Glimpses of Abhidharma: From a Seminar on Buddhist Psychology

There's actual quite a bit about basic meditation as well. Joe rated it liked it Jun 21, Alain Larochelle rated it really liked it Feb 13, Dillon rated it it was amazing Jun 26, Vania Velotta rated it liked it Feb 28, Kevin rated it liked it Dec 06, McFarland rated it liked it May 20, Nellalou rated it it was amazing Jun 12, Tglinsley rated it it was amazing Feb 05, Jamie rated it liked it Jun 01, Maureen Ziji rated it really liked it Feb 12, John rated it really liked it Oct 16, Sonia Gomes rated it it was amazing Nov 08, Tallguy rated it it was amazing Nov 11, David rated it really liked it Nov 21, Anastasia rated it it was amazing Feb 18, Tom Woodward rated it liked it Mar 29, Bob rated it liked it May 13, Vince rated it really liked it Apr 13, David Jacobs rated it it was amazing Nov 03, Sharon rated it really liked it Jul 26, They have no way of interpreting it other than as knowing everything.

In their way of thinking the enlightened man is someone who knows geography, science, psychology, history, philosophy, sociology and everything. They think that if someone has ten or twelve Ph. Then someone with one Ph. So being a superscholar is not the answer. The contemplative traditions of Buddhism, such as the Tibetan and Zen traditions, emphasize practice very strongly and see study as something that should go side by side with it.

Here the idea of learning is that it is a process of new discovery, new scientific discovery, which is actual experience. There is a tremendous difference between putting something under a microscope, actually seeing it with your own eyes, and just purely analyzing the topic. Anything can be analyzed, but if you have no experience of it there is no basis for analysis. So the idea in the contemplative tradition is that one should have some basic training in meditation practice, however primitive it may be, and then begin to work on the intellectual aspect.

Glimpses of Abhidharma: From a Seminar on Buddhist Psychology

This way the teaching is treated as a confirmation of experience rather than purely as a bank of information. Could you explain this tendency in us to be satisfied with theory instead of being freer and more open in terms of actual experience? I suppose the main tendency might be the tendency to make secure what we are doing. You see, on the whole practice is a sloppy job. This is a tendency to identify oneself with desires and conflicts related to a world outside.

And the question is immediately there as to whether such conflicts actually exist externally or whether they are internal. This uncertainty solidifies the whole sense that a problem of some kind exists. What is not real? That is always our biggest pro blem. It is ego's problem. The abhidharma, its whole contents with all the details, is based on the point of view of egolessness. When we talk about egolessness, that does not mean simply the absence of ego itself. It means also the absence of the projections of ego. Egolessness comes more or less as a by-product of seeing the transitory, transparent nature of the world outside.

Once we have dealt with the projections of ego and seen their transitory and transparent nature, then ego has no reference point, nothing to relate to. So the notions of inside and outside are interdependent-ego began and its projections began. Ego managed to maintain 7 Copyrighted material pletely one with them; complete absorption takes place with sounds, smells, sights and so on.

This approach is at the core of the mandala principle of the vajrayana teaching. At the same time, the great importance given to the six sense consciousnesses in the abhidharma has a similar concrete significance in its application to the practice of meditation and a person's way of relating to his experiences. Both levels of teaching put tremendous emphasis on direct relationship with the downto-earth aspect of experience.

Can you say more about how the six senses connect up with meditation? The implication of the abhidharma teaching on the six senses for the practice of meditation is identifying yourself with sounds, touchable objects, feelings, breathing and so on. The only way to develop sound meditative technique is to take something ordinary and use that. Unless you take something simple, the whole state of mind of your meditation will be based on the conflict of what is real and what is not and your relationship to that.

This brings all kinds of complications and one begins to interpret these complications as psychological problems, neurotic problems, and to develop a sort of paranoid frame of mind in which what is going on represents to one much more than is actually there. So the whole idea is to start by relating to nonduality on a practical level, to step out of these paranoid conflicts of who in us is controlling who.

We chould just get into actual things, sights and sounds as they are.

Reward Yourself

A basic part of the tradition of meditation is using the sense perceptions as a way of relating with the earth. They are sort of middlemen for dealing with the earth. They contain neither good nor bad, are connected with neither spirituality nor samsara, nor anything at all. They are just neutral. Ignorance seems to take on different values at different times, if I understand you.

Could you explain that further? Ignorance is an evolutionary process. You have a seed and then manure; then the plant grows and finally blossoms. As we have said, the beginning of that ignorance is bewilderment, panic. It is the ultimate panic, which does not even contain fear. Being just pure panic, it transcends fear.

It is something very meditative in that sense, almost spiritual-a spiritual absorption. It is that profound; it comes right from the depths of your very being. That ignorance is the seed of what you are. It is fundamental, neutral, without any concepts or ideas of any kind. Just pure panic, one hundred percent panic.

From this, the cloudiness develops as an aftereffect. It is like when you get hit and then you get dizzy afterwards. When you speak of "things as they are," do you mean completely without proj ections?

It is at least theoretically possible to experience things without projections, isn't it? The reason I ask is because if there is an overwhelming quality to experiencing things as they are, then that sense of overwhelmingness would be a projection, wouldn't it? It is definitely possible to experience things without projections. But just things as they are would not be overwhelming.

There would be no quality of overwhelming because overwhelming means "who has got control over who. Seeing things as they are is very, very plain. Because it is so plain, it is colorful and precise. There is no game involved, therefore it is more precise, clearer. It does not need any relative supports; it does not call for any comparisons. That is why the individuality of things is then seen more precisely-because there is no need to compare anything to anything.

You see the merit of each situation in its own right, as it. Is not the student of abhidharma always playing a game then, intellectually assuming a nondualistic point of view and then using that to actually work through duality? That is not so much the case with the abhidharma. I would say that is more true of working with the sunyata principle according to the middle way or madhyamika school of Buddhism. This is a philosophy which developed after the abhidharma.

Another example would be the koan practices in the Rinzai tradition of Zen where the meditation involves trying to use a certain kind of logic which is apparently illogical. But it is a logic of its kind because it is illogical. Using the koan again and again exhausts the mind's habitual thinking and takes one off the road somehow. There is a sudden experience of the futility and childishness of trying to apply ordinary logic, and that is where the gap or satori comes.

In that case it is using a kind of logic of nonduality dualistically in order to destroy dualism. On the other hand, the abhidharma merely presents some first idea of the pattern of duality. It is like a philosophy of meditation. By explaining the psychological pattern, it tells why meditation is valid. With regard to the eight consciousnesses- does it make sense to try to have a direct experience of any one of them isolated from the rest, or is this too abstract a way of going about it? I think that is too abstract. You cannot deal with them purely individually. It is like looking at a person: So in looking at experience from one perspective you see the rest as well.

Once we experience one sense consciousness, then what gives that particular sense consciousness the quality of consciousness relates it to the others. Each sense consciousness, to a certain extent, contains the overall picture. It must be what it is in relation to some background; it must breathe some air to survive. It is like seeing a flower growing- when you see the flower, you also see the ground it is growing out of. Is everything we experience within the basic ignorance, within the eighth consciousness, including wisdom or higher states of meditation?

FORM 13 Copyrighted materia'J are different types of attributes of form, so to speak, that are around it. Is there any activity within that world of form? It seems to me that the most basic activities I ever experience begin with feeling. No, what you are talking about is what you might call "facade experience.

You cannot experience anything without a somebody to experience it and that is the starting point. That somebody is an unknown person, but experiencing it feels good. That is ignorance and the ego. So the first step is naming and labeling in order to begin experiencing yourself. Yes, yes- one's own position.

The starting point of comparison. What is a skandha? That means it is not an independent definite object like a brick, but a collection of a lot of little details and aspects of psychological inclinations of different types. For instance, the second skandha, feeling, is not solid, not one feeling. It contains all sorts of feelings. The third skandha, perception, is the same-it is a collection. So ego is made out of a lot of particles rather than being one fixed thing that keeps going on.

You say that the six sense consciousnesses are in the first skandha, the skandha of form. In the ordinary understanding, when one speaks of the senses one is already talking about perception; and yet perception is the third skandha. The senses are connected with perception; but there is more grasping and holding on involved in perception proper.

But it is a very random way of relating because you no longer have any sense of direction, you do not know how to proceed. If sight comes first or sound or smell- it just happens to you. You are just insensate, just crawling along. The seventh consciousness is more intelligent than the eighth, than the basic ignorance, but you are still only sleepwalking, almost awake but not quite. Is that at all like when you find yourself walking in t he garden and you hadn't realized you were there?

You've done something without realizing it? Yes, it has actually been described that way. It is the subconscious feeling of a possible way of relating with the senses, but you have not quite worked it out properly yet. It happens in the midst of very precisely defined situations as well. It does not have to be a dreamy state at all. In those cases it is almost like the impact of the first bewilderment is coming to life again. But it still has a certain tinge of the dreamy quality and a potential of the six sense consciousnesses in it. It is a sort of no-man's land that you go through.

Is this state characterized by a sense of tension between opposites, such as when for a minute you are confused between sweet and bitter? You are vacillating back and forth between the two and then you realize that the taste is just what it is? That sounds like when you have already gotten to the sense consciousnesses. But at the beginning you are not sure, you are just feeling around it. The seventh consciousness is like putting something in your mouth; chewing and tasting is on the level of the six senses. Feeling, in the sense of the second skandha, cannot function independent of them.

Feeling in this sense is something much more fundamental than just pure sensation. Fundamentally it is of the nature of positive and negative, but feeling also has the third possibility of indifference. Feeling solidifies itself in terms of these two fields of experience. Feeling relates to mind as emotions and to body as clusters of instincts, things, thingness. We can meditate either intellectually or intuitively. Intuitive meditation engages the body level of feeling, particular bodily sensations- pleasurable sensations, pain in t he legs, hot and cold temperatures in the room and so on.

Mind is the emotional, imaginary or dream quality. And body, in this case, is also a quality of mind. That is, we do not, in feeling, experience body as it is. We experience our version of body. The fundamental point of view of ego based on comparative criteria, the definite separation between this and that, is already operational at this point. That basic twist is already there with the first skandha, form.

The unobstructed space of things as they are is already distorted by the time we get to feeling. We cannot help anyway working along with this situation as naive people confronted by what has happened already. Still, looked at from a very basic point of view, the whole involvement of feeling is very childish.

In fact, when we really see it, we see it is fundamentally deceptive. When we talk about feeling, we usually think in terms of feeling towards someone else: In that imagery the other person is all-important and you are insignificant. On the other hand: In that case you are all-important and the others are insignificant. Feeling plays that introvert-extrovert game of making itself important by reflecting off of "other. The body is a thing made out of all kinds of things; therefore pain in us makes us feel a relationship with actual reality rather than imagining anything beyond it.

Of course in this kind of situation there is always the likelihood that somebody will come sit by our bed and read us prayers of how beautiful the beyond would be if we could only get out of this shameful, raw physical situation. Talking about the beauties of heaven and spirituality, the person hopes to get us drunk on it and get our mind off the bodily situation of pain.

But that does not work. Once we are into the world of imagination in which we can imagine how beautiful beyond-the-body could be, we are also connecting up with the imagination of how terrible the pain could become. We are lost in the world of wishful thinking or unwanted thoughts. Somehow relating directly with the body aspect of feeling goes much more in the direction of what is.

I really don't understand. In the beginning you said that feeling could only function independently if it had concepts to work with, to relate itself to. Then right after that, when you mentioned mind and body, I thought right away that these are the concepts it's relating itself to in order to be independent. Well, the feeling happens with the concept, but as it happens that whole movement becomes bewildering and the concept does not apply any more.

Actually pain and pleasure, apart from the second skandha, just happen. They have nothing to do with concepts or criteria at all. Pain or pleasure does not have to be a comparative thing. There could be independent pain, independent pleasure. We can afford to experience pain and pleasure without feeling. Many people might feel this is extremely demonic, that if there are no strings attached, if feeling does not have to be connected to concepts, you might be experiencing that through destroying or hurting people.

But this fear on the part of people of the demonic aspect of themselves comes from being afraid of an unknown situation. They are afraid of that space because they have not seen the other aspect of it that is without hope or fear. You are sitting down to meditate and you say to yourself, "I'm going to do it fo r twenty hours starting right now; and whatever physical pain comes up is fine. It will be part of it. Okay, let it come through. Let it happen all along. That will be okay. But in actual fact, by the time you finish your twenty hours of meditation, your ego has been strengthened because you feel that you worked so hard and you faced so much.

You have been doublecrossed by ego. Is it possible to purify the feelings so that movement towards what is true feels good and movement towards what is not true does not feel good? The question is whether or not we see that there is no point in playing the game of feeling which is the second skandha. If we see that, we are not concerned by that or this any more. We go along very boldly, in a very stubborn way- we just sail along. We have our own plough, our own tank, and we are going to drive right along. Whether we are confronted by a house, a shop or a supermarket, we are going to drive right on through.

The whole point seems to be whether o r not we have that bold attitude of being what we are and are willing to disregard the duality of that and this. We accept our negative side and the fact we are a fool. We use it as part of the meditational process. Nevertheless we are going to go on and on and on and on being ashamed or being proud of it. But we are just going to go on and on and on.

Rinpoche, I wonder if I've misunderstood. Are there basically four kinds of feeling, bodily pleasurable and painful and mind pleasurable and painful? There seem to be, on one hand, pleasurable and painful feelings and, on the other hand, bodily and mental type feelings. This is because so much imagination is involved. To put it in terms of a very simple metaphor, the mind aspect of feeling is like being high on. The first is highly imaginary, the second is rather earthy but at the same time emotional.

So it's like two kinds of intoxication- high on chemicals, high on yeast. Feeling has all kinds of variations- more than four. Pain, pleasure, or indifference could be friend or enemy, mental or physical. You see, all human experience is high on something. Whether we regard ourselves as sober or not, we are constantly drunk, drunk on one thing or another, drunk on imagination or d runk on conflicts on the bodily level. Otherwise we could not survive. So we could say that this idea of feeling is different kinds of intoxication.

You are intoxicated with good and bad: You are intoxicated in imagination- all sorts of imaginations are going on. You are intoxicated in the body in that you are irritated by that and this and therefore you would like to get revenge by imposing yourself on something, laying your trip on something. The whole thing, all of experience, is being intoxicated on something. That is a very important and revealing aspect of this question of feeling, of this second stage in the development of the skandhas.

The first skandha is ignorance, bewilderment, confusion and vague name and form. In the second one, already having some vague concept of where you stand, you would like to lay trips on something. This is what the feeling that happens-good and bad, body and mind-is about. Is every feeling dualistic? If it's based on something, some concept or wishful thinking. You see, every feeling of that sort must have a target in terms of this and that, of this in relation to that.

This where I begin and that where I want to get to. In other words, in relating to this and that, you have no way at all of relating with yourself. You have lost yourself altogether because 24 FEELING Copyrighted material the two extremes have something continuing underneath as a common link, a common thread that runs between happiness and sadness of body and mind.

Perception is based on that which is manifested by form and feeling and that which is not manifested by them. These are the two basic qualities in perception. In the first case, something is manifested via the six sense organs. You perceive something and you relate to it; you hold onto certain senses and their perceptions, and then from there you relate with that content.

That is the first touching and feeling process. Feeling is like a radiation radiating out. Within that radiation, perception takes place as the radiation begins to function as definite details of that and this. In this case "feeling" is not quite our ordinary notion of feeling. It is not the feeling we take so seriously as, for instance, when we say, "He hurt my feelings.

Here, in the case of the second skandha, it is the immediate, impulsive type of feeling of jumping to certain conclusions and trying to attach oneself to them. Perception could be called another type of feeling, the deepened feeling of experiencing that which is manifested and that which is not manifested in terms of the solid bodily situation. You see, the whole idea of the manifested or the nonmanifested here comes from freezing space in our way of dealing with situations. Primordial consciousness flashes out, the unconscious flashes out, which creates tremendous open space.

Glimpses of Abhidharma: From a Seminar on Buddhist Psychology - Chögyam Trungpa - Google Книги

Within that space, ignorance and energy develop as we discussed before. Immediately, then, when ego begins to take up its position through the action of the skandhas, there is a natural automatic tendency to relate to that open space as overcrowded. Ego tries to possess that open space, that awakened state, by overcrowding it.

It is still the first impulsive situation of ego's development, so in order to crowd that space, one tries to freeze the whole space into a solid block. It's like water freezing into ice. The space itself is regarded as a solid thing of ego. It is t he basic intelligence which begins to show this bravery. On the whole, any notion of exploring or taking a chance in relating with one's ego and projections is regarded as inspired by the enlightened mind.

That is because you are not trying to hold on, to continue something, to prove something, but you are looking at other. That in itself is a very brave attitude and a very spacious one, because your mind is completely charged with curiosity and interest and space and questions.

This absolute nothingness is the last stage of development of perception. On the whole, the relationship-between perception and the previous skandhas is that form creates the ego and ignorance and basic things, and feeling brings the spiky quality or sharpness within that, of something trying to maintain itself.

The perception comes as extending ego's territory and trying to define its position even much more. There is in perception a lot of referring back to the central headquarters of ego, and then extending and exploring further and further always in relation back to it.

This establishment of territory in relation to a central reference point seems to be the general pattern of the development of ego. I only got four developments in perception. Big is the third one, and small is the fourth. The fifth is absolute nothingness. Could you go over nonmanifestation again? It has to do with fear. It is based en the fear of not having a solid situation anymore. Solidified space is hope. It is hopeful in that you manage to solidify the space as something to hang onto. In nonmanifestation, you have found nothing, and there is complete despair and giving up hope.

But that is in itself a doublecross of ego, because giving up hope is in itself clinging to something. The first flash is just blank. Then a question, then an answer, then solidifying that and relating to it in terms of love and hate and so on. But very quickly, in a fraction of a second. Is it possible to continue to exist without this process? It seems if that would stop, I would be in great danger.

That is what you think. There are people who have managed to do without it. After all, all this information about this pattern of the five skandhas comes from the point of view of those who have seen it from above, from an aerial view. It is not necessary to go through these complicated patterns of skandhas. It would be extremely simple not to go through them any more.

You do not have to keep giving birth to the whole process. You can just perceive and go along with that perception, whatever arises. Is that kind of perception you were just talking about outside the ego's confine? Well, that becomes inspiration. Outside of ego, perception becomes inspiration. But that is getting onto the tantric level, which may be too difficult to understand.

It seems that there are hints of tantric teachings in all of this. Of course, yes; if it were without connection to the earlier teachings tantra would be a solitary planet. Actually some of the details of tantric iconography are developed from abhidharma. If you understand the abhidharma really clearly you can get into tantra, then? Yes, that is what happens. Actually a great deal of the tantric symbolism, the mandala, for example, is based on the terminology of the abhidharma.

It runs right through. The abhidharma is a way of seeing; the psychology that it describes is not just a lump sum, a theoretical generality. There is individuality in every aspect of human emotion, human psychology. It is very rich. Each aspect of mind has its own individuality, and as you go along further and further, deeper and deeper, you begin to see these individual aspects as really living forces. At that point you also lose ego, because you no longer have to label experiencing as one big lump sum of "me" and "mine" and "I" anymore.

That has become useless, absurd. Does one identify with these details? Is there a technique of identification happening? Well, if you identify with all these details going on in personal experience, that is very much a shortcut. You don't have to look for outside answers, because answers are there already. It happens on a personal level. What is the process when you say ' 1identify with something"? Say I'm sawing a piece of wood, and I remember to identify with that, is it somehow like putting my mind on my hand?

How does this fit in with the skandhas? Is that like connecting the.

See a Problem?

You are quite right to raise that question. It is quite dangerous actually when we talk about identifying. Nothing is built up that way. Breathing is just breathing happening there. It has nothing to do with my breathing, so that I should have to breathe specially. Becoming one with the wood, is that becoming intoxicated?

We could say that, yes. Once you are in the experience there is some logical pattern to follow, which becomes a sort of perpetually creative process; you begin to see the colorfulness, the vividness of things. Could you explain the relationship between fear and identification? Well, identification is surrendering and not referring back; not checking back with central headquarters but just going on with what is there. Fear is referring back to yourself and making sure that your relationship with what is happening is quite secure.

If you don't check up on yourself, you might have to panic. Suddenly you stop identifying because you fear something is wrong-you begin to lose your grip. This is because in identifying, the carpet of security is pulled out from under your feet. Rinpoche, you said that nonmanifestation is based on fear, whereas it seems to me that the quality of fear is a more solid thing than hope. I see something more spacious about hope than fear. I don't understand how nonmanifestation is based on fear.

Well, nonmanifestation is based on fear in the sense that it becomes despair. Fear projects a situation in which there is nothing to hang onto and you have lost every contact, every connection; so you are dwelling on that-which is despair. It is creating another type of ground to hang onto, dwelling on fear, enjoying fear or sadness as an occupation.

Doubt is intelligence, yes. That is really very powerful thinking actually-. The chaos is intelligence and it is teaching. So you do not have to ward off anything at all. Could you say something about pure pleasure and pure pain isolated unto themselves? How could they exist outside the body or mind? They cannot exist outside the actual body and the actual mind, but they can exist outside our version of the body and our version of the mind.

That is the most difficult thing of all- we say "body" and we say "mind," but we have our own interp. This thingness of things as they are is what is called "emptiness," sunyata, the actual isness quality of things. Things could be without us; they could remain pure and perfect as they are. But we put our own version over them,. It is like dressing up dolls. We have the naked bodies and then we put on military costumes or monks robes or an ordinary tie and suit.

We dress them up. Then suddenly we find that they are alive. And we try to run away from them because they begin to chase us. We end up being haunted by our own desires and perceptions, because we put so much onto them. Finally our own creation liecomes destructive to us. I really didn't understand what you said about freezing space.

The basic ground is open ground, but you do not want to accept that. You want to solidify it to make it tangible, safe ground to walk on. So by freezing space, I mean solidifying that open space. There could be the experience of pain and pleasure as naked pain and naked pleasure without any problem of fixing them in relation to anything. We do not have to conquer our projections and our mind at all. We do not have to control anything. Beyond Mindfulness in Plain English.

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