May 10, 2014 Seattle Sat. Am Pp 1-4 very clear intro to the fruits of vipassana practice Pp 4-8 introduces the akashic field practice.

May 10, 2014 Saturday Morning, opening talk, Seattle Retreat

Pp 1-4 very clear intro to the fruits of vipassana practice

Pp 4-8 introduces the akashic field practice.

Aaron: Good morning. My blessings and love to you all. I am Aaron. Now I may look like Barbara sitting here, and it doesn't matter if you think I am. Just imagine there's somebody sitting here, talking to you. If it's helpful, use it. If not, discard it. I just asked Barbara to reread that poem "You Have Permission" for the others.

You Have Permission

by Dan Nussbaum

You have permission to think. You have permission to worry. You have permission to wonder if you're doing it right.

You have permission to wonder what doing it right means. You have permission to see yourself wondering. Did you start meditation to become a good meditator? You have permission to do it wrong. But if you have permission to do it wrong, how can you do it wrong? You have permission to be bad.

You have permission to remember what it was like to be carefree. You have permission to doubt those memories. You have permission to get back to those memories whether you made them up or not. You have permission to know how you make up memories.

You have permission to go over German verbs. You have permission to think about the different grades of motor oil. You have permission to wonder, How is this meditation? You have permission to note body sensations. You have permission to do something else with body sensations. Love them. Be suspicious of them.  Forbid them. Give them meaning. Question that meaning.

You have permission to have feelings. You have permission to need someone, to worry out of habit, to fear vaguely, to feel disgust, to insist on getting things your way.  You have permission to let things go on. You have permission to find yourself in unexpected mind states.

You have permission to get lost. You have permission to be curious and interested. You have permission to get transfixed. You have permission to feel calm. You have permission to feel sleepy. You have permission to sleep. How else will you know about waking up if you don't have permission to be asleep?

You have permission to know yourself in meditation.

You have permission. You have permission. You have permission.

Why are you here today? A vacation day? You could be swimming or walking in the sunshine. Why are you here? I would imagine that you are all here because there is some sense of dissatisfaction in your life experience. Your life may be beautiful, filled with joyful things, pleasant. Do you then occasionally ask, is this all there is? What is this about? Or your life may be filled with unsatisfactory experiences–sadness, wanting, confusion, pain.

When I asked, "Why are you here?" that was about today. But also, why are you here in incarnation? Don't tell me it just happened! Yes, your mother and father got together, sperm and egg, and a fetus arrived, a baby was born. Why you? Why this particular consciousness that you are? What have you come into the incarnation to learn, to do?

Each of you is distinct in the answer, but for all of you, you have come to learn loving kindness to yourself and to others. All of you have experienced harshness toward yourself, toward others, toward the world, and that's okay. You have permission. You have permission to perpetuate those patterns. You have permission to perpetuate the suffering that grows out of those patterns. You have permission to explore the patterns, and find that you do have a choice, and that you do not have to perpetuate the patterns, that your life can be more joyful and filled with love. It's your choice.

So when I ask you why are you here today in this room, in this house, I would take it that it's because you are ready consciously or unconsciously to more deeply explore the patterns that have held you bound into suffering, unsatisfactoriness, fear, anger, confusion, and so forth. Increasingly ready to say maybe I don't have to do that anymore.

If my longtime friends will excuse my repetition, I want to offer a metaphor. Supposing there was a beach on that lake down there, and we all came there on a beautiful summer day. Your friends are all out swimming. You don't know how to swim, but I give you a lifejacket. You strap it on. You're timid with it, but I have you climb down the ladder from the dock, and it supports you. A little bit of movement with the hands and feet, doggy-paddle, and off you go, more and more self-assured as you go out to greet your friends. You swim with them, you have a good time.

Ten years go by, and every day you strap on that lifejacket and swim with it. Now here we are at that same dock. I come down and I see you strapping on a moldy, mildewed, waterlogged lifejacket. "What are you doing?" "This is my lifejacket. You gave it to me ten years ago. It supports me."

Ten years ago it supported you. At some time in your life it seemed as though the old habitual patterns of anger, of fear, of blame, of feelings of unworthiness, offered some kind of support. What may they have supported? Perhaps as a child there was so much anger at abusive behavior from an adult, and no ability to safely express that anger, so you turned the anger onto yourself and said, "See? I'm unworthy." And this became the lifejacket. Whenever anger arose, instead of saying to the other in a skillful way, "You may not talk to me that way," you said, "See? It's just because I'm bad. Something's wrong with me."

Eventually the suffering becomes so intense, but you're attached to these lifejackets, these stories about yourself that you have carried forever. "I'm inept. The lights go out in the house but I don't know how to change a fuse. I'll have to wait until somebody comes along and changes it for me. I'll sit in the dark because I've been told that I'm inept in that way. I can't change a fuse."

"Nobody will love or respect me." That's another lifejacket. They don't sound like lifejackets, they sound like burdens. But at some point you picked up these stories because they seemed to offer you protection in some way, some kind of safety. And then there was never the opportunity to explore, "why am I hanging onto this?"

Your vipassana practice gives you the opportunity to look at these old lifejackets, these old stories, and consider, which ones do you still wish to carry? Which ones are you ready to release? So this morning on the dock, I say to you, "It's waterlogged. It's drowning you." I ask you to climb down that same ladder, let go, don't move your hands and feet. See what happens. "Do you remember ten years ago it buoyed you up? What happens?" Down you go.

Now imagine you've climbed back up the ladder to the raft. You're holding this lifejacket that you believed supported you, that you believed you needed, and you've just had a direct observation it's drowning you. It's still not easy to take it off, is it?

Our meditation practice gives us the opportunity to watch the old habitual patterns that are drowning us and to question them. Everything in this world of conditions arises when the conditions are present for it to arise and ceases when the conditions cease. It is all impermanent.

(Looking out the window) There was blue sky, beautiful clear blue sky. (Pointing at clouds moving in) Storm clouds. Atmospheric conditions are blowing the storm clouds this way. Eventually it will rain. When the atmospheric conditions change, the blue sky will be apparent again.

Do you identify yourself with the blue sky, or with the storm clouds, or do you see that both are part of you? If you only identify yourself as the storm cloud, as it goes past you'll look around for another one. If you only identify yourself as the blue sky, you're going to be in for a very hard time because the storm clouds will come and you won't be able to bear it. But when you recognize the innate nature as the blue sky, and out of conditions the storm clouds come and then they pass away, then instead of constantly contracting to keep the storm clouds away, there can be attention to the spaciousness of the blue sky, attention to your innate goodness and clarity.

Let's look at this window right here. It has some of Buddy's (the dog) smudges on it. Seeing the smudges from Buddy's nose on the glass, do we think to ourselves we'll have to tear out the glass? The glass is innately perfect. Do we take a heavy scouring pad and scrub the smudges off? You'll scratch the glass. We simply notice the smudges, and that they interfere with our perception of the innate clarity of the glass. And then we gently wash them off.

This is basically what you're doing in meditation. You see the "smudges" that come, the fear, the knots of fear, the body pain, the self-judgment, all of this arising out of conditions. You attend to it with kindness and awareness, present with it, seeing this contraction has arisen. That anger has arisen. This fear has arisen. This body pain has arisen. How am I going to take care of this with love and let it release?

Then as you come back, you come back to the innate clarity and perfection of your being and you begin to know yourselves as that. But you are not just that; you have the capacity for the distortions, and your innate nature is perfection. When the distortions arise, then there's not so much self-identity. We just say, "Ah, you again."

Again asking my old friends to forgive my repetition. Here is a story about the Tibetan saint Milarepa. He's meditating at the mouth of his cave when the demons of fear and greed and anger appear. They are terrible looking! Milarepa notices them, takes one look at them and says, "Ah, come sit by my fire, have tea." "Aren't you afraid of us?" they ask. "No, your hideous appearance only reminds me to have mercy, to open my heart, to be aware. Sit by my fire, have tea."

My friends, these demons are going to appear when you meditate. It's inevitable. The question is not whether they appear, and the work is not to grab a stick and keep chasing them away. The question is, how can I open my heart to them, wash them off my being gently so as not to damage the "glass", and reveal the innate clarity, the innate radiance and beauty of my being. That is our practice.

Gradually these objects arise less often, and you become more and more adept at offering them tea. They're going to want to tell you stories. Here comes a feeling of unworthiness, shaking you. "Hey, you're not listening to me. You're just no good! Why don't you realize that?" "Shh! Sit and have tea. No dialogue." So we see how these demons want to grab hold and engage us in their stories, and part of the presence is being willing to let them sit there, without taking a stick to them and without believing in any truth of what they're trying to tell you. Just watching them. If you don't give them energy, they'll go.

I wanted to say this to create a ground for our practice this weekend. I know that some of you will be here different lengths of time, but whether it's just for a day or three days, a focus on vipassana, watching how objects arise out of conditions. Not getting caught in the objects. Graciously offering them tea. Not getting caught in their stories. Watching them until they fade away, and coming back to the innate purity of the glass, your innate pure being, so that you start to get to know and trust that innate clarity, that goodness and radiance and beauty of yourselves. Yes, sometimes you're angry. Sometimes you're afraid. Sometimes you're impatient. Sometimes you're judgmental. It's just a Buddy-nose smudge on the glass. Let it be.

Part One of our practice then is deepening the vipassana practice so it's a useful tool to do this work, with appropriate instruction as needed. Part Two for those of you who have studied with me and Barbara for a longer time, I want to deepen our akashic field work.

A brief explanation for those who are new. Picture a bowl. Put everything in the world into that bowl: thoughts, feelings, physical objects, everything. It's an infinite empty space. When we hear a sound, the sound of the bell, from where did the sound arise? Where will it go? It arose because the striker hit the metal, then there's sound. Then the sound will pass away. Let mind give rise to a thought. From where did it arise? Where will it go? Feel a pain in the body. It arose because of certain body conditions. Where did it come from? Where will it go in the end?

It's all coming out of, the Tibetan teachings use the term "All Ground." I prefer the word "akashic field." I am not a Tibetan teacher so I use a different term. There are four basic material elements: earth, air, fire, and water. If it rains hard on the soil, you end up with mud. Do we have water element or earth element? Of course we have both. If there's a brisk wind, so that you have a big mud puddle and the wind starts blowing flicks of that mud, do we have wind element, air, earth, or water? Of course all three. And then the sun comes out and dries it up. The muddy water starts to become hot-- the fire element.

These elements are conditioned; that is, they are finite. As with every other conditioned object, the water element, the fluidity throughout the whole universe, is a conditioned object. The earth element is a conditioned object. Fire is a conditioned object. And we have the ground out of which they arise. The fifth element is ether or akasha, which is  an object in itself and also is the container for these mundane elements That ground is, let's call it the edge of the conditioned, the container, out of which all the conditioned objects arise and into which they sink.

In the Tibetan teaching, we have just beneath that All Ground what they call primordial purity. In primordial purity there is no distortion. Picture this vast field of primordial purity, the bowl, and the possibility of the basic shift into a conditioned world but not yet moved into it. Picture a one-way membrane. So the primordial purity opens up into the conditioned, into the Ground. It's expressing into the Ground, and then the ground expressing into the elements and into thoughts and into all the objects of your conditioned world.

Into that immensity of turbulence of conditioned objects arising and passing away, some will appear distorted. So we have a deep still sea, completely quiet. Then the wind blows, air element, and it sets up a ripple and a wave, and suddenly there's turbulence. The turbulence is not bad or good, it's simply the interaction of the wind on the water, setting up currents.

We have people in little rafts on the surface. They were floating there on the still water, and suddenly they're bouncing up and down. And we say, "Oh! Now this is bad!" It's just water being water and wind being wind. But we do want to reach out and stabilize the rafts, or help these people get into a bigger boat so they don't drown.

I will explain the akashic field practice further. Some of you who are here just today will not get much of it. Those of you who are here longer will get more of it.

We sink down into the akashic field. Think of yourself as having the ability to stretch out to 200 feet long. So you're up there with these rafts bobbing up and down on the water, people screaming, "Help me! Save me!" You as ego can't save all these people. You're bouncing up and down just like they are. In meditation we know our infiniteness. Let yourself stretch down so your feet move down 100, 200 feet into the still water, and anchor yourself. Ground yourself. With your feet still down there, metaphorically speaking, reach up your energy and attend to what needs to be attended to on the surface.

It's the difference between, if you have a candle burning on the table and it tips over, running around screaming, "What am I going to do?! The cloth is set on fire!" Or just (taking a deep breath), "Candle tipped. Cloth burning. Smother it." It's not coming from an ego. It's not coming from fear. You do know what to do. You always know what to do. Not you, but that part of you that's interconnected with everything.

There are many levels to this work within the akashic field. As appropriate we'll discuss them with whoever is here. The importance for you right now is that our vipassana practice is a non-dual practice which allows us to be present in the world of conditions and also deeply present in the Unconditioned at the same time. Present in that stillness, in both the primordial purity and the All Ground, present in that field.

There's a beautiful poem by Hongzhi, a zen poet of long agoin his book,Cultivating the Empty Field.. I'll ask  Barbara to see if she can find it in her computer and read it to you later.

The Bright, Boundless Field

The field of boundless emptiness is what exists from the very beginning. You must purify, cure, grind down or brush away all the tendencies you have fabricated into apparent habits. Then you can reside in the clear circle of brightness.  Utter emptiness has no image, upright independence does not rely on anything. Just expand and illuminate the original truth unconcerned by external conditions. Accordingly we are told to realize that not a single thing exists.  In this field birth and death do not appear.  The deep source, transparent down to the bottom, can radiantly shine and can respond unencumbered to each speck of dust without becoming its partner.  The subtlety of seeing and hearing transcends mere colors and sounds. The whole affair functions without leaving traces, and mirrors without obscurations. Very naturally, mind and dharmas emerge and harmonize.  An ancient said that non-mind embodies and fulfills the way of non-mind. Embodying and fulfilling the way of non-mind, finally you can rest. Proceeding you are able to guide the assembly. With thoughts clear, sitting silently, wander into the center of the circle of wonder. This is how you must penetrate and study.

So this is where our practice is going. It's not a practice of fixing things. It's a practice of attending and is based on our deepest intention to do no harm for ourselves and others; to do good in the world; to support loving kindness in the world. We draw on our ability to hold space for whatever arises within that container that feels contracted, frightened, angry, negative, confused; to hold space for it and let it dissolve, and essentially to then let ourselves sink down 200 feet to that still space. Gradually in your practice you become so stable in that place that you do have direct experiences of the Unconditioned, what we call awakening experiences. You start to know I am, we all are, that. We all are of the essence of that Unconditioned itself. And we stop dividing experiences into good and bad. Maybe pleasant and unpleasant, yes, wholesome and unwholesome, but not good and bad. We stop creating dualities.

You all have the basic vipassana practice. I'm going to keep this short. You have different degrees of experience with the akashic field so may or may not touch that in your practice.

Q: Is the akashic field synonymous with the Unconditioned, or are there other elements?

Aaron: The akashic field is the Unconditioned and conditioned together. It's the field of everything, the space out of which it arises, the Unconditioned itself, and the expressions. A lot of the difficulty that people get into is creating a distinction that says this is the Unconditioned and therefore good, and that's the conditioned and therefore, even if it's delightful, it is other-than-good in some way.

Within vipassana we see the continuity. This is why we look so much at impulse energy. We watch thinking arise and then we begin to watch the impulse that gives rise to that memory or thought. We watch physical sensation, and as attention deepens we begin to find the very first subtle nudges of that physical sensation. An ache somewhere in the body-- suddenly it's got your attention, but where was it half an hour ago when it was just a little bit of sensation?

Through watching in this way we become totally certain that it's all simply arising out of conditions, impermanent, and not of the nature of a self. Simply put, if I am not these skandhas, these outflows from the Unconditioned, what remains? This then gives you a chance to move deeper into that "what remains."

Do you know the term access concentration? (Yes.) Have you experienced access concentration at some times? (Yes.) Okay. So this becomes a doorway, because objects are still arising into your experience but there's no going out to them or trying to hold onto them. We just see them coming up and going off.

At that point, within access concentration, the degree of presence that is needed, and the equanimity with formations that is needed, are both present, so that instead of it being grounded in the mundane citta or consciousness, the doorway is open to experiencing the supramundane citta or consciousness.

Every citta takes an object-- basic dharma. Eye, seeing consciousness, seeing the cushion. Touch, feeling consciousness, feeling the touch, touching. Mind touching an object, a memory. Mundane citta take conditioned objects. Supramundane citta take supramundane objects.

With the opening of the door that comes with access concentration, the supramundane citta become available and capable to take a supramundane object. We enhance that ability by encouraging people at that stage of practice to use space or energy or nada or luminosity more consciously as the primary object, so there's already some touch into the Unconditioned. These are not the Unconditioned; these are direct expressions of the Unconditioned. But it's at that point that cessation experience and a full emergence into the Unconditioned can arise. We're not practicing to have an experience of the Unconditioned, we're practicing for liberation. But that experience of the Unconditioned definitely grounds the liberation experience.

So we're using the akashic field work as a way of seeing the simultaneity of Ground and expression. Not getting so swept away by the expressions, nor hiding out in the Ground, but holding space for both. And it's really another route into access concentration. As we see these expressions arising and passing away, suddenly there's deep equanimity with them. You're resting more deeply in the Ground, and yet there is still presence that sees them arising, sees them passing away, experiences it.

The second part of the akashic field practice. Once one becomes skilled at resting in the akashic field, once one becomes comfortable there, one can begin to interrelate to the world in a more skillful way. If you come into a room and many people are hostile and yelling at each other, you feel the distortion in the space of that room. You feel all the angry energy. The person entering, based in ego, will either run out or will say, "You all be quiet!" and try to fix everything. The person coming into it resting in the akashic field will simply sit, feel all the energy swirling around, hold the space. Invite the smudge-free glass from all the people in the room. Some will be able to offer that, some won't. But gradually it changes the energy of the whole room.

So we find that working in the akashic field is not only part of a clear path to liberation but is a path to service in the world, to action to enhance loving kindness and compassion in the world. So we work with this practice for both of those reasons.

Does that give you some more understanding of it?

Q: Yes, thank you.

Aaron: Are there any other questions? (No) Then enough words. I want you to have time to practice. We'll talk more. I will be back this afternoon, tonight, whenever. Remember we are in silence...

Let us just sit ...

(session ends)