build an experience.

• These are the same elements that we have named as the Five Basic Components of our living experience.

• Matter is involved in the construction of my physical body with its sense-organs; and the substances out of which the external objects I see, hear, smell, taste, touch and think about are being formed.

• Material forms play a big role even in my imagination. The mental images of objects and people I have pictured in my mind are real, in the sense that they are influential components of my living experience. Even in the absence of the concrete object before me, the imagined material form does create pain and pleasure in my mind.

• We say matter is dead or lifeless, taking into account the natural energies or fundamental elements that manifest as matter.

• According to the analysis of matter that has come down to us from ancient times, it is known as (i) the earth element, (ii)the water element, (iii) the fire element and(iv) the air element.

• You and I are expected to develop the mental habit of visualizing the actuality in which these elements interact in building and keeping our body alive. Do that and see for yourself what effect it will have on your attitude towards your body.

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Let us take a look at the functioning of the sense-organs:

• There are 5 physical organs each of which is sustained by consciousness, as though consciousness is separately assigned to each sense-faculty.

• They are the eyes, the ears, the nose, the tongue, and the body. We are naming them because you are taking them for granted, paying no serious attention to them.

• They are named five faculties or sense-bases and Nature has charged each of them with a specific sphere of activity, and none of them interferes with the functioning of another faculty

• There is a 6^th sense-base recognized as the mind-base, which coordinates all the information brought in by the Five Sense-bases, in addition to attending to its own special functions in dealing with the mind-objects that arise in the mind itself.

These 6 internal bases have 6 external bases corresponding to each ofthem.

1. The eye or the optical organ can deal only with visible objects that are external.

2. The ear or the auditory organ can receive only sounds or audible objects.

3. The nose or the olfactory organ receives only smells or odors or olfactory objects.

4. The tongue or the gustatory organ can deal only with taste or sap or gustative objects.

5. The body or the tactile organ deals with body-impressions, touch or tactile objects

6. The mind-base deals only with mind-objects: thoughts, concepts, images, ideas etc. constructed rightly and wrongly out of the data provided by the 5 sense-bases.

12 : 7

Consciousness

How can we make out Consciousness which is said to be a Basic Component of our living experience?

• We cannot trace consciousness, because it has no essence that can be seen, felt or touched.

• It cannot function or exist by it-self; it has to depend on something else in order to appear.

• Consciousness can be compared to day-light. We become aware of day-light through the objects that are being presented or brought to light, or revealed by day-light.

• Consciousness has to be conditioned by something else, that something else can be anything material or mental through which consciousness can be seen to be expressing itself

• Consciousness is the most important of the Five Fundamental Elements as the other four are ‘kept alive’ by, or depend upon consciousness

• What is called experience is really a case of being conscious of four components of living experience: matter, feeling, perceptions and mental conceptions.

• When you say ‘my body’ you really mean ‘there is consciousness of matter that constitutes your body’.

• When you say ‘I feel’it means ‘there is consciousness of feeling’.

• The ‘I’ part of it, and ‘my’ part of it are creations of your mind, supported by ignorantly holding consciousness of body and feeling as yours.

• So consciousness can be described as ‘the presence’of something or other in (your) living experience.

• Consciousness only points out, or brings to light, something other than itself, a sight, a sound, a smell, a taste, a touch, or a mental image, idea or even notions and views.

• That is why consciousness gets identified with the sense-base associated with its function, as eye-consciousness, body-consciousness, mind-consciousness etc.

• You can have no experience without an object of which you are conscious.

• Consciousness cannot, and does not stand alone by itself.

• When we speak of the purity of consciousness, we mean the purity of the content, or of the object with which consciousness is associated.

• This is important.

• You cannot think or speak of any object in the whole of this universe, unless that object is present in your consciousness.

• Material world has a natural and independent existence of its own; but matter can ‘come to life’ only within the consciousness of a human being or of an animal.

• Matter exists therefore, in the sense of ‘existing’, only in someone’s conscious experience.

• Consciousness is that upon which all other things depend for their existence.

• That means consciousness is a determination, but a determination which in turn has also to depend on all other things: namely: matter. feelings, percepts and concepts etc. i.e. materiality and mentality, for its existence.

• That means consciousness derives its importance from perception of other things: such as matter, mental images of matter, feelings, percepts and concepts etc.

• Perception is altogether a mental action.

• These are neither substantial nor permanent. So do not entertain conceited notions about the importance of your consciousness.

• You need to think hard to understand what all these things really mean.

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Let us try to understand what is meant by Sensation and Perception

Material objects come in contact with one or more of the five sense-organs.

• Things imagined or imaginary objects come in contact with the mind-sense.

• When a material object comes in contact with a materially conditioned sense-organ, that immediately wakes up the consciousness that acts as a bridge between the sense-base and the mind-base

• The immediate effect is a sensation.

• A sensation is just being conscious of some sense-experience.

• Which in turn causes the object to be perceived.

• Perception is purely a mental act making use of the sense-faculties that are sustained by sense-consciousness.

• Upto this point it is the cognitive aspect of living-experience that was dominant.

• Cognition is that by which mind gets knowledge, or becomes conscious of the object.

Re-cognition of the object is the outcome of this process.

• At this point the sense-experience changes over to the emotional stage of living-experience led by feeling.

• Feeling is a condition that develops, depending on the mind dwelling upon (contact) a sensation and perception of, what caused that sensation.

• Herein a causal process of emotional development introduces the personal factor in order to experience pleasure out of what is being felt.

• That is what causes the initial sensation to become a feeling that can be felt as pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral.

• The eye, for example, sees only the colour, the shape and themovement of the object.

• The eye does not recognize the object that it sees as a flower; does not know that it is called a ‘rose’.

• The act of perceiving, supplemented by the wealth of information previously received and stored in the memory of the mind-base re-cognizes the visual object as a rose.

• It is the consciousness that makes it presentor reveals in exactly the way the mind has interpreted the sense-experience.

• Percepts of this nature keep flowing in from all the six sense-bases all the time the individual is awake.

• Each percept gets created entirely on the basis of causes that make it arise, and conditions that sustain it for the moment that it exists, until it is overtaken by another percept.

• Percepts are mental property – property that remains within the mind-base, and as such subject to be acted upon by other mental processes

• Two such important faculties areintention and attention.

• Intention as volition or will, exercises an extraordinary influence over all of the Five Basic Constituents of my living-experience.

• As soon as an external object is perceived by a sense-base, and its image is conveyed to the mind-base, intention wills, intention wants to know more of the nature of this object that has appeared before the mind.

• This is the kind of instinct that nature has built into every organism, in order to ensure its safe and secure continuity in existence.

• It is of paramount importance for the survival of the creature to get to know whether this stranger is friend or foe, whether it is a predator come to attack and devour it, or a potential prey that could be attacked and devoured for its own survival.

• That is the primitive function of intention, but it operates in respect of every object that is perceived to get to know what use one can get out of this newly recognized object, whether this object is desirable or undesirable, etc.

• In order to achieve this objective, volition or intention directs the mental faculty of attentionto scrutinize the perceived object and find out what value it has for the organism, whether it is safe or dangerous, supportive or destructive etc.

• We have differentiated between Sensation and Feeling.

Sensation is what is felt when matter comes in contact with one of the Five Senses- eye, ear, nose, tongue or the body, e.g.: body pain is natural and even the Saint feels body pain.

• Feeling that is of the mind-sense when held by self-view desiring to derive pleasure out of Perception is the source of all aversion, hate revenge, violence etc., in consequence of Desire for Sense-pleasure.

This is a natural process of mentality, but it leads eventually to a critical moment of the material world getting incorporated within (my) mental world (i.e. contact) and creating an unnatural situation.

• This is contact between matter and mentality that develops into feeling;

• and feeling that evolves into an intense desire (craving) to derive pleasure out of feeling;

• It is that emotional drive of desire or craving that transforms the Five Basic Components of Living-experience into a Self or Ego or Personality

• This marks the causal evolution of dead and insensitive matter into a living creature that identifies itself as Self, or Personality, that suffers pain which is mistaken as pleasure.

• We can introduce this actuality as Personalization or Personifying the Five Basic Constituents of Experiencing.

THE BIRTH AND GROWTH OF THE PARASITE-

THE SELF THAT EXPRESSES ITSELF AS “I-MINE-AND-MY SELF”.

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Conversion of Material and Mental aspects of my Living-experience into my Ego,

my Self, my Personality.

It should be clearly understood that in our living-experience there are two distinct aspects:- distinct but mutually related to, and interacting with each other.

• They are the Material or Physical aspect and the Immaterial or Mental aspect.

• The physical body with its sense organs as well as the objects of the outside world that are revealed by consciousness associated with each sense-organ, comes under the materiality of living experience.

• Perception and the sensations or feelings associated with perception, and all of the mental constructions – thoughts, concepts, imaginations, intentions, attention etc., come under the mental or immaterial aspect of living experience.

Consciousness associated with the five senses and particularly the sixth sense, that is the mind, always acts as the connecting link between these two Departments of Materiality and Mentality.

13 : 2

Let’s find out why we deserve to be called ‘worldlings’- ‘I’ and the ‘World’

If I tell you that you and I are living in total ignorance of the Nature of the world, you are not going to like it.

• We are living without knowing how absolutely, how completely our life is being controlled by the things of the world. For that reason we are called ‘worldlings’.

• We are conscious of things within our life and things outside ourselves.

• There is the world over there, outside of me; and ‘I’ am over here. These two entities are connected to each other naturally, in a manner that one cannot be separated from the other.

• You might think you can isolate yourself from the social environment; but you certainly cannot disconnect yourself from the world of matter, wherever you may be, by your wanting to do it, by your intending to do it, by your determination to do it at your will. Doesn’t this sound strange?

• Things outside create an effect on your body through the medium of five sense-organs: the eyes, the ears, nose, tongue and the body.

• Mind-sense has a special mechanism to record everything you experience, that is memory. That is the function of the sense-faculty of mind having the brain as the physical base. The sense organ of mind also has its consciousness which reveals everything that happens within that organ or faculty.

• These five senses together with the mind (considered as the sixth sense organ) is the machinery behind what you and I call our living experiencethat has matter as its foundation.

• The entire production of this machinery can be examined under five categories.

• You will understand that life as it is lived, cannot be cut up into sections.

• Living experience functions as one, and as such these categories or constituents are to be recognized as Aggregates, or Constituent Elements that go to make up one complete thing, in this instance our living-experience.

• They are always working together inseparably as a single group.

• These are really the constituents or activities that make you experience life – your living experience at each living moment, namely:

(1) matter

(2)feeling,

(3) perception or becoming conscious of things (particularly matter) with the aid of one or more of the five senses or with the mind and

(4) conception that formulates thoughts, ideas and views in the mind using perceptions and feelings.

The (5^th) is very special: i.e. Consciousness being the factor that reveals in experience whatever happens within each of the other four aggregates or constituents.

• These must be realized as actualities in your own experience, and not as mere verbal conceptions or psychological literature.

• The five senses can project on your mind only mental extracts of material forms, whether of dead or living objects of the world outside, that is outside of your mind.

• The consciousness of mind, which is also a sense-organ, jointly with the consciousness associated with each of the sense organs, reveals and creates the mental images of persons, things, objects and events, seen, heard, smelt, tasted, touched and thought about.

• Something we don’t realize is that these mental images, even of living persons, are only lifeless, dead pictures arising and ceasing in series creating the illusion of living beings as in the movies.

• Very briefly, what is called living experience is this combination of the outside objects that are perceived

• and the internal mental activity of perceiving, image-forming, feelings and mental constructions of thoughts, views, and opinions etc,

• Does this not make you realize that almost ninety-nine percent of your living experience is of the mind, that is mentality with matter only as a basis?

• The human mind has to depend for all its knowledge and understanding of things, outside of itself, on just the information brought in by the five sense organs.

• It is left to the mind which is also a sense organ, to relate and compare these bits of information or data, one with the others, and formulate thoughts, ideas, views, opinions etc., and to store them as memories for future reference.

• The actuality, the truth as to how exactly I become conscious of the world in this manner, is not evident to my mind. I do not know, I am ignorant.

• Beyond this you and I have no personal knowledge as to the behaviour of Nature either outside in the world, or inside our own living experience.

• If someone were to explain these things to us that would be a different matter.

13 : 3

Men, Women and Children over there

• How do I know that the object I am seeing,

is a person, a man, a woman, a boy, or a girl?

Seeing an object is an act of perceiving. Perceiving involves (i) becoming conscious of an object (ii) with one of the senses (iii) in collaboration with the mind-sense.

• What are the distinct functions of the five sense organs in the act of perceiving an object?

• The sense organ eye is a Nature’s creation out of the basic elements of matter, water, heat, air and vitality, manifesting in various forms known as flesh, nerves, tissues, etc.

• In none of these material elements can you detect any trace of a person, a man, woman or child or a creature that is alive, or even the possibility of recording the living image of a creature with all of its feelings, sense- experiences and consciousness intact.

• Then there is the physical form of a living creature outside, revealed by sunlight or any other form of light.

• Those rays of light in contact with the object at one end, and the sensitive tissues of the eye at the other end, keep transmitting the patterns of colour and the shape, as well as the movements of that form, from the object to the surface of the eye.

• Then there is consciousness without which there can be no awareness, no knowing, no sensation, no feeling, nothing. You know if you are made unconscious, or even if the eye is anaesthetized for surgical reasons, it can receive no impression of an object.

• Nature has seen to it that consciousness works with each of the sense organs separately, distinctly.

• Eye-consciousness does not mix with ear-consciousness or with nose-consciousness or with tongue-consciousness or with body-consciousness. If that discrimination is not there, your perceptions will be chaotic.

• What consciousness can do and does is only to reveal, to bring to light, to indicate the presence of whatever happens in the domain of the senses in relation to objects.

• When the eye can receive only the immaterial colour and shape of the object in sight, the mind-consciousness supplements and complements the data absorbed by the eye-consciousness and reveals the material object to which those qualities of colour and shape belong.

• That is all the service that the sense-organ eye, with its own consciousness can render in keeping you in touch with the objects of the world outside. Nothing more.

Eye-consciousness cannot and does not, on its own, present that material object as a living creature, man or woman.

• All this should be sufficient for you to be convinced of the fact that your eyes do not and cannot see and recognize living beings as such men, women boys or girls or even animals.

The ear as a sense organ

• The ear receives vibrations of sound transmitted over the air, resulting in the sensation of hearing.

• The ear-consciousness reveals the sensation felt within the ear.

• In recognizing the source of the soundit is the mind-consciousness that reveals the object.

• It is the mind, as a sense organ, that has previous records of hearing sounds or seeing things and recognizing them for what they are.

• The ears do not know whether the sound was the voice of a man or the barking of a dog.

• Why we differentiate between perceiving and recognizing is because perception is a mental or psychological factor confined to a sense-organ with limited power.

• On the other hand, recognizing means being conscious of the fact that this person has been seen before, or this sound has been heard before. That is an act of re-cognizing.

• For things to be re-called or re-collected there has to be a memory of things perceived and recorded previously.

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Purpose of analyzing living experience into Five Constituent Elements

At this very moment you are experiencing the fact of your living; being conscious of body, feelings and thoughts etc. You are in no doubt about it at all.

• What is hidden from your awareness are the factors that are conditioning that living experience of yours.

• These conditioning elements of our living experience have been revealed to us by the Buddha, very simply as Five Constituent groups.

• The purpose in doing that, is to help you and me to realize that, actually and in truth, you and I have nothing to do with what we think is our living experience.

• In other words, what appears to us as our living experience is a natural process, caused and conditioned by certain elements in which there is no person to be called you or me.

• It is the same as your heart and lungs that are functioning at this very moment, through the interaction of a series of certain causes and conditions in which you as a person have absolutely no involvement. You don’t even notice their existence.

• They in turn do not know that they are keeping a man or a woman alive. For them you are a non-entity; you don’t exist, you are nobody to them. Your being a Very Important Personality in your estimation means nothing to them.

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The Structure of the Totality of our

Living-experience comprises of

Five Constituent Groups :

1. Matter or material substances, or the variety of forms in which substantial things behave.

2. Feeling

3. Perception

4. Mental formations or Conceptions which include Intention or volition, and attention.

5. Consciousness that brings to light all constituents of experience: material and mental.

• The duration of an experience can be a mere fraction of an instant, if you can imagine what that is. Even then that momentary experience will consist of Five Constituent Groups that have come together to structure that moment.

• When one experience follows another it is a fresh experience consisting of Five Elements.

• Each fresh experience is a fresh set of Five Elements.

• The most incomprehensible, the most difficult thing for us to understand is, how such a natural conditioning process, which is nothing more than a combination of mental elements working on a material foundation, gets converted into a personal experience with feelings of desire, love, hate, fear, anxiety etc etc.

• In short how dead matter charged with life element, as in the case of trees and creepers, evolve into individual men, women, children who think of themselves as personalities.

We started with the question as to how we come to know the objects we see a persons, as men and women ?

When my own mental habit is one of converting the materiality of my body into a personality, is it surprising that I conceive all other physical forms endowed with life and consciousness that come within my sight, as those of persons – men, women, children etc.?

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The belief in a self that doesn’t suffer,

that is undying and lasting for ever

The human mind has invented a very effective device, (but altogether a false one) to get over both these problems ofmateriality that is totally devoid of emotional feelings, and impermanencethat makes it impossible to be holding on to anything that one wants to enjoy.

• The human mind does this by compelling the nature’s creation of the Five Constituents to be personalized by identifying itself with a false belief.

• That is the belief in a Self which is only a notion, an idea, a view, that the mind in its ignorance has concocted just for the purpose of covering up the true nature of life.

• This deception can be recognized in the way it behaves:

(i) It takes complete possession of the living experience in its elements, as well as in its totality.

(ii) It takes full responsibility for everything that is made to happen by Nature through causation or conditionality, saying: “I am the one who is doing all this”.

(iii) It has established an independent, sovereign, authority as “This is my Self”.

• It commands “Identify with Me, if you do that you can experience happiness permanently, and enjoy pleasure of the senses ; regardless of life’s temporary suffering and impermanence; because the Self that I Am is permanent, never changes, never dies, lives even after the death of your physical body”.

THE PROGRESSIVE STAGES OF CONCEIVING A SELF, EGO, OR PERSONALITY OUT OF THE NATURAL PROCESS OF SENSE-EXPERIENCE.

{Please read contemplatively, and try to grasp the relevance of what you are reading to your own living experience. This is an attempt to reveal certain hidden behaviour of your mental life. As it involves mental effort and exertion to understand, your mind is likely to skip through carelessly.}

Let us take for example, there is a man seated in front of you.

This is your visual experience of seeing a human figure in front of you.

How do you come to recognize this figure as that of a person, as one Mr. So and So? .

The conditioning process behind this visual experience :

• The light reflected from the object strikes the surface of your eye.

• This creates a subtle sensation, perhaps not directly felt by you.

• Immediately the-eye consciousness wakes up and reveals the mental activity resulting from this contact, unknown to you.

• The mental activity of perceiving the material object is limited to extracting the colour (say brown) and the shape of the object, also without your being aware.

• The eye-consciousness reveals or brings to light the material object

(a body) to which this colour and shape are attached.

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Consciousness – the conditioning factor behind sense activity.

Please take note of the very special role played by consciousness in this activity, as revealed to us by the Buddha.

• Consciousness is shared by the six senses, and the role each sense-activity plays is distinct from the roles played by the rest.

• This distinction is brought out by designating consciousness as eye-consciousness, ear- consciousness, mind-consciousness etc., to ensure that what the eye-consciousness presents (what is seen) is not mixed up with what the nose-consciousness presents (what is smelt).

• The mind- sense, in its coordinating function, uses consciousness to reveal to itself, to bring to light, whatever that happens within the five sense-bases that are in contact with the world, that is matter, as well as what is perceived within the mind’s own domain.

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Who recognizes the human figure as such?

• The material eyes cannot by themselves recognize the material object as that of a human being.

• What the eye-consciousness has extracted out of the sight of that material object (colour and shape by the eye-consciousness) what is called perception, is all mental.

• Now this basic mental data gets immediately communicated to the sixth sense-base,

• The sixth sense-organ is your mind-base, equipped with its mind-consciousness.

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The mind-base is dependent on a physical substance

• Mind with its consciousness has the very special facility of sharing information with the five sense bases that are in contact with the world of matter outside. This is in addition to what the mind ‘perceives’ on its own.

• The physical foundation for the sense-organ called the ‘mind’ is the brain.

• (The brain has the support of the heart when it comes to emotional reactions).

• The data gathered by the eye-sense are communicated via the nervous system.

• Nerves are the thread like connections nature has constructed for transmitting, for sending across the impulses of sensation and motion, from various parts of the body to the brain, via the central link of the spinal chord.

• How this electro-chemical process within the brain-cells comes out with an image – a still photograph of a human form is beyond the science of neuro-biology to explain.

• We are describing this process, most inadequately, only to show that what the brain can do is only producing an impersonal, non-substantial image of things that the outer senses have communicated.

But it is a reality, an actuality that I recognize this person who is seated in front of me as Mr. So and So. How does that happen?

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Matter perceived by the senses becomes the condition for Concepts.

The percept or the image to which that colour and shape are attached, evolves into what is called a concept within the mind.

Let’s see how that happens.

• An object of matter perceived by one of the five sense-bases gets relayed to the internal mind-sense;

• This entry of the visible qualities of the material object to the interior mind-base is significant and it is recognized as contact.

• A perception originating from a sense-contact with a material object, with its entry into the mind-base invariably conditions or causes a subtle feeling to arise in the mind.

• This feeling is mental, and may be pleasant, unpleasant or neutral.

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How are concepts formed in the mind?

To conceive is to get a thought or an idea formed in the mind.

A concept is an idea of a quality common to a group of things.

• We said that a sense-perception derived from a material base gives rise to a feeling that becomes its inseparable companion; and that this combination of perceiving and feeling is what becomes a thought.

• A combination of a percept, that is something perceived by a sense-organ, and an accompanying feeling, invariably conditions the birth of a thought.

• That means these two factors, i.e. a percept and feeling are the invariable conditioning elements of any single thought.

• Always these two move hand in hand, of course, covered by consciousness, otherwise there is no knowing that it is a thought.

• An idea is also thought; Idea is a picture in the mind. A series of such pictures of percepts will exhibit their common qualities and these will condition the structuring ofconcepts or opinions

14 : 7

The awakening of intention and Attention

• When a sense-percept arises, (when something is seen or heard etc.,) and enters (or contacts) the sphere of the mind;

• The sensation aspect of that percept that arises in the mind, draws the attention of intention towards that percept.

• Intention (or volition) and attention are two distinct elements in our living experience.

• Intention or volition plays a determining role or a conditioning role over all of the Five Basic Elements of our Living Experience i.e. (i) matter or form, (ii) feeling, (iii) perception, (iv) all formations of mind including contact and attention as well as consciousness.

• Consciousness, as we have often repeated, is the common element that presents or reveals, makes known, whatever happens in the two spheres of living experience – materiality and mentality.

• Intention or motivation directs the faculty of attention to investigate the purpose; whether the percept that just entered the sphere of the mind could generate more pleasure, whether it is something desirable, and should be cultivated; or something undesirable and so should be wiped out.

• That means feeling becomes the condition for generating craving (strong desire) for pleasure out of sense-experience, desire to be happy, desire to be, to be comfortable, to become - to continue being (to exist) in a state of happiness or satisfaction.

• If at this very moment you are in a happy mood, just direct your attention and find out what sense-object or objects are responsible for that satisfaction. It could even be an imaginary object unexpectedly surfacing in your memory.

• We said that Nature’s hidden motive is to see that this organism survives, at whatever cost.

• For this purpose Nature provides incentives for the organism to strive to exist, wanting to exist or will to live.

• Volition, intention or motivation is part of this package.

• In our analysis of a simple sense-experience we came to the position in which intention utilizes attention to dig deeper into the qualities of a sense-impression (contact) to decide whether it is desirable or not.

• In the process of intention and attention digging into the qualities of an external object, as projectedon the screen of the mind-base by perception, what emerges is feeling.

• Consciousness of feeling, whether it is of the body or of the mind, is the primary incentive to continue existing, to desire and to crave for survival.

• Consciousness is what confirms that you are alive; but consciousness cannot be seen, be perceived or even be felt.

• Feeling that you are conscious of, can be felt,andso you learn to identify feeling with the fact of your existence, as your very life that needs to be preserved.

• Thus conscious feeling generates an intense desire or craving to exist, to be, to continue living.

• The consciousness of craving cannot exist in a vacuum. It needs a medium through which to express itself, to manifest itself as something that exists, it needs to attach itself to something that has substance, it needs a material substance to hang on to, to cling to.

• Whatever one attaches to, it cannot go outside of the Five Components of living experience.

• Whatever medium is found or created it has to be identified with one or more of the Five Components: consciousness (of) matter, feeling, perception, and conceptions.

• The mental images of external material forms, perceptions and feelings and mental conceptions,all ofwhich (one) is conscious of, are the only mental factors that are available to be held, and clung to, to be attached to.

• But as mental properties they are continuously arising, changing, and vanishing so fast, leaving no substance that could be handled even mentally. (Go back to what we said about Transience and Impermanence and Causation)

• This is a most disappointing and unsatisfactory predicament (suffering).

• The Component of Conceiving provides a solution for this by fabricating that Fiction of Self.

• It is a solution that ends up being a disastrous deception.

14 : 8

What is Conception?

How is anything Conceived?

Please notethat what we are presenting here are still pictures of a process that moves extremely fast within every moment of your psychological existence.

• What you and I experience are the effects of things that have already happened; or right now you may be going through pain or sorrow of some sort.

• But with our un-enlightened minds, we cannot see the causes and the conditions working behind the scenes to create and maintain this pain and sorrow.

• We have to learn that from what the Enlightened Buddha had seen and revealed to us.

• That is what we are discussing, in order that we ourselves may, one day, be able to see the working of those conditions in some way that the Buddha had seen them.

Why is it essential that you and I should see the way it happens within our own living experience?

• As we have been assured, that it is the only way of bringing to an end all of our personal or existential suffering of whatever sort they may be.

14 : 9

The conditions that lead to the

Conceiving Self out of a simple Percept

We said that if we want to understand our living-experience rightly, we must learn to look at everything that happens in our life in reference to the Five Components or Constituent aspects of our living-experience.

• Namely : the aspects of Matter, Feeling, Perceiving, Conceiving and the over-all aspect of Consciousness.

• For purposes of study and understanding we consider each as distinct from the rest –

• Let’s recollect that moment of our perceiving, the figure of a man in person.

• What exactly my eyes perceive or are able to extract from the sight of that figure of a man is only a lump of solid matter of certain shade of colour limited to that cognition based on the eye-sight.

• Then that percept moves over completely into (my) mind-base which is also covered by consciousness.

• Just as there is consciousness of whatever the eye sees, there is consciousness of what the mind perceives.

• Perceiving is distinct from conceiving. We learnt of the way Material Forms outside of our mind become the condition for creating sense-impressions becomes the condition that gives birth to a perception

• Apart from Matter, the rest are all actualities that rush through our mind.

• Matter that exists in the world outside of my mind comes to contact with my senses in six different forms.

• Matter that is visible, Matter that is heard in the form of sounds, matter that is smelt, matter that is tasted, matter that comes in touch with body and matter that gets imaged in the mind.

• To perceive is to be or to become conscious of what happens when things come in contact with one of the senses or the mind.

• Can we not say that the material thing outside does absolutely nothing in this activity of my perceiving, except to become a passive condition causing an impression upon a sense-organ?

• From that moment everything that happens upto and including the moment of recognizing the object for what is can be considered as conditioning activities of the mind.

•In this process of perceiving an object, I as a person, I as a man or woman, I as an individual have absolutely nothing to do; except to imagine deludedly that these sense-organs are ‘mine’ and ‘I am’ the one experiencing these perceptions.

•It is this delusion that we are attempting to explode. This actuality of perceiving is nothing more than something that happens at one moment becoming the condition for something else to happen the next moment, and that in turn serving as the condition for something else to happen.

•This is what we described as conditionality.

•If you look at the way an automobile engine is functioning you can understand what mechanical conditioning means in which no ‘personality’ interferes.

•If you visualize the functioning of (your?) heart or the lungs that are functioning so efficiently do you as a person have anything to do with that functioning?

•That is what we call ‘impersonal’ impermanent - arising - changing and ceasing - actuality of conditionality’.

14 : 10

What makes perceiving shift gear to conceiving?

•We knew you were very unhappy to be told that you have nothing to do with the functioning of your heart or the lungs.

•Not you, but the mind itself is most unhappy being compelled to live with these impersonal and impermanent conditions.

•With the recognition of the object for what it is, the constituent of perceiving completes its responsibility.

•Persons with developed wisdom like the sages–the arahants are said to be capable of confining their living experience to this level of perception and not allow it to be distorted by the invasion of a false sense of self.

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How does this invasion or the intrusion take place ?

When a material object is recognized through perception to be what it is, that gives rise immediately to a consciousness of feeling in the mind.

•That kind of feeling is different from the kind of sense-impression or sensation confined to a sense-organ of which there is consciousness.

•The physical body is the fifth sense-organ. When some object comes in contact with the body externally or when some change occurs internally there is an ‘irritation’ – pleasant or unpleasant-aches and pains particularly unpleasant.

•These are signals designed by Nature warning the organism to ‘take care’.

•The kind of pleasurable, un-pleasurable and neutral feelings that arise in the mind on perceiving and recognizing a sense-object or a mind-object is of a different category.

How is that ?

•The kind of pleasurable-un-pleasurable or neutral feeling that arises at this stage signals the point of transition of the naturally conditioned impermanent existence of the organism to the stage of a personal property of an ego or a self that is not subject to change or even pain.

•Feelings of pleasure and pain are never the attributes of matter or things of nature.

•Living creatures, structured out of matter plus life plus consciousness do experience naturally conditioned feeling : pleasant or unpleasant to the organism.

•Personalized ego feelings of the Self go far beyond.

•When a feeling is felt as pleasurable that becomes the condition for the organism to strive to continue existing on that pleasurable note of feeling.

But all the conditions that go to make up that feeling are fleeting, transient-ephemeral (exist only for a brief moment) arise - change and pass away (although this actuality is not noticed by the mind)

•That feeling, regardless of its transient nature, generates an extraordinarily strong desire– craving to continue existing – being and becoming enjoying whatever incentives that the senses may provide.

• What is the point in going on living if there is nothing pleasurable to get out of living?

• Craving hands over the contract to build something permanent out of all those impermanent ingredients to the Constituent of Living Experience registered as Mental Formations handling all matters of constructing, conceiving permanent things out of impermanent processes that go on happening within the Constituent of Perceptions. The Authority in charge of concept-making utilizes the services of Craving to handle - hold - and bundle all those arising and ceasing elements together in one grip and wrap the whole thing up with that primordial concept of an ever-lasting-un-changing, un-dying permanent and therefore most pleasurable concept of a soul, self or ego.

• Primodial here means that which has come into existence from the time man became conscious of himself.

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The First Level of Conceiving Self

• This ‘holding’ – ‘grasping’ – and ‘building up’ of fleeting actualities into ‘things’ – ‘fixed entities’ and considering or ‘viewing’ them as property belonging to the unchanging self or ego has given rise to the notion “THIS IS MINE”.

• ‘THIS’ refers to everything that comes under the transient constituents of consciousness of Matter-Feeling and Perception that have now been manufactured into ‘THINGS’ such as thoughts, notion, ideas, views by the Constituent of Conception.

• IN other words the entire living-experience is now ‘MINE’ – the most pleasurable notion that human mind could have ever conceived – because notion of ‘self’ never changes never suffers, never dies, whatever may happen to the things in its possession.

14 : 12

The Second Level of stabilizing the

Notion of Self.

It is tiresome to be considering every single item of perception as ‘this is Mine’, ‘this is Mine’ and ‘this too is Mine’.

• The mind now advances its faculty of Conception to one of IDENTIFICATION. Everything that Consciousness reveals as sights, sounds, thoughts, ideas etc., are all identically the same - none of them distinct or different or separate from their proprietor the Self- the Ego. Everything that is perceived, everything that occurs in experience, immediately leads to Conception ‘THIS AM I’.

• The objects of experience are over-looked-ignored.

• They are no longer important. The Self that I am – the ‘Ego that I am’ is the most important.

• All that is being experienced is ‘MINE’ because ‘I am’. ‘I am’ the one who experiences.

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The Third Level of Stabilizing the

Concept of ‘Self’

When the mind goes on conceiving ‘This is Mine’, ‘This am I’ in experience after experience, in all sorts of varied experiences, moment after moment, hour after hour, day after day, year after year –

• then invariably the mind concludes“There certainly is an ‘I’ – that permanently stands out, that persists, that remains fixed, and unchanged, that goes on for all time, – that exists on a permanent basis”.

• You can remember you were the same self as a child, as an adolescent, as a youth.

• This existence of your Self, Ego, the personality seems timeless; time has no effect on that concept.

• ‘I the self’ am a Permanent entity. – These objects of experience are impermanent – it is true, but that doesn’t affect my self, my soul, my ‘Athma’. This object of experience is only one among millions of such objects that come ‘my way’. This is the line of thinking that ‘self’ is now prompting.

• Henceforth ‘Self’ exists as a totally independent, separate, and distinct entity from all objects of experience - but in absolute command of everything that happens in Living-experience.

• ‘Self’ has gained independent status.

• From now on every single item of my living experience becomes

(i) ‘THIS IS MINE’ (distortion of Perception).

(ii) ‘THIS AM I’ (distortion of thought)

(iii) ‘THIS IS MY-SELF’ (distortion of view).

• Briefly this is the way ‘I’ have become the Owner – the Proprietor, the Doer, the Actor, the Manager, the Creator behind everything that goes on within my living experience.

Question : You say that SELF is a myth conceived by the mind. But our experience of pleasure and pain, fear and anxiety etc., are absolute realities.

• They are and they are not.

• When it comes to feelings, pleasant and unpleasant felt at the level of sense organs they are real, e.g. bodily feeling – pleasant or unpleasant of which there is consciousness are real.

• If they too are held and clung to as ‘mine’ and ‘me’ and ‘Myself’ – the pain is two-fold.

• The pleasures and pains of the mind conceived and viewed as Mine-Me and Myself are absolutely un-real.

• That is why they can be completely dissolved and wiped out of the mind.

• But that dissolution cannot be done by logical thinking or reasoning – for thoughts themselves are products of conceiving dominated by the deluded SELF.

• The only Way that can attend to that dissolution will be discussed inPart II of this book.

Historical and Religious Origin of the Belief in a ‘Soul’

What we dealt with so far, is the psychological conception of a ‘self’, constructed by the mind out of living experience itself.

• Apart from this, there is a strong, unshakable ‘religious’ conviction that we have inherited from our primitive ancestors, to the effect that a permanent, unchanging, eternal, immaterial, spirit or ‘soul’ resides in each one of us.

• This has been invented by the human mind as the one and only psychological remedy against human suffering caused by the operations of an unsympathetic Nature.

• From the time the human being arose on this planet earth, we can assume, that there would have been a gradual evolution of his conscious mind, identifying one’s physical body and mind with oneself.

• No doubt the individual being would have developed attachment to one’s own body, to one’s own mind, and to one’s own people, and to whatever his mind created.

• However primitive his intelligence would have been, he would have noticed that all those others to whom he was attached, were one by one getting old, incapacitated and dying; and he himself was subject to change.

• This would have, no doubt, caused pain of mind.

• In course of time even the primitive minds learnt and adopted a belief to the effect that, that element in their life that thinks, wills, and feels, knows, and sees and also that which appropriates and owns, acts and initiates action must be a permanent, unchanging, immaterial and eternal entity, something that exists on its own, independent of this impermanent body,

• This is what came to be regarded as one’s athman, or soul.

15 : 2

Soul or ‘athman’

Seeking pleasure and avoiding painseems to be the only purpose for a livingcreature to exist. It was more so at the beginning of human life than it is today. This is what is called craving or intense desire.

• But the actuality of nature is such that all things involved in living experience are impermanent; whatever is desired and cherished by human mind is in the nature of changing, decaying, and dying. There was no way of getting away from this, and life, right through continued to be ridden with uncertainty and anxiety.

• Human mind had to come up with a solution for this never-ending problem.

• What the human mind did was to create a buffer, a ‘shock-absorber’ to take up the shock of this constantly arising pain of mind so difficult to endure, so painful to put up with.

• What the human mind did was to create a notion, an idea, a view, a theory, which was to make everybody believe that behind all this impermanence in human experience, there exists an entity within oneself that lives on for ever.

• By entity is meant a thing that exists by itself, without having to depend on any other thing for its existence.

This entity was named ‘athman’, soulor self.

• It is described in terms such as unchanging, everlasting, undying, immortal, eternal; an entity that is permanent and therefore, most pleasurable, when one identifies oneself with it.

• Mankind has been holding to this view, identifying oneself with this mental image of an entity, from the time man became conscious of himself, and became aware of his ability to think and imagine.

15 : 3

Justification for the invention of

concept of ‘soul’

The primitive man was ignorant of the causes and conditions behind natural events.

• When he noticed things happening in his own life, for which he was not in the least responsible, he could only imagine that an unseen agent was keeping him alive, and guiding him along.

• His personal agency, his personal responsibility for getting everything done, was transferred to an invisible agent, animmaterial spirit which came to be named soul.

• Soul is that part of man looked upon as different and separate from himself, but working through his body, and also providing hope and satisfaction of continuing to live even after death.

• Man’s worst sorrow and anxiety was the fact of death.

• In spite of his belief and confidence in this individual soul as the unchanging, everlasting permanent invisible agent and guide–there was no end to his suffering and the calamities that he had to go through.

• Then he promoted this image of individual and personal soul, into a concept of universal authority of an Almighty God with attributes of permanency, immortality and absolute authority over creation and destruction of everything in the universe, including whatever happens in the life of each individual.

• That was the Ultimate Supreme Authority to whom man could submit his appeals.

• In spite of man creating an entire hierarchy of benevolent super human authorities, from the ordinary to the most exalted, to provide security for man on earth, there was no end to man’s problems that made him suffer.

15 : 4

This belief, the idea, the view of a permanent self

an unchanging, everlasting, entity residing within this ever-changing human life is inherited by us.

• It is deeply ingrained as an item of our racial memory of the subconscious, and appears to crop up in support of the distortion of the natural process of experience.

• The purpose in conditioning man’s mind to hold this view was to undermine the disappointment created by the impermanency of every thing that man holds dear and near, and then to convert living experience into something that is pleasurable and satisfying.

• What is unfortunate about this belief is that, as a matter of fact and in truth,there is nothing corresponding to this notion actually existing, in the life that you and I are experiencing.

• It is only a mental construction, a conception, a belief, a view, an imagination.

• It is held because it appears to be the only source of consolation available to man, easily accessible to man’s imagination, granting psychological relief from sorrow and anxiety caused, particularly, by the transitory nature of life that appears to end in death.

15 : 5

How my ‘ego’or ‘self’ becomes a

‘subject’ in grammar

We had learned that ‘to see’is a verb. The object of the verb ‘see’ e.g. can be ‘a tree’.

• We were taught that a predicate cannot stand alone without a subject. Whois the subject of this predicate ‘see a tree’?

• It has to be a being, a person or even an animal; and so ‘I’ become the subject whom that action refers to. So ‘I see a tree’is the complete and perfect sentence.

• The ‘ego’ or ‘I’ or ‘self’ is being treated as the subject of all action as the ‘doer’, the ‘thinker’, the ‘actor’, the ‘author’, the ‘observer’ the ‘perceiver’etc., and as the proprietor, the owner, the master, of all the objects of experience.

• Do you see that ‘I’ as only a fabrication in the grammar of language, whereas the only actuality is ‘a tree happens to be seen.’

15 : 6

Personalizing Things Caused by Nature

• There is a latent tendency in the human mind to the conceit of ‘I’-making and ‘mine’-making.

• A Latent tendency is a reaction of a deep-seated‘virus’ that has embedded itself in our psyche or our mental make-up.

• We are not conscious of this, not aware of such a thing operating within our mind.

• The damaging presence of a virus can be diagnosed only through the symptoms that become visible, quite after some time.

• Why does the human mind desire so strongly to be a self? -to create an “I - me - and mine” out of whatever is experienced?

• Within the human mind there is a strong desire to exist as a self, enjoying pleasurable feelings, however brief that enjoyment may be.

• Because matter out of which this human body, including its sense-organs, as well as sense-objects outside have been structured by Nature, are totally insensitive ; and as such the body cannot, by itself, experience or provide any feeling of comfort, pleasure, joy, or happiness.

• It is true that this matter of our body is imbued with life or vitality. So are the trees and plants. They too, not being endowed with consciousness, do not experience feelings.

• It is only a living being – human or animal, endowed with consciousness, that has the capacity to feel, that can provide comfort, pleasure or joy or even pain through its experience of living.

• So this organism equipped with a conscious mind, craves to become a living being, a person, a self, an ego in order to derive pleasure out of this life.

• If there is no such pleasure where is the drive to fulfill Nature’s purpose in continuing its creation?

• This is achieved by that strong desire, by that craving for pleasurable feeling, through grasping, clutching, holding, clinging on and moving along with that object of experience; not letting go of that desirable sense-object, even for a moment.

• Whatever object that is held gets absorbed into my living experience, and becomes identified with my self through that process of ‘I making and Mine-making’.

15 : 7

Identification is a Mysterious Character

of my Living-experience

• It is mysterious because I am unable to see how and why it so happens.

• I know what it means to be attached to material things like my house, my motor car, my books and whatever thing I possess. I am aware of the kinds of things I like to have. I know the difference between what is desirable and undesirable as far as I am concerned.

• It is no secret that I like some people and do not like some. I like some faces and dislike some others. I know what it is to love and what it is to hate. I know how I am attached to those persons who make my life comfortable and happy. I know the depth of my aversion towards persons who make me displeased and unhappy.

• I know the ideas, views, and opinions that I am strongly attached to. I defend them saying they are my principles and I dislike people who do not appreciate my principles. I hate people who are evil and unjust and unfair.

• My living experience, day in and day out, is completely under the control of the things, the people and the thoughts, ideas, attitudes, opinions and views that I am attached to.

15 : 8

How is it that I have got into this

Habit of Identifying My-Self with those

Things and People in the World outside?

• The fact of my seeing something or somebody means - that the consciousness of the eye-sense - and that of the mind-sense together are attending to the function of recognizing that object or that person.

• There is consciousness that permeates the whole of my living body including all of my sense-faculties – the heart, the brain etc.

• Consciousness that is awake with perception of that object, reveals or makes known to the mind all of the sensations, feelings, and conceptions of thoughts and ideas arising and ceasing ‘simultaneously’ with the occurrence of that perceiving of the object.

• That means all of the components of my living experience - perception of matter, feelings, conceptions of thoughts and ideas are all now tied up with the object outside over there.

• That object becomes a complete living experience of my own. It becomes identical with my life itself. It becomes “I-me-mine and my self.”

• There is my living experience within this body and mind over here; and there is my living experience out over there, as well, tied up with ‘my’ perception of some matter, feelings and conceiving all complete.

• My living experience, my life has doubled itself, has become doubly strong as a result of this attachment to an object, an object that has got personified.

• This is what identification means; personification of objects of attachment.

• Now do you understand the mystery behind your attachments, and the difficulty of letting go of your attachments?

• We know by now, that no single object: matter, or a feeling, or a percept or a concept can appear on its own, without being woven into a structured experience of ‘being conscious of materiality and mentality’.

• We know by now, that every single moment of our living experience comprises of Five Basic Components.

• The matter that has become a sense-object is only one of the five; and it cannot exist alone, by itself, independent of the other elements of my living experience.

• Therefore what that craving hangs on to, is the composite Five Components in their entirety. That is the totality of my living experience, my whole life.

In other words:-

• Since materiality cannot feel there is the need for some mentally created entity, an unchanging, permanently lasting entity that can feel and enjoy life.

• So craving has determined and given birth to this mentally created self, to fulfill that need out of nature’s creation, distorting nature’s creation.

• Among them the material objects are the only concrete things, substantial things that can be perceived by the five senses. It is matter that can be seen, heard, touched and even mentally visualized and desired in imagination.

• This explains why man is so attached to material wealth.

15 : 9

Mind-made Sense-objects are more solid than Concrete Material.

• There is another class of sense-objects –objects created in the mind-base, that are wielding a much more powerful influence over our lives, than the material objects.

• They appear to be more solid, and lasting longer, than concrete material structures.

• These are the creations of the mind - mental images of material objects, the objects of imagination, thoughts, notions, ideas, concepts, views, opinions and beliefs that exercise a much stronger hold on our lives than material wealth.

• They can all be classed under VIEWS.

• It is this holding, and hanging on to the run-away Five-Components-of living experience, that creates the ‘notion’ of ‘my self’ as an entity that continues to dominate the whole of this living experience.

• It should be noted, that in the case of us, un-enlightened ordinary people, this had already happened from the moment we became conscious of ourselves. We cannot specify that moment in time.

• For this reason we find it extremely difficult to accept and understand, or even imagine that our personality is only a mental creation, an idea, a notion of the mind, carrying out the command of mind’s own craving to be, to enjoy the pleasure of existing.

• The Buddha calls this entity the parasite (what we called the ‘virus’) that derives its birth, growth and livelihood from our own living experience, and then subjecting that very living experience to abject slavery, driving us to our insanity.

• The hall-mark of Enlightened people is that this false view of ‘my-personality’ has been completely eradicated from their living experience.

How can Ego-consciousness, or Personality-view

Become the Cause of all my Suffering?

One of the most difficult things to understand is impersonality.

Before that we must understand what ego-consciousness or Personality means.

Am I an individual?

Yes, in the sense that I am a single human being, distinct from all other members of the family, members of the society to which I belong, and distinct and separate from all other human beings

Am I a person?

Yes, in the sense of being a single human being regarded by me, as well as by others as having distinctive characteristics and social relations, and one who has been existing continuously as a particular individual identified along with those characteristics.

Am I a ‘Personality’?

• My personality refers to the view I entertain about myself as a person, or the attitude with which others look at me.

• Your personality is the concept or image of you, that others have built in their minds which is different from your own image of your self as a personality.

• How others look at me, and the opinions others have of me, do not really matter so much to me, as the view, the opinion I hold about myself as a personality.

• In the first place, the view I hold of my being a personality is a mistake; that is if I have the slightest understanding of the actuality of my living experience.

The most grievous mistake I am making is ignoring the actuality that all of us, human beings are universally structured out of five identical constituents of Matter, Feeling, Perceptions, Conception and Consciousness.

• The stupidity of my mind has extracted itself out of that universality, in order to stand out as a separate distinct, special individual personality – an entity causing misery to itself and the rest of humanity.

• The way that others judge me and my character depends upon the way I express my feelings and emotions, or my knowledge of things, and my strivings or the way I get about with the kind of work or activity that I am involved in.

• These represent three aspects of one’s personality recognized under (i) Cognition, (ii)Affection and (iii)Conation.

• One’s physical appearance matters much in building one’s personality.

• Man who thinks of himself as an individual has put himself in a cage, not only physically separate, but also mentally separate and distinct.

• My feelings, my thoughts, my views, my wishes, my likes and dislikes, the things I have gained through my education, experience, and hard work, what I consider right and wrong are all confined to, and limited to myself. When all these are added up, they make up my personality-view.

• My personality view and the self – that I am conscious of, are the same as my ego-consciousness.

16 : 2

Now how does a mental creation such as ‘My Self’ be the cause of all my suffering?

• The fundamental suffering arises through the identification of the unchanging notion of Self with the living experience that is conditioned and therefore continuously changing (Go back to what we said under Ignorance of Conditionality leading to Suffering).

• The belief in Self or personality view has been brought into existence by craving to derive pleasure out of an otherwise insensitive causal process of nature.

• Thus going for what is pleasurable, and fighting to destroy what is un-pleasurable, constitute the sole mission for which Self is dedicated.

• The reality is such that there are most unexpected conditions arising and standing in the way of satisfying the desires of self.

• In society, each individual Self is battling against many odds, and is in perpetual competition with other individuals to get what one wants.

• This leads to personal reactions of intolerance, anger, and hatred towards persons labelled as ‘others’ or ‘enemies’ standing in the way of one’s pleasures.

• This mutuality of fear andsuspicion has brought about fragmentation of human race into ‘friendly’ and ‘unfriendly’ nations, races, tribes, castes, classes, religious, linguistic and ethnic communities; supposedly for reasons of self-defense and protection of identity, but more so to facilitate the annihilation of the enemy.

• The accumulation of hostile sentiments, and weapons of mass destruction by each self-determined segment, will inevitably determine the gradual annihilation of mankind.

• Is this much not enough for you to realize the extent of suffering, that this false notion can create for human beings, individually and universally for all mankind?

16 : 3

I stand in total distinction

from all other people

• My ego is the universal standard, the criterion available for ‘me’ with which to measure and compare you, and all other individuals I meet, and all others about whom I hear, and about things and events in this whole world, that I can imagine.

• What else can I do? My ego, is my sole guide, philosopher and friend, the only one who understands me best, of whom I am so proud.

• I have no way of directly experiencing the feelings, emotions, opinions of other people, however closely they may be living with me.

“My Views are quite different from yours”,

“I know who I am, and what I am doing”

• So I judge all other people and affairs from what I know of myself.

• But when I realize on certain critical moments, such as incurable disease, and near death, in spite of all the power and the wealth I possess, that there is no one in the whole world who can understand my condition, who can get me out of the situation in which I am placed, then only I realize how abandoned, how isolated, how helpless, and alone I stand on this planet.

• Doesn’t that define what existential suffering is?

16 : 4

My body is all a product of matter, as such my body cannot and does not experience any satisfaction or dissatisfaction.

• My sense organs– the eyes, ears, nose, tongue and body are made out of matter and therefore cannot by themselves experience pleasure or pain.

• The objects perceived by the senses : sights, sounds, smells, tastes, things in contact with the body, are all material that cannot think, cannot feel pleased or displeased.

• Nature is materiality involved in my living experience, then all things natural, all things material cannot, and do not entertain views, thoughts and ideas regarding any one’s individuality or personality.

• Yet it is a fact that you and I, and all human beings as far as we know, do experience pain and pleasure, love and hate, desire and lust, happiness and unhappiness, pride and prejudice, fear and anxiety, anger and aversion, grief and sorrow etc. etc.

• We are certain that it would occur to you, that life would not be worth living, if not for these pleasures, desires and lust, occasional joy and happiness, even if, very often, these would result in disappointment and frustration, pain and anxiety, grief and sorrow.

• These are the consequences I experience as a result of personalizing all insensitive and impersonal materiality involved in my living experience.

• These are all the functions of misguided mentality. It’s in the domain of mentality that you and I have to look for remedies for our existential suffering.

16 : 5

Why you and I are called worldlings ?

Have you noticed that for the most part of your waking life, your senses are engaged with people and things of the world outside? Aren’t your senses: eyes, ears and mind directing you all the time, to things outside your self, to things around you, to things of the world; making you cling to the world, making you a worldling?

Just watch how things of the world capture your attention.

In your daily experience, anything that is seen, heard, or felt, straightaway, automatically, draws yourattention.

No time is allowed for anything else to come in between, or to mediate between that object and your experiencing it.

That attention of yours is not an isolated event.

Your total life gets involved in that seemingly simple living experience.

There is a bunch of roses placed on that table. You happen to see them, ( matter that roses are) or they come in (contact) with your eyes. Then you look at them (attention). Their colours and shapes are being recognized as those of roses (Consciousness of Perception). That at once gives rise to a pleasant (feeling). Then thoughts of appreciation (intention) in terms of (thinking) ‘how beautiful !, how fresh and colourful !’, etc., will run through your mind. All these mental events take place all-together at the same time, and they make up the totality of your living experience. You are directly connected with the object of experience: namely, the roses and yourself.

• Those psychological terms we have emphasized: matter, contact, attention, perception, feeling, intention, thought constructions, contact are all the conditions that work together to make up our living experience at any given moment.

• Only other most essential condition is consciousness without which none of these could be known or felt. Nothing more is needed.

• You are unaware of these conditions, these actualities without which you cannot have any living experience

• Your non-knowledge of the working of these conditions behind every simple and single experience of yours is what is called your ignorance

• It is this ignorance that is at the bottom of all your false views responsible for all your suffering. At this stage this statement may be too difficult to accept.

What is more important to understand, the world outside or the life you are experiencing?

• We said you are in the habit of allowing yourself to be totally absorbed into the things of the world. What do you think is more real, is it the things of the world outside or your own life and living experience?

• Happiness and unhappiness, pleasure and pain, joy and grief, are all matters of your living experience. Things of the world belong to nature and matters of nature do not suffer, do not experience the emotions and sentiments that human beings experience.

• If you want to know the nature of human beings, you only have to know the nature of the human being that you are – your own living experience.

• That is what we are trying to lead you to.

• For this purpose your mind has to be trained, rehabilitated through certain exercises. The old habits of mind should be systematically replaced with more beneficial ones.

• In the case of your experience with the beauty of the roses your mind was involuntarily, passively occupied with the enjoyment of the sight.

• Suppose now you voluntarily make the effort and take your attention away from the roses and redirect that attention on the mental activities that are taking place within your mind. See if you can recognize and identify those conditions we mentioned.

‘THE WAY’ to liberate your life from being enslaved by the World is dealt with in Part II (for practice.)