Consciousness, Awakened & Not

Years back, I was teaching a retreat on karma, when one of the retreatants, whose background was in Zen, raised his hand and said, “Why this emphasis on the minutiae of actions and their skillfulness when the unconditioned emptiness is all around us? We can just open up to it, and there it is.” I explained that you’re not going to see the unconditioned until you get really observant of how your actions are conditioning things.

His attitude is a common one. It reflects the attitude of quite a few Buddhist practice communities, not only Mahayana but also some Theravadin: that we’re here to open up to the present moment; that the present moment is the goal; that that’s where the unconditioned lies—our awareness, right here, right now.

But that raises the question: Why did the Buddha formulate the path of virtue, concentration, and discernment? If you can simply open to the unconditioned, why would he formulate such a difficult path?

In some schools, they define discernment in terms of how you define emptiness, and they have courses of study that go for years until you get the right understanding of what emptiness is and what it’s not. But in the Buddha’s take on right view, he doesn’t mention emptiness or unconditioned consciousness in the standard formula at all. If you look carefully at the formula, you realize that he teaches the path of actions, training your actions through the precepts, training the actions of your mind through concentration and through discernment, so that you can become sensitive to what’s getting in the way of the unconditioned and you can clear it away. That’s his strategy

Which is why people who don’t focus on the precepts, don’t focus on mastering them as skills, tend to mistake your present-moment awareness for something unconditioned. They say, “It’s there all the time, always present. It seems unconditioned. Has no social conditioning, no sense of a person in there if you don’t apply it.” In that way, they’re missing something really good by falling for something that’s artificial.

Because when the Buddha focused on actions, he wasn’t just focusing on the fact that you do act. He also wanted you to see the impact of your actions, the extent to which your actions shape your awareness of reality, what’s going on around you in the world, what’s going on within you inside. And you have to be sensitive not only to the fact that actions have results, but also to whatever harm you’re causing, either gross harm or more subtle forms of harm, through what you do in body, speech, and mind.

In fact, the path is one of getting more and more sensitive to the subtleties of where you’re causing unnecessary stress, unnecessary disturbance. First you have to be very clear about where you’re causing harm through your actions, which is why the precepts are an important part of the practice, why concentration as an activity is an important part of the practice.

You go from levels of stillness that seem as still as the mind could possibly get, and then you find that you can get even more still and more still, and you realize why. It’s because in the first stages you were doing some activities of which you weren’t conscious, but then you became more and more conscious as you progressed.

Now, the Buddha does mention an unconditioned consciousness at a few spots in the Canon. But he makes very clear that it’s very different from the consciousness you’re experiencing right here, right now. He talks about the fact that your consciousness right here has food. It feeds on material food. It feeds on intentions. It feeds on contact. And it feeds on the act of consciousness itself. You have to be especially alert to that last one, because this consciousness that people say is unconditioned right here, right now, is sometimes just conscious of consciousness itself. It’s got an object. And if consciousness has an object, it’s conditioned.

There’s also the consciousness at the six senses that arises because of the contact between the sense organ and its object. That’s very much conditioned. It happens all the time, but that doesn’t mean that it’s constant or a permanent ground of being. It’s just an activity you’re doing all the time.

You’re not going to see this until you get sensitive to your actions in general, which is why the Buddha focuses on the precepts, avoiding harm in gross forms: killing, stealing, illicit sex, lying, taking intoxicants. If you’re still engaged in these kinds of activities and you don’t see the harm you’re causing, you’re not going to see anything subtle at all.

This is why the people who have the attitude that the precepts are just Sunday school rules, or just a lovely container for the practice, or that they can easily be broken when you claim that you have a compassionate motive for doing so, are not really learning the lessons from the precepts that they should be learning. They get more focused on the question of “attachment to the precepts,” saying that attachment is bad.

Well, you’re not going to learn from the precepts unless you really try to follow them and you come up against situations in which there’s a strong temptation to break them. The Buddha wants you to say, “No.” Try to see: What would the harm be in breaking the precept? Focus on that, and you’re going to see some things you wouldn’t have seen before. And this is the whole purpose of the path: to see things you didn’t see before. To make you more sensitive to things you used to brush right past.

Then it gets subtler in the practice of concentration. Obvious forms of harm have been cleared away, but there’s still the burdensomeness of the fact that concentration has to be fabricated. You’re very conscious of this fact in the beginning as you’re trying to get the mind into concentration and you find it difficult. But as you get more and more inclined in the direction of stillness, as the mind gets more and more content to be there, the effort goes underground. So you have to develop your sensitivity, to keep on looking for what you’re doing right here, right now, if you’re going to see that.

That’s the question the Buddha wants you to ask—what are you doing right here, right now?—which is why his teachings on right view, whether they’re mundane right view or transcendent right view, focus on your actions.

Mundane right view basically says that there are the results of skillful and unskillful actions. The four noble truths take the same issue and go deeper, focused on the problem of suffering: Where are you causing suffering through what you’re doing? Each of the four noble truths involves an action. Clinging in the first noble truth is something to be comprehended. The craving in the second noble truth is to be abandoned. The third noble truth is dispassion—dispassion comes about as a result of looking directly at your actions. When an unskillful form of craving arises in the mind, you want to see: What’s the origination. The origination is an activity that comes from within the mind. How does it pass away? What’s the allure? Why do you go for it? What are the drawbacks?

This involves a fair amount of thinking and observation, and focuses attention again inside, just as the precepts focus attention inside. They may be dealing with your external actions, but the big issue in the precepts, of course, is your intention. What was your intention in doing something? If you kill without intending to or if you tell a falsehood without intending to, that’s not breaking the precept.

So the focus is on your actions and especially your internal actions. This is where the Buddha wants you to become more and more sensitive, even to the point of seeing discernment as an activity. He points out how you start taking apart your practice of concentration in terms of the aggregates, discerning how they all are fabricated — including the aggregate of consciousness — and then you incline the mind to the deathless.

But then you have to watch out. The perceptions that incline you in that direction, such as the three perceptions of inconstancy, stress, and not-self: Those, too, are actions. It is possible to cling to them. Or you have an experience of the deathless and you cling to that.

So you have to be very sensitive to what you’re doing. Circumspect all around. It’s only then that you get to see something that lies beyond what you’ve fabricated. You see it because you’ve been focusing on the fabrications and clearing them out of the way, clearing them out of the way. It’s only then that you’re going to see the difference between the consciousness that’s here in concentration — which is also consciousness at the senses, at the sense of the mind — and what might be unconditioned.

There’s a passage in Majjhima 140 where the Buddha takes you through the different elements — earth, water, wind, fire, space — and what’s left is consciousness. In terms that the Thai ajaans use, that’s “the knower.” You’ve cleared away your passion for things outside, and the consciousness that remains is aware of feelings arising and passing away. It’s able to separate itself out from them, observe them. The image the Buddha uses of watching someone making a fire. You rub two fire sticks together and the fire starts. IF you take the sticks apart before the fire’s got a chance, everything calms down. In the same way, feeling comes from contact and ends when the contact ends. You’re conscious of that contact. You’re conscious of the feeling. But the consciousness is separate from them.

As I said, this is “the knower,” the phuu-ruu that the Thai ajaans talk about. But they, like the Buddha, are very clear in the fact that this knower, this consciousness, is a construct. Only when you see that it’s constructed from your actions can you get a chance to go beyond it and find something of genuine value. And you’ll be primed to see that because your practice of virtue, concentration, and discernment has made you more sensitive to what you’re doing all along. That’s why these practices are a necessary part of the path to this realization. They’re not just lovely conventions or a lovely container for the practice. They are the practice.

Years back, there was a book that divided all the Buddha’s practices into two sorts: those that try to create the unconditioned through the effort of meditation, and those who tell you that the unconditioned is already there and all you have to do is relax into it. The author of the book presented these as the only two alternatives that were possible. Now, if that were the case, only the second alternative would be right. After all, the unconditioned cannot be created. You can’t create it through your efforts. It has to be something that’s already there. But neither of those alternatives is in line with right view.

Ajaan Lee gives a third alternative. His image is of getting fresh water out of salt water. The fresh water is there in the salt water, but just relaxing or letting the salt water sit in a bowl is not going to get the salt to separate out. You have to distill it. For Ajaan Lee, the heat of the distillery stands for the effort of the practice. In doing the distilling, you’re focusing on getting the salt and other minerals out. You’re not focusing on the water so much. You taste the water. If there’s still any salt in it, you’ve got to distill it again. You have to put it through the effort of observing the precepts, practicing concentration, developing discernment, getting more and more sensitive to how you are shaping your experience of reality. Even when the mind is very, very quiet, there’s still an intentional element going on. When you’re sensitive to that and you realize that you’ve had enough of that and you want something even more peaceful, that’s when you have a chance.

When the Buddha talks about this, he uses the image of the light beam that doesn’t land. There are places in the Canon where he talks about how ordinary consciousness lands on the different aggregates and, once it lands, it proliferates, it grows. Here he switches the image then to a seed. You place a seed in the ground, and it’ll grow into a plant. A consciousness that doesn’t land is the consciousness of the arahant. It’s like a light beam that doesn’t land. You can’t detect it, but it’s there. It’s not based on any object at all. It has nothing to do with any of the six senses. It’s like a seed that’s not planted in anything—and, in the Buddha’s image, it’s burned. It won’t grow

So this consciousness that doesn’t land is consciousness, but it’s of a different sort. And you’re going to see the difference between that and what you’re conscious of now—as you get the mind to that state of aware, aware, aware, an awareness that has objects but seems separate from its objects—only when see where that awareness, too, is constructed, that too is fabricated. Once you’ve developed dispassion for that fabrication, that’s when you’ll be free. You don’t need to have a right view about that beforehand, about what you’re going to find as a result, aside from the right view that it’s going to be good.

So focus on doing the work that needs to be done so that you get sensitive to what it means to do work—to shape things, to fabricate things, to have intentions, to act on them. Get really sensitive to these activities, because those are the ones that are getting in the way. You’re not going to get them out of the way simply by telling yourself to let them go. You’ve got to master them first, because they teach you a lot about sensitivity. And it’s the sensitivity that will carry you through.