What’s Relative, What’s Constant
July 30, 2024

There’s a parallel between the Buddha’s teachings and the theory of relativity. Most people think that relativity means that everything is relative, but that’s not the case. It simply means that the constant is not what we thought it was. In Newton’s theory, space and time were constants, and everything else was relative to them. But then Einstein came along and said, “No, the speed of light is the constant. Space and time are relative to that.”

It’s a little disorienting, thinking that space could shrink or expand, time could speed up, slow down, relative to their speed next to the speed of light.

The parallel is that we ordinarily think of ourselves as a constant—“me and my story”—and our experience of pleasure and pain is pretty random: Sometimes we do good things and we get bad results; we do bad things and get good results; we do good things and get good results; bad things, bad results. It doesn’t seem to make any sense.

But think about the Buddha on the night of his awakening. In his first knowledge, his identity was the constant that he was trying to trace. But he saw that his identity was pretty random: From one lifetime to the next it would change. And it didn’t necessarily go up. Sometimes it would go down.

An analogy he used later was that it’s like throwing a stick up into the air. Sometimes it lands on this end, sometimes it lands on that end, sometimes it lands splat in the middle.

So his question was, is there a pattern to the ups and downs, or was it truly random? Then in the second and third knowledges he found out that there was something that was constant—the laws of causality, particularly as they pertain to karma: intentional actions.

So the question is not so much who you are, it’s what you do. And who you are is a result of what you do. That changes the constant, because, who you are can change. There’s a lot of good news there, too: If you hold on to yourself and say, “I’m this kind of person and I wouldn’t feel comfortable being anything else,” reflect on the fact that you’ve been many, many things.

Think of Ajaan Mun recollecting his previous lifetimes. He came across a period when for 500 lifetimes he was a dog. It’s hard to think of Ajaan Mun as a dog. But as he said, there was a period when he was satisfied with the pleasures of dogs—dog sensuality—and that’s why he was stuck there.

So if it could happen to Ajaan Mun, imagine your past history. It’s all kinds of things. Which is why all kinds of things happen to us, based on the actions of the many different identities we’ve assumed all along.

The constant is this pattern that in acting on skillful intentions, you get good results; acting on unskillful intentions, you get bad results. Now, the working-out of that pattern can be complex because what you’re experiencing right now is not totally determined by the past. It’s also partially shaped, in fact, largely shaped by your skills here in the present moment: how skillfully you shape your thoughts, your words, your deeds, your experience of the body, your experience of feelings, perceptions, thought-constructs, even consciousness. All these things are shaped by intentions.

This is why, when we meditate, we’re sitting here with our eyes closed to look at what we can do to improve our internal skills. As issues come up that deflect us from the present moment, think of them in terms of karma. As I said, karma is the constant. Your identity is not.

People can do things to you which you think are horrible, and you can tell yourself, “I never would have done that. Why is this happening to me?” Well, how do you know? If you hadn’t done something like that sometime in the past, it wouldn’t be happening to you now.

So remember, you’re not the constant. What you are is relative to the principle of action, the principle of causality. This is why when the Buddha talked about dependent co-arising, and people would ask questions that would try to put it into a context, say, like the context of the world outside or the context of who you are—he would refuse to answer those questions. The pattern of dependent co-arising: That’s the constant. Your identity is something shaped within that constant. Your sense of the world is shaped within that constant.

It takes a while to get your head around this, but it’s a useful thing to learn to think about. Try to see things from that perspective, rather than from the perspective of “me and my problems,” or “me and my issues.” Learn how to take those things apart.

As when the Buddha talks about the present moment and the role of fabrication: He says you experience the aggregates because of this intentional activity. The process of fabrication here and now takes the potential for form, the potential for feeling, perceptions, thought-constructs, even consciousness, and turns it into actual aggregates.

I was listening to a Dhamma talk the other day in which someone was saying, “Consciousness has to be unconditioned. After all, how could one conditioned thing know another conditioned thing?” Well, that’s what actually happens: Knowing something is a conditioned process.

The only thing that’s unconditioned is consciousness without surface, and that has no objects at all. All other consciousness is conditioned. So the question is, how are you conditioning your consciousness right now? What are you focusing on? What are you paying attention to? How are you talking to yourself? Your inner conversation: Have you ever stepped back and just said, “Well, this is just a bunch of directed thoughts and acts of evaluation,” and looked at it simply in those impersonal terms? When thoughts are going through the mind, have you ever stopped to categorize, “What are the actual perceptions, the labels I’m putting on things, that have led to this riot of thoughts in my mind?”

The Buddha talks about the perceptions and categories of papañca. Papañca is a kind of thinking where you identify who you are, and then once you’ve taken on that identity, you have to lay claim to your part of the world as your food source in order to survive. Of course, you’re going to get into conflict with other people who want the same food source. So there you are, going from “I am the thinker” to fighting.

Sometimes papañca is translated as “conceptual proliferation.” That translation has entered the vocabulary of vipassanā communities, where it simply means that your thoughts are running wild. But for the Buddha, it’s not so much that your thoughts are running wild, or how many thoughts you’re having, it’s the categories you’re using to talk about things. Once you put an “I am” in there, you’re trying to make that the constant, and it’s going to lead to trouble.

So just notice the acts of perception—the labels you put on things. What would happen if you changed them, changed the labeling? Take something like colors: We have a pretty set notion of what the different colors are, and where one color shades into another. But when you learn different languages, you find that the map of the color wheel is very different from one language to the next. And you can’t say that one map is more accurate than the others, it’s just how things have developed. There’s an arbitrariness to our perceptions, even on something basic like that, to say nothing of our ideas about social interactions or our emotional life. They’ve made lists of words, of emotions that you would have in one language that other languages have trouble describing. So it’s good to look at perceptions as pretty arbitrary, pretty random, and then ask yourself: “To what extent am I driving myself crazy by holding on to certain perceptions? I could change them to other perceptions that are just as true, but actually more useful.”

So you look at your perceptions, not so much based on what you’re used to thinking in terms of, but based on where they’re coming from, where they’re going. This was how the Buddha got onto the path, by dividing his thoughts, not in terms of what he liked or didn’t like, or what thoughts were his kinds of thinking and not his kinds of thinking, but simply: thoughts that came from skillful mental states and thoughts that came from unskillful mental states; thoughts that would lead to good actions, thoughts that would lead to afflictive actions. That’s changing the constant, changing the categories.

It may be disorienting at first, but you find that the Buddha’s way of looking at things in terms of karma and the many identities you’ve had over who knows how many eons, is actually a good tool for liberation.

Remember the image of the handful of leaves, when he was going through a siṁsapā forest? The siṁsapā tree has tiny, tiny leaves, like little dimes—even thinner than dimes. They’re very small. He picked up a whole handful and said, “Which is more, the leaves in my hand or the leaves up in the trees?” And the monks said, “Of course, the leaves in the trees are more numerous.” He said, “In the same way, the things I learned in the course of my awakening are like the leaves in the trees. What I’ve taught, what I’ve been teaching, is like the leaves in my hand.”

Among the things he taught, of course, were the teaching on karma, the teaching on dependent co-arising, the teaching on rebirth. Those are all part of the handful of leaves. They’re part of the teaching on the four noble truths, the part of the teaching that can help put an end to suffering.

So, instead of seeing these teachings as weird artifacts of Asian culture that somehow got stuck in the Buddha’s teachings, realize that they’re something he thought about and he chose carefully as tools you can use. So learn how to use the teaching on karma and rebirth as a tool.

As for dependent co-arising, that’s a very complex tool if you try to comprehend the whole thing. But break it down: As the Buddha said, if you bring awareness to any one of the connections there—between one event and the one right next to it—that’s enough to bring the whole thing down.

So look at the different connections and see which ones speak to you. The connection between ignorance and fabrication is a useful one to start with, because as you’re sitting here meditating, you’re getting direct hands-on experience with bodily fabrication—i.e., the in-and-out breath and all the variations of the ways that you can breathe. Verbal fabrication—directed thought and evaluation—all the different ways you can talk to yourself about the breath, all the different questions you can ask, all the different ways you can try to change the breath and evaluate what you’ve done. And then mental fabrications—feelings and perceptions, i.e., the mental images you use. Try out different ones. Learn how to master them.

I was reading an article today on the topic of mastery, and they were saying that people who master a skill have four qualities: enthusiasm; generosity—generosity in the sense of really giving themselves to their field; unbroken concentration; and playfulness. Well, those correspond to the bases for success. Enthusiasm corresponds to chanda, desire. Generosity, in the sense of really giving yourself to the practice, corresponds to persistence, energy, effort. Unbroken concentration corresponds to intentness. And playfulness is a part of your using your powers of analysis: trying something out, seeing what works—if that doesn’t work, using your ingenuity to figure out something else.

Try to master just these issues of bodily, verbal and mental fabrication, seeing them as processes, not so much as your old ways of talking to yourself, your old ways of perceiving things, or even your old ways of breathing. If you get the “you” out of the way, the “me” out of the way, you find there’s a lot to play with, and a lot of possibilities there that you wouldn’t have thought of before.

So, try to get a clear sense of what really is constant—i.e., the pattern of causality—and how everything else is relative to that. That’s a tool for liberation.