This course is the third of our six Insight courses written by Peter Wilkes (see details of all our Insight courses). These recordings were made during the November 2023 – January 2024 course on Zoom. We will be running the course again in the future as part of the 6-course pathway.
Please email us on highlandmindfulness@gmail.com if you are interested in participating in this or any other insight course on this website.
SESSION 1 – REVISITING THE SENSE OF SELF
In the “Sense of Self” course (the first intermediate course) we looked at the sense of self in a generalised way concentrating on the feeling of a sense of presence or feeling of self. In seeking to deepen our practice there is a need to look at the sense of self in much greater detail concentrating more on the individual building blocks of self. This allows for a much more thorough “demolition” job or to put it more gently, a full and detailed structural survey. Doing this will not only help us to realise the processes of construction of the self but also give us deeper insights into our conditioning. Consequently, we are starting this course by returning to the sense of self and taking a little more time to explore it more thoroughly. If we don’t realise the sense of self fully before we explore the mind further everything that arises will be seen to be distorted through the “lens of self”.
Practice 1 – Feeling into the nature of the sense of self. In this meditation we are invited to settle and ground ourselves and come to rest before gently exploring the sense of self to see how it feels and what its components may be.
Practice 2 – Softening the sense of self with compassion. In this meditation we are invited to look at the judgements and comparisons that we make particularly with regard to ourselves and others and to open to these with self-compassion.
Exercise –The relationship between our sense of self and the judgements that we make? Contemplate your upbringing, the values that you were taught were important, reflect a little on any prejudices and biases that may have been part of your community and consider how this conditioning affects the judgements that you now make and the preferences that you now express. Consider the processes that are involved in producing and reinforcing this conditioning and how these feed into your feeling of who you are. As you move through your day notice the interpretations that you are placing on the events that are taking place and how things can change from moment to moment. Ask yourself if your sense of who you are is a fixed as you might hitherto have imagined and see if you can begin to let go of any assumptions about who you believe that you are.
As in the first course please be aware that this exercise is primarily a feeling exercise that should involve meditating on the questions that have been posed. Your feelings will guide you to find what is most important and lead you to a realisation of the emotional processing that is taking place in the mind from which intellectual understanding can arise.
SESSION 2 – LOOKING AT THE SELF WITH COMPASSION.
Arriving at the point when we begin to feel the fluidity of the sense of self and realise that it is not fixed or permanent in any way is an important step in our insight practice. Reflecting in meditation on the manner in which the sense of self arises from moment to moment leads to the realisation that much of what we think of as me is constructed by the mind in response to the conditioning events of our life. Whilst this realisation can result in a sense of freedom – “I don’t have to be me anymore” – there are much greater insights to come when we begin to look more deeply into the nature of our existence.
Practice 1 – The possessive nature of the self. A meditation practice in which we examine the nature of possession – of objects and of people – and feel how the sense of possession arises with and from the sense of self.
Practice 2 – Practising self-compassion and challenging the self-critic. A self-compassion practice – learning to be your own best friend and to be open to whatever arises in your experience.
SESSION 3 – CONSTRUCTING AND DECONSTRUCTING THE SENSE OF SELF.
Moving through our daily lives we tend to view everything around us as if it exists separately from us and has its own separate and distinct nature. We assume that other people and other things exist in and of themselves as if they have their own inherent existence. We make the same assumption when we look at ourselves that there is a separate, inherently existing self somewhere. The self can be seen as the owner of the mind and body and is viewed as an underlying, unchanging essence or core. When we search for such an independent self within or even apart from the mind and body it cannot be found (see article on Inherent Existence and the 7-fold reasoning on the Insight page of the website). Our sense of self is a conceptual construct that we mistakenly believe to have its own intrinsic nature.
Despite intellectual recognition of this and the realisation that everything around us is impermanent and constantly changing, we have a deep-seated tendency to assume falsely that people and things have fixed, inborn natures that make them what they are. Realising this lack of inherent existence frees us from the view of being a separate, contained self in a world of separate, contained people and things. It frees us from constant grasping after permanence, security and happiness whilst seeking to suppress everything that gives rise to unhappiness, conflict and fear.
Practice 1 – Looking for the self – the 2-fold reasoning and the impossibility of self. A meditation practice focussing on the first 2 (which are the most significant and on which the other 5 rely) of the 7-fold reasonings (see article on the insight page entitled “Inherent Existence”). In this meditation we search for the self in the body and the mind and consider whether it might exist independently of them. Since the self cannot be found the conclusion is that it cannot inherently exist and must in some way be a construct of the mind.
Practice 2 – Constructing the self. In this practice we focus our awareness on specific sensations to enable us to feel how a sensation is felt in the mind and received by the self. We look at how the mind imputes the self as a receiver of sensation and how the foundations of self lie in the external senses.
How does the sense of self arise?
In the “Sense of Self” course we considered the situation of a foetus in the womb and how the foetus has no need for a sense of self since everything that it requires comes from its mother. When the baby is born it comes into contact with an outside world full of previously unknown sensations of which it has to make sense if it is to survive. Since the only information that it has about the outside world comes from its 5 external senses there naturally arises a feeling of separation from what is outside. In other words, a sense of duality arises and the mind gradually develops a sense of self, of me and what is outside of me, to make sense of what is being experienced. This sense of self grows and develops throughout childhood according to social interactions, education and so on but it never remains static. Even as we approach “maturity” our sense of self is being constantly constructed, deconstructed and rearranged according to the events of our lives. The sense of self never becomes fixed and permanent. Once we are able to realise the everchanging nature of self and the moment-by-moment flow of the self we can begin to decentre ourselves from it so that we no longer become caught up in its machinations. Not surprisingly this takes practice and I hope that the following 2 exercises will help.
Exercise 1 – Familiarise yourself with the first 2 reasonings of the 7fold reasoning process (see article on the insight page entitled “Inherent Existence”) and meditate on the fact that an inherently existing self cannot be found anywhere and therefore cannot exist in and of itself. Once you feel confident in that conclusion contemplate the possibility that the self must be a construct of the mind and that it is constantly being shaped and reshaped by the events of your life as every moment passes.
Exercise 2 – The foundations of the sense of self. Meditate on the sensations of the body by choosing a specific sensation – one that you may generate by, for instance, pressing a thumb into the arch of one of your feet or one that may be particularly prominent at the time that you sit down to practise – and gently feel into the process by which the sensation is received in the mind. Reflect that the sensation is being received and owned by the self and that if there weren’t a self to receive it what would happen to it?
SESSION 4 – MOVING BEYOND THE SELF – THE ILLUSION OF SEPARATION.
This session is all about the sense of separation that we feel between ourselves and other people and between ourselves and the rest of the world including every other living thing. Our sense of being separate from others is a manifestation of duality that depends upon our way of looking at the world. Objects of every kind such as apples, cars, people and more subtle things such as thought, feelings and sensations, are conventionally identified or located by characteristics that are relative to other characteristics, such as large is to small, hard is to soft, coarse is to subtle and so on. When we contemplate how an apple comes into being we realise that it does not create itself or exist in itself but rather is dependent on the sun, the rain, the earth in which apple trees grow, the insects that pollinate the flowers and so on. The existence of apples is dependent on a great many factors and conditions. This dependence on other things is known as dependent arising or co-dependent origination. Everything arises in dependence on everything else and there are no independent, self-existing objects that can be found to exist. There are no self-established things.
In this session we are seeking to soften the sense of separation that exists in our minds and to consider how the tendency to think of things as either one way or the other prevents us from realising the connections that we have with others and with things outside of us. The tendency to see everything from a dualistic point of view isolates us from the truth of our interdependence with all things. It serves to emphasise the sense of a separate and inherently existing self.
Practice 1 – Awareness has no boundaries. A meditation in which we are invited to come to rest in awareness and then allow awareness to expand outwards through the body, into the space around us and out into world. The questions asked is “Does awareness have any boundaries?”
Practice 2 – Softening the boundaries of the self with loving-kindness. A meditation in which we are invited to make contact with our innate sense of caring, kindness and love and allow it to begin to fill our bodies and minds. We are then invited to view those around us through this lens of compassion, to see what we all have in common, including suffering, and to gradually release feelings of isolation and separation. How does this feel?
SESSION 5 – DUALITY AND ULTIMATE REALITY.
As our sense of self grows during childhood, we begin to develop another sense that seems to fit neatly into our new found feeling of self – a sense of preference. This seems to be a natural way of making sense of the sensations that we are receiving and viewing as mine by classifying them. The feeling of being hungry which drives us to seek food is compared to the feeling of being well fed or full. Hunger is felt to be unpleasant because it demands some action whilst feeling well fed and full is regarded as being pleasant because it makes us feel secure and we relax and fall asleep. Gradually our world which had started as being one of “no-self” and “one taste” becomes not only full of our self and others but also of good and bad, hard and soft, happy and sad and so. In other words, we begin to experience the world as full of dualities.
Conventional reality, the real world in which we are living right now, is characterised by duality and life in this world is seen to be of an experience of duality in everything. Looking more deeply into the mind, we can begin to see how this duality is created and reinforced and to gradually begin to realise how conventional reality arises. In this way we can begin to decentre ourselves from reality as we know it and come to understand that there is another reality, sometimes called ultimate reality, from which everything arises.
Practice 1 – The “no preference” meditation. A practice in which participants are invited to settle and come to rest before gradually opening up to the whole of their experience. As they rest with their experience the practice moves on the invite them to notice how the mind grasps and clings onto thoughts and feelings expressing preference as it does so. The invitation is to begin to release this tendency to grasp by allowing the mind to come to rest. What arises when the mind rests in this way?
Practice 2 – Seeing clinging and duality. A practice in which participants are invited once again to observe the mind engaging with and clinging to thoughts and to notice how this makes thoughts seem very real and solid. The invitation is to observe this solidification of thought and begin to see how clinging and preference create the sense of duality that is characteristic of conventional reality. What happens to the feeling of solidity when the mind no longer clings and judges?
SESSION 6 – DEPENDENT ARISING.
Dependent arising simply means that everything in this world is conditioned by other factors. For instance, a flower needs the conditions of sunlight, soil, and water to grow and perhaps a person to plant it. A wood fire needs dry wood, tinder and a match to light it plus the presence of oxygen to allow it to burn. Even the process of meditation can be said to be conditioned by relaxation and open awareness. Things do not appear out of nowhere but arise due to causes and conditions. Whilst this is common sense it is necessary to meditate on the concept of dependent arising in order to realise it emotionally and to understand how profound it is.
Some philosophical and spiritual teachings describe dependent arising in relation to mental states as a chain reaction in which one thing gives rise to the next. These teachings describe how mental states arise and evolve, and how it is possible to shift the outcome of this process towards greater happiness and peace. Commonly such teachings begin with a description of how ignorance of the world (the world of duality in which we all appear to live) leads to the fabrication by the mind of a personal preferred reality dependent upon a consciousness that selects and tries to see only what we wish to experience. Unfortunately, clinging to what we feel will make us happy and content whilst rejecting all other things ultimately creates conflict that produces tension and stress. As a result, we become caught in a downward cycle of dissatisfaction with life from which we can only escape by realising our ignorance and opening our minds to other possibilities.
Dependent origination applies to objects as well as thoughts and feelings and to the individual as well as the entire universe. Nothing exists independently. Everything depends upon causes and conditions. It includes the concepts of interdependence and the interconnectedness of all things. The idea is that every action has the potential to affect every other thing. This is sometimes expressed as a “butterfly effect” in which even the slightest action of a butterfly’s wings can have effects far removed in time and space from the original action.
Practice 1 – Resting with the whole of our experience and observing the arising of all phenomena with love and compassion. A practice in which participants are invited to come to rest and open their awareness to the 5 external senses and to the mind in order to observe the arising of the whole of their experience. The invitation is to consider how everything arises in a manner that is dependent upon everything else and that all we can ever know of the external world is experienced through our senses.
Practice 2 – Opening to our experience – the lack of inherent existence and dependent arising. A meditation practice in which we are invited to open to our experience with love, welcoming whatever arises and realising the truth of no-self and no separation.
SESSION 7 – BEYOND THE SELF – THE VASTNESS OF AWARENESS.
Even though we may feel that we are already able to experience a feeling of “no-self” and that we are making good progress in our meditation the truth is that it takes time and much practice to begin to move significantly beyond the self. This should not surprise us since our sense of self has been constructed over many years, constantly being reinforced by our conditioning and the manner in which we have become used to interpreting the events of the world around us, and has in fact become not just a habit but a way of life. The mind is not going to let go of its old ways of viewing the world easily. The process of retraining or of allowing the mind to release its old ways of thinking and feeling will take considerable time. As a consequence, at our stage of meditation training anything that we might contemplate will be viewed to a considerable extent though the lens of the self, that is, seen through and distorted by our preferences. The mind will grasp onto inviting concepts such as “ultimate truth”, “sacred awareness” and “universal consciousness” and generally throw up illusions to convince us that we have arrived at the “ultimate” whereas in fact we are still very much caught up in the self. It is much easier for the mind and for our sense of self to try and maintain some semblance of the status quo rather than continually challenging our assumptions and seeking to look more deeply into the mind. The process of looking beyond the self is made even more difficult by the fact that there are now many directions in which we can seek to direct our meditative enquiry and it is possible to become confused and even lost in the myriad of ways that now appear before us. In this session we take a short break and examine awareness and perception to see whether what arises will help to show us the most useful direction to go in our practice.
Practice 1 – The vastness of awareness and the sense of separation. A meditation practice in which participants are invited to settle and to begin to feel what seems to be the immeasurable space of awareness. As the practice moves on the invitation is to feel sensations, thoughts and feelings, that is all phenomena including even the sense of self, rising into awareness and then fading away as if they are merging from and melting back into awareness itself. The question is asked “Is it possible to see all phenomena as having the same feel or substance as awareness?”
Practice 2 – Perception and fact. A practice in which participants are invited to settle and ground themselves and gently come to rest in awareness of the whole of their experience. The invitation is then to narrow the focus onto one aspect of that experience such as sound and to reflect on the processes of perception working on that aspect of experience to give it meaning, to name it and if necessary to explain it. The questions then asked is “Is what we finally receive in our minds as a result of our perceptual processes a fact?” We are invited to liken this to the session in our beginner’s mindfulness course entitled “Thoughts are not facts”. Maybe perceptions are also not facts.
Exercise – choose any of the meditations that you have practised so far in your journey into the mind and listen to them again seeing if anything new arises for you. As you do so remember the oft repeated instructions “Always be prepared to return to basic mindfulness practices (especially if things appear to be becoming more difficult and complicated)” and “Adopt a beginner’s mind (open to the practice as if you had never encountered it before)”.
SESSION 8 – SELF-COMPASSION AND EMPTINESS PRACTICES.
We suffer in life because we grasp after things believing that they are fixed, substantial, real and capable of being possessed by our self. When we discover that things do not exist the way our grasping self supposes they do, we give ourselves the chance to be free of suffering. When we realise that everything around us is connected, that nothing exists independently and of itself and that everything is an expression of one seamless, ever-changing world, we arrive at what is called the concept of emptiness.
The true meaning of emptiness is often misunderstood. It is not complete nothingness, it doesn’t mean that nothing exists at all and it is not some kind of heaven or separate realm apart from this troubled world. Whilst nothing we experience stands alone and no individual person or thing has any permanent, fixed identity, everything taken together becomes what is sometimes referred to as “interbeing.” This term embraces the true meaning of emptiness with its sense of connection, compassion and love. Another way of expressing this is to say that the realisation of emptiness awakens qualities of mind such as clarity, equanimity, compassion, joy and love that are innate within us. The mere intellectual reading of emptiness fails to appreciate the joyous practical quality of emptiness in spiritual life.
It’s important to differentiate between the emptiness experienced through insight meditation with the emotional expression of sadness or depression. In common speech “emptiness” is not a happy word and it is difficult to use it without feeling the underlying sense of loneliness or separateness that it contains. It can be helpful to look for alternatives that express more of the positivity of the realisation of “emptiness” and various words have been suggested, for example, spaciousness, connectedness, suchness. What is definitely not useful is the word “voidness”. The realisation of emptiness is the recognition of something that has the potential for becoming, for the arising of something that has form from that which is formless.
Some people think that a meditative state without thought or activity is the realisation of emptiness. Such a mental state should be treated like all mental states as being temporary and not ultimately conducive to attaining any realisation. Emptiness is, in fact, not a state of mind at all. It is the felt expression of the true nature of all things including the mind. Whether the mind of the meditator is full of thoughts or empty of them, this true nature holds. The reason why we meditate on emptiness is because it is only when we can open our minds to the realisation of the flux and fluidity of the ultimate that is ungraspable and inconceivable that we can relax into clarity, equanimity, joy, love and compassion.
Practice 1 – Progressing towards the recognition of emptiness. A practice in which we progressively observe our body sensations and our thoughts before feeling into the sense of self and allowing our mind to settle. Participants are invited to rest deeply in open awareness and to slowly let go of thinking, of judging and of the concept of duality leading to an experience of being with whatever is arising just as it is.
Practice 2 – Resting deeply in the experience of unknowing. A meditation practice in which participants are invited to use their breath to help them release tension and come to rest deeply and to let go all desire to analyse, explain or seek meaning. As the mind releases concepts, the invitation is to rest in the feeling of unknowing.
Peter Wilkes 18th October 2023.