Whole-body Consciousness

When the Buddha lays out his steps for breath meditation, he starts with two steps in which you simply discern what’s there: You discern short breathing; you discern long breathing. From that point on, you train. In other words, you induce certain states as you breathe in, as you breathe out. The first training is to be aware of the whole body as you breathe in, breathe out. The question is, why would he start there?

Ajaan Lee’s answer is that he’s trying to get you to be aware of the breath as a whole-body process and to acquaint yourself with your awareness as a whole-body phenomenon as well, because we tend to be centered in one spot. Our awareness is sometimes centered in the head, sometimes in the heart. It can be centered anywhere, but this fact of “being centered” is something you want to spread out. It’s almost as if we’re in one part of the body looking at the rest of the body. What we want is a state in which that center of awareness is connected with awareness of the rest of the body. The rest of the body is not the object. You could say it’s the subject. Your whole awareness in the body is the subject as you sit here.

This is good in a lot of ways. One, it gives you a good solid foundation. If you’re focused too much on one spot and then something else comes in and distracts you a little bit, you’ve lost your concentration. But if you have the whole body as your framework, then things can come in, things can go out, and it’s like people coming in and out of a building. They don’t destroy the building. They just move in and out, but the building stays solid as it was before.

There’s a passage in the Canon where the Buddha talks about going through the different elements of the body, being aware of earth, water, wind, fire, and space. Ajaan Fuang would also have you go through the different elements. For him, breath, of course, is the first. Once the body is filled with good breath energy, it begins to calm down. It gets to the point where the breath actually stops.

Then he would have you move to fire, the warmth in the body. You begin to notice that some spots in the body are warmer than others, so you focus there. Then you think of the warmth spreading from those spots to fill the whole body. If the warmth gets oppressive, and it could easily get oppressive in Thailand, then you could switch to water. Water is cooling. Where are the coolest spots in your body right now? Think of them spreading out to fill the whole body.

Then he would have you move to earth, the solid parts of the body. Again, we can list the solid parts, the bones and whatnot, but there’s a quality of solidity to the whole body. Think of that. Hold that perception in mind. You learn the power of your perceptions as you focus on each of these things. When you’re focused on fire or warmth, you find that it can be warm through the whole body. You focus on coolness. Well, coolness can be cool through the whole body as well.

Then once you’d been through the four elements, he would have you mix them: not too cold, not too hot, not too heavy, not too light. Everything seems balanced. When everything seems balanced like this, the borders of your body begin to disappear. Everything seems smoothed out inside. It’s as if the body were a mist of little sensation dotlets. You can focus on the sensation dotlets in this fuzzy body you’ve got, and then you can focus on the space between the dotlets.

You realize that space has no boundaries at all. It’s not bound by the body. If you’re sitting in a room, it’s not bound by the room. It penetrates even the atoms of all the walls, the ceiling, the floor, out in all directions.

You can then hold on to that perception of space. It’s as if the sensations that you’re aware of in this screen of your awareness—this large awareness—can be tuned to different things. You tune it to space, and you see space. You tune it back to the body, there’s the body again. Ajaan Fuang would have his students stay with space for a while, and then turn the focus to the awareness of the space, what he would call “the knowing.” Other teachers in the Thai forest tradition would call it the knower, phuu ruu; he would call it awareness itself, tua ruu. This awareness, too, has no boundaries.

Now, in the Canon in Majjhima 140, the sutta that talks about the elements it has you go through the different elements, the four physical elements plus space, and you even get to consciousness. Now, the sutta calls it “pure consciousness,” but it’s still fabricated.

This is an important point. One of the reasons why the forest tradition monks call it phuu ruu or “the knower,” is that if there’s any sense of identity there—and there will be, you create a sense of identity there, and you know that it’s through a perception that you tune into it—as long as you realize that you’re doing that, you’re fine. There are people, though, who get there and they blot out the sense of anyone or any action doing this, the fact that it requires a perception to maintain it, the fact that it’s constructed. They think that this is the unconditioned, the ultimate, this is ultimate reality.

But in the sutta, the Buddha makes it very clear that this consciousness is a construct. With it, you observe feelings. From contact comes feeling: a pleasant feeling, a painful feeling, a neither pleasant nor painful feeling. You see the contact, you see the feeling, and there’s a sense of being separate from them. There’s the awareness, there’s the feeling, and they’re two separate things. This, the Buddha points out, leaves you with a strong sense of equanimity.

But he doesn’t stop there. Remember, equanimity, too, is a constructed state. He says you could apply this equanimity to any of the formless jhānas and you could stay there for a long, long time. But the fact that it’s applied—the fact that a perception maintains it—means that it’s constructed. You realize that anything constructed is going to end. In the beginning these states are very, very pleasant. There’s a great sense of spaciousness, a great sense of release from the constraints of having a body, even though you have the body right here, but you feel unconstrained by it. These states are very, very pleasant. But as you stay with them long enough and are honest enough with yourself, you begin to see that they’re constructed. You realize that if you went anyplace else, that, too, would be constructed. It really hits home that there’s no alternative but these constructed states, and yet the mind wants an alternative that’s deathless, that doesn’t have to require this constant maintenance. That’s when there’s an opening to something that’s not constructed, and it’s so very different.

It, too, is a kind of consciousness but it has nothing to do with any of the six senses. You return from that and you have a totally new perspective on sensations of the body, sensations of the senses. You’ve stepped out of space and time, but your karma is such that you have to come back in. But at least you know that the Buddha was right: There is a deathless, and it’s totally free from suffering. And you obtained it through your discernment.

Your discernment didn’t cause it, because it’s totally uncaused. But your discernment took you there, and the discernment was based on virtue and on concentration. The virtue makes you honest, makes you sensitive to what you’re doing and the power of your actions. Concentration, again, makes you sensitive to what you can do simply with the intentions of your mind, the perceptions you hold in mind. And because it’s still and easeful, it ideally should raise your standards for what counts as stress and ease. It raises your standards for what you want, what’s satisfactory, which in turn allows your discernment to be more discerning and more precise.

But the concentration on its own doesn’t do the work. There has to be some discernment that starts asking the right questions. And the basic questions are, “What am I doing that’s causing stress here?” “How can I stop?” “When the level of stress goes up, what did I just do?” “When it goes down, what did I just do?” You take responsibility for what’s going on, so that when you get to these very, very refined states, you’re more likely to look for, “What am I doing?”

So try to get a sense of this whole-body awareness. It provides the foundation you need to change things around inside. Remember, it’s not you up in your head, looking down at the body. It’s you in the whole body. That’s why we talk about not watching the breath, but feeling the breath, being surrounded by the breath, being bathed by the breath. That begins to equalize everything inside.

There was a book that was printed years back, Above All, with pictures of the high mountains in California. The photographer was a student of a more famous photographer who liked to take very dramatic shots: bright orange sunrises, bright orange sunsets; sharp, sharp lines, deep shadows, strong contrasts. His student wanted to take pictures of the peaks of all the mountains in California that were over 14,000 feet tall. So he went around and climbed up to the mountains to take pictures. He started out taking very dramatic photos right at dawn and sunset, but because he often spent the night there, sometimes he would take pictures before dawn and after sunset, when there were no sharp shadows. Everything was bathed in a diffused, equal light. He ended up throwing out all the dramatic photos and making a book out of the more equalized ones because in the equal light, you could see everything, all the details. They stood out.

Well, it’s the same way with your meditation. You want to give equal weight to everything in your range of awareness so that you’ll pick up details that you wouldn’t have picked up otherwise. After all, when you’re breathing in, breathing out, the breath isn’t going to just one spot in the body. Every cell in the body is breathing in and breathing out. There’s awareness in every cell, in every nerve. That’s the state of mind, the state of awareness, that we’re trying to develop here, as we get the mind to settle down—because that’s the state of awareness in which you’ll see things you never saw before.