This weeks FBA Podcast, “Spiritual Death and Rebirth, a New Perspective On the Dharma Niyama”, takes us deeply into the stages of spiritual death and rebirth that are key to the system of meditation, representing the culimination and fulfilment of the Buddhas vision. During this talk given at Padmaloka Subhuti explains some new elements of Sangharakshita’s thinking about how they relate to the Niyamas, particularly the Dharma niyama – exciting, and challenging stuff.
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Spiritual Death and Rebirth, a New Perspective On the Dharma Niyama
(upbeat music) This podcast is brought to you by Free Buddhist Audio, the Dharma for real life. Our work is funded entirely by donations from our generous listeners. If you would like to help us keep this free, come and join us at freebuddhistaudio.com/community. Thank you and happy listening. - So I'm just going to talk for a little while as an introduction to not just the stage of spiritual death, but also the stage of spiritual rebirth. I'm going to do them both together. And then we can just get on with meditating for a couple of days. So I've been talking to this nadhama chain and pointing out the way in which in which we move away from primary experience into a secondary experience, which is constructed upon our primary experience by reactions to the, especially the pleasure and pain content of those, that primary experience. And we've been looking at the way in which the stage of integration brings us back to our basic experience, to basic spurture, sadhana, and identification of the world around us. And that the stage of positive emotion brings positive intentions into play in relation to that primary experience. So we deal with it skillfully, helpfully to ourselves and to others. But of course, positive emotion goes further and deeper than well-wishing, or well-wishing goes further than deeper than merely having thoughts of well-wishing. Skillful action leads to a karmic resultants, it leads to karma vipaka. And as you act more and more skillfully, as you generate more and more skillful action, when you experience a fulfillment, you experience an enrichment. So I've been talking about an enriching and deepening of your experience, and that is a karmic consequence. So it's as a result of your skillful action, of your first of all being integrated with, of being mindful of your primary experience, and not reacting to it. And then your skillful action in relation to it, your experience unfolds with a greater richness and depth. So that the whole sort of early realm of spiritual life is really to do with karma vipaka, karma and karma vipaka. Deanna, in the end, is a karma vipaka. It's very clear, when you read the early texts, the summoner palisata, for instance, which is a kind of root text of the basic path. The Buddha talks about, first of all, renunciation. Then an ethical life is a lot. They're all three or four different versions of precepts are given, an ethical life, so that you're living skillfully. And as a result of living skillfully, you're happy. Happiness is a result of your innocent life. Then as a result of being happy, you become concentrated. You just sit and your mind naturally collects itself. And it naturally, in accordance with the purity of your mind, it naturally begins to touch on higher realms of consciousness. One can make effort, of course, but you can only make that effort to the degree that you've got the basis for it, the karmic basis for it. So the, when I say the early stages of spiritual life, I'm in, for many lifetimes, a large part of it is to do with working with karma. You're working with the karma niyama. You could say that Prapancha takes place because you've identified yourself almost entirely with nature, with the three lower niyamas. You've not seen that there's a karmic force to be taken into consideration. So you're a sophisticated animal, you might say, your vittaka, your intelligence is being used for the sake of human animal aspirations and interests. But the spiritual life works with a karma niyama. To begin with, you're aligning yourself more and more with a karma niyama so that your actions are aligned, yes, aligned with the karma niyama. This current, you could almost say, within reality, that means that skillful action brings fulfillment in a satisfaction, happiness, if not always, of course, a smooth life from an external point of view because that's due to the other niyamas. But internally, you're gained more and more satisfaction, pleasure, fulfillment, well, sort of self-respect, self-confidence, and so on. So, yes, I've talked about primary experience gaining richness and depth. That's under the result of the action of the karma niyama, but that's not the end of it. There's another niyama, there's the dhamma niyama. And to begin with, in a way, you can only work with the dhamma niyama by following the Buddha's teachings. But eventually, the dhamma niyama becomes a force within your own life, you might say. And this is part of what I was talking to Banti about in these interviews I've mentioned. We were talking quite a bit about the niyamas. You know, a lot to say about the niyamas. And he was saying that it's the dhamma niyama that makes Buddhahood possible. It's that within reality that makes Buddha's arise, makes enlightenment possible. There's something about the way reality works that brings enlightenment. So, just as there's something about reality, the way reality works, it means that when you act skillfully, you'll gain in a spiritual depth and richness, you'll gain in satisfaction, in a satisfaction. In the same way, when you align yourself with the dhamma niyama, you will understand reality more and more deeply. He spoke of it not merely as a sort of a description. It's not that the dhamma niyama is, you know, description of what happens. It's as if it's almost a kind of a force. Of course, it's not exactly a force, it's only a metaphor. But once you start to align yourself with it, it begins to operate independently of your will. It begins to manifest in your life and behavior. You said to me, we don't want to go to the extreme of a kind of vitalism or whatever. At the same time, we need to recognise there's something about the universe which is active, which is dynamic, that once you begin to align yourself with it, it takes you forward, it unfolds, and eventually leads to your full realisation. Bante talked about this in terms of his own experience of, well, first of all, of connecting with the dhamma when reading the dhamma n sutra. And he said his experience and huge release of energy and a great sense of joy through his contact with the dhamma at a very, very lofty level. It sort of worked within him. It changed his experience and it's released a huge amount of energy and joy. And he said at various times in his life, he's felt as if he was being worked through, as a metaphor, don't fix it too much. But he talked particularly of that time when he was in Nagpur in Bombay and had arranged to go to Nagpur to be with the new Buddhists who converted just six weeks before. And his friend Dr. Mehta, if you've read the memoirs, he tried to stop him. But Bante knew he had to go and he arrived there and of course was greeted with the news that Dr. Ambedkar had died. And he said that for the next three or four days, he functioned without thinking. He gave many talks. He said he never thought about what he was going to say, but whatever what he said appeared, as it were, in his mouth and was exactly what needed to be said. And without saying that somebody was doing something through him, it was as if it was something more than him at work. So when we're talking about the domineerma, we need to think of something that sort of operates beyond our normal self, our normal experience, that we're opening up to, that we're trying to, yes, align ourselves with. Our practice of the dumber, to a large extent, is aligning ourselves with this force, this current that's inherent in reality. That's all there is to be said, really. But it's a very, very powerful important point, which warrants a great deal of reflection. It's not just a matter of kind of common sense of realizing something and there you go. It's a question of something opening up, which is far bigger than you, and that in a sense sort of works through you. Bante spoke of the Garavasata, which we'll read tonight in the Puja, in the Garavasata. He's talked about it in a number of places. Just after the Buddha's enlightenment, the Buddha thinks to himself, it's painful not to look up to something. It's painful not to rely on something. So what is that I can live reverenting and relying upon? And so then he says, well, there's no human being I can do that with. There's nobody who's greater in realization than me. There's nobody who understands life better than me, as I can't rely on any human being. So what will I rely upon? And he says, then, let me live reverenting the Dhamma, relying upon the Dhamma. And Bante says he thinks it's a tremendously significant passage, which he finds it strange is not really commented on in the Pari Canon. Looking for it this morning, I found another passage where one of the Arahat Bixus talks about himself relying upon the Buddha and reverenting the Buddha. There's a footnote, and the translator, Bikubodi, says this seems rather strange that he's an Arahant, but he still reveres and reverences the Buddha. So clearly something hasn't been sort of kind of nothing's been made of this. But Bante says he thinks it's tremendously significant. That what it implies is that the Buddha's realization was in a sense not enough. His realization connected him to something. Some principle, if you like, but principle is too kind of flatter word, not sufficiently dynamic, or a transcendent, you could say. He was connected to something that was greater than him, which his realization was a realization of. And he suggested that maybe that this is what is being got out in later tradition when it talks of the Buddha Amitabha sort of standing behind the Buddha Shakimuni. There's a kind of transcendental universal, I won't say abstract, Buddha who the human historical Buddha kind of reveres, looks up to, and sort of relates to, relies upon. What you could say is that the Buddha is still a human being. So he's still living as a human being. He's got a human body, he's got a human brain, and therefore a certain sort of human mechanism. So even though his realization is beyond time, above time, as a human being, he stands in relation to that, beyond time, if you sort of mean. In talking about it and trying to sort of get to grips with it, Banto sort of stressing that he's very reluctant to talk about these things that so easily sentimentalized, so easily rarefied, so easily drift into, you know, grand abstractions, so easily leads to people thinking they've understood something because they've got a form of words. He said, in the end, he thinks it's a mystery. And it's a mystery, which we shouldn't try to understand. In a way, we should recognize that there's something that the Buddha realizes and that we can begin to contact that cannot be understood in our ordinary terms. And that our spiritual lives are to an extent, an attempt to open up to. So he thinks it's far better to give us little content to that as possible. And this is his quarrel with later Mahayana and so forth, which fills the void with lots of grand metaphysical abstractions, even, well, you know, his distrust of terminology to target a guru and so forth. He thinks that this sort of then imposes on the mystery something that appears to be intelligible. And it may have some positive effect, may come out of people's genuine experience, but he thinks that danger is, that it easily stands between you and the mystery. Of course, the danger of leading it as a mystery is that you think it's blank. So how to, you know, pitch it just right down the middle. And he said, he thinks, for instance, if you're talking about your own experience, your own even spiritual experience, even some kind of vision experience, don't reach for ready-made concepts. He said, describe the raw experience. Don't try to fit it into some categories and say it's this or that, whether they're categories to do with Buddhist metaphysics or categories, you know, to do with this realization or that realization, this level or that level, just describe the experience. And, you know, people have had that experience, so they'll recognize what you're talking about. If they haven't, well, they'll get some inkling of it because, well, all experience, you know, has echoes for others if you describe it. Well, so long as to be enough. So, yes, he's saying that there's a mystery. The Buddha fully engages with a mystery that our spiritual lives are lived to see, if you can see a mystery, to immerse ourselves in. And that's what we're beginning to do in the stage of spiritual death and the stage of spiritual rebirth. In the stage of spiritual death, we're letting go. We're giving up those things that prevent us from experiencing the mystery, those things that prevent the domineema working itself out through us. We're systematically disentangling ourselves from identification of ourselves with our physical bodies, with the physical elements, thinking that that's who we are, thinking of our minds in those terms, thinking of our experience in those terms, thereby closing them off, narrowing them down so the domineema can't manifest within us. It's got no chance, no opportunity. There's no hole, as it were, through which it can sink, although it sometimes does burst through in spontaneous ways under old circumstances. But yes, first of all, we need to loosen our hold on our tight-grasting onto the physical elements as me and learn to experience them, but without grasping. Well, that's what you're doing with mindfulness, actually. You're trying to see what's there without any sense of mind. Even when we're looking through the body and seeing the sensations of having a body, of touch and so forth. We're trying to just see them without any sense of grasping onto them. But we need to, much more systematically, undo our identification with the physical elements. So when we do the six-element practice, we're engaging in that process. We're recognizing that there's nothing in each of the elements, earth, water, fire and air, that is permanent, that's substantial, that we can call our own, and we're giving it up. It's interesting in the Pali version of the practice in the (speaks in foreign language) It talks about feeling nibhindati, having the experience of nibhita. Do you remember in the positive nidanas? Nibhita, which means usually disentanglement, sometimes even disgust, a sense of I don't want. Not just, oh, let go, but give up, let go. It's holding me down, it's tacky, it's holding me back. And then virajati, which of course is viraga, which is what follows on, which is dispassion. In other words, indifference, you're not interested. And the interesting thing is that these come on after Yathabut and Yana Darshan, don't they? Which is the point when the Dhamma Niyama begins to decisively operate within you, irreversibly operate within you. It's the point when you enter the stream. The stream is the stream of Dhamma Niyama. You've entered that conditioning process, that process of preteachers, somewhat pada, which leads on to enlightenment. So you're letting go of what prevents that from unfolding. And then when you come to the space element, you're getting some sort of preliminary feeling of spaciousness because you're letting go of a limited experience of space. So you're connecting with a much larger field of consciousness, and then you're seeing that consciousness, well, it's got nothing to identify itself with in the five elements. Consciousness is pure subjectivity, you could say. So it has no identity by definition. Do you see what I mean? But identity belongs to the objective world. It's objects that are identified, distinguished from other things. But consciousness is the act. It's not actually a thing at all. It's the act of knowing objects. It, Dante suggested in these discussions that one might, he once tried to use a verbal form of consciousness, which is consiring. C-O-N-S-C-I-R-E, I-N-G, rather. And we both agreed that probably it wouldn't catch on. But it means the act of knowing, the act of being conscious, it's connected with science. So consciousness isn't a thing. We talk about it as if it was a table or a chair, my consciousness, so we say, my consciousness leaves my body at death as if your shirt came off and went on to somebody else. It's not like that. If consciousness is the act of knowing, so when you're not identifying anything as mine within the objective world, there's nothing for consciousness to be attached to. So consciousness is just conscious, it's just being conscious in the text, in the Dr. Vivangasita, the Buddha talks about it as being Parishita Parayodita, which means very pure and very bright. So what you experience when you cease to identify with the elements, the physical elements, is a consciousness that is undefined, luminous, knowing, but without a knower, without a source, as it were, of light. It's just pure knowing. And Bantu says then, would just see what happens. You sort of push your boat out into the middle of the stream, see where the stream takes you, see what unfolds in your experience, what happens to consciousness. Of course, you may need to continue to just disentangle as your consciousness goes back to clinging and grasping, you just sort of disentangle. But essentially what you're doing is allowing something to happen, seeing what's left when you leave the space. And the space that you're leaving is the space within which the domineama can begin to emerge or unfold. So the stage of spiritual death is dying to those things that obscure the domineama, those things that hold you back from the domineama. It's those things that you cling to that prevent the stream from plaring you along. So as if you're, well, we're in the midst of reality, where therefore the domineama is playing upon us all the time. In a sense, the domineama operates through the other nearmas, getting dangerously close to metaphysicalizing at all. But we remain, as it were, safe from the domineama, because we cling to the elements, we cling to the scandals, we cling to mine, I. And when we relax, which is what we do in this six-element practice, there's an opportunity for the domineama to begin to operate through us. And what actually happens, it's best not to say too much. Because when you speak about it too much, you start to sort of prepackage what happens. And it's very, very difficult, not then, to sort of think you're having an experience that you're not actually having, to sentimentalize it or reify it. So Banti prefers you're leaving a space within a mystery has the opportunity of unfolding. And of course, nothing may happen. But you repeatedly do the practice, you disentangle more and more, and there's more and more of an opportunity for something to emerge. So that's the stage of spiritual death. What about the stage of spiritual rebirth? 'Cause in a way, the domineama working within you is rebirth, is spiritual rebirth. You've died to a self connected with the four, or the three learned ehemas and even in a way that the carboniuma. And when you die to that, something else takes over. But we need some sort of way of approaching that. We need some way of, well, worshipping the domineama. It's not enough just to have a golden dama chakra. It's very difficult to feel the golden dama chakra is sort of worthy of reverence. It can be just a sort of shorthand for a pile of books. Maybe it isn't for some people. Very interesting, there's the fascinating suttas in which the golden wheel appears in the sky. The wheel of the wheel turning monarch and so on. But yes, it's in a way an abstract symbol. It doesn't carry, well, for me at least, it doesn't carry a kind of a numinous power, a sense of something coming from another dimension. And we need that, because without revering and relying upon something, life is suffering. Of course, we can rely and revere the Buddha. And we're very, very fortunate. The Buddha is a historical personage who we know quite a lot about. And Bantu says he thinks that we need to know, we need to sort of focus much, much more on the historical Buddha. All the other Buddhas and Bodhisattvas only have their meaning because of the historical Buddha. So we need to sort of ground ourselves again and again in the historical Buddha, because he embodies that transcendence. But in the way, we need to have a bit of a glimpse almost beyond the historical Buddha. We need a glimpse of what it is that makes him the Buddha. And where we get this from the architect, Paul Buddhas and Bodhisattvas, they embody the Dhamma Nirma at a point beyond our human horizon. Bantu speaks of them as being on the horizon of our experience. What's beyond the horizon? We can't imagine. But there, where that horizon, well, what's beyond that horizon, meets us. And they allow us to connect with something way beyond our own present experience, our present consciousness, our present way of experiencing. And they give us something to revere, to rely upon and to aspire to and even to serve. Yeah, we can do that with the human historical Buddha because he's for us to some extent also an archetype. It goes beyond the human and the historical. But through these practices that we were given as ordination, we've been given a means of connection with the Dhamma Nirma in an embodied form, in a personified form, albeit a transcendental person without as it were human characteristics in the ordinary sense. Which is much more approachable for us. You remember in the Three Jewels, I remember talking about this on one or other of the Gughelokas that some of you are on. He talks about, to think of enlightenment as impersonal is to think of it as sub-personal. And it's better to think of it as sub-personal. Do you see what I mean? So if you think of the enlightenment as something impersonal, the impersonal for us is something that has no personality. In other words, it's sub-personal because personal is the highest category we know. So you need to think of enlightenment as something beyond a person. And the best way you can do that is thinking of a transcendent personality. Is that clear? So that when we visualise the Buddhism Bodhisattvas, we're connecting with this principle, the Dhamma Nirma, an active force, which is the dynamic of reality in terms of these figures, which are not literally what it is. But they're the nearest approach we can get to it from our sense, based albeit sublimated sense faculties. So that's what these two stages are about. The stage of spiritual death focuses on letting go so that something can happen. Not just letting go, bunches stress. It doesn't think that the terminology of letting go is enough. You need to think of giving up, something much more active that goes a little bit against the grain. We are definitely putting down, getting rid of, putting aside. So that, something can begin to emerge. And in the visualization practice is you're connecting with the closest you can come to what that mystery is without falsifying it. He thinks that metaphysical formulae easily falsify. And that you get much closer to it in imaginative terms, imagine all terms, archetypal terms, albeit transcendentalized archetypes, not mere archetypes, but archetypes that are invested with a transcendent meaning. And that when you contemplate those, you're drawn up, you're allowing the domineama to affect you directly. So I hope this is a helpful way of talking. This is hot off the press and gaining clarity in my own mind as I'm speaking. But I find it especially helpful that we should think of the universe as constructed with a built-in tendency towards enlightenment. A scientist that says very tentatively, in a way you could see this in all the nearmas. You can see that the physical, inorganic nearma, sort of transcends itself in the sort of biological creation. It's out of it, comes life, living matter. And then you can see that that living matter fulfills itself in the intelligence of the animal, the instinctive intelligence of the animal, the manonium, which operates in us too. A lot of what we are is this instinctive intelligence albeit at a very sophisticated level. And that fulfills itself in the common nearma, in self-consciousness. Self-consciousness is the basis of ethics. It's when self-consciousness is there that there's a relationship between the self and the world. And so the common nearma is the fulfillment of the manonium, you could say. And the dominium, it kind of emerges out of the common nearma because when you are fully operating in harmony with the common nearma, the dominium can manifest. When you are fully skillful, when you're living a life of ethical purity, when your mind is deeply immersed in higher mental states, the dominium emerges. So this force of self-transcendence, this transcending force, is present at every level of reality. And what we're doing in our spiritual lives is aligning ourselves with that. And everything that we're doing even during these days is an alignment with those forces. What we're doing in these practices, first of all, is getting out of our false construction reality, which our self-consciousness allows us to do. Our manonium emerges with a self-conscious dimension and we mistake its character and we become immersed in seeking satisfaction through the senses, albeit in very complex ways. So that we're lost in Prabhancha. We come back to ordinary basic awareness and then we make that skillful through my tree and through skillful action, which begins to emerge as richer and richer experience of life in aesthetic terms, aesthetic in the worldly sense and aesthetic in the deonic sense. And if we then, what we then need to do is work at letting go of our grasp onto the lower neomers, our identification with the lower neomers, our identification with the elements and allowing something to emerge within us. We don't know what, but we have confidence. We have faith that that will happen. Our faith is the first glimmering of the domineomer. Faith is the first sort of sense of being pulled upwards beyond ourselves. And with the six element practice, we're deliberately letting go, our hold on the elements, even on the lower neomers, our identification of the lower neomers. And with the visualization practices, we're engaging, we're opening up to the domineomer as embodied in these transpersonal personalities and thereby allowing the domino to affect us much more fully, much more deeply. So there you are. We're gonna do it now. A lot to reflect on, but a lot to work with. And I think the main thing is that as we approach these two dimensions of practice, try to get that sense of mystery and of faith that something will emerge. Those seem to be the key terms. A sense of faith, but almost you could say, you don't know what in. A faith in something that you're absolutely conformed is beneficent and is supremely beneficent. But you don't know what it is. You can't put it into words. You know you can't put it into words. Or you know that any words you put it into will miss something about it. And yes, you give yourself up to that. That's what these two practices are really about. (upbeat music) We hope you enjoyed the talk. 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