Seeing That Frees: Meditations on Emptiness and Dependent Arising

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Michael: What I specifically mean is rather than, for example, doing a yidam practice with a Vajrayāna deity, one might use archetypes as well as just regular objects and experiences. VIMALASARA ( VALERIE MASON-JOHN MA - hon doc) is a public speaker and master trainer in the field of conflict transformation, leadership and mindfulness. They are also the author of ten books and the Co-Founder of Eight Step Recovery, an alternative to the 12-step program for addiction. They were featured at TEDxRenfrewCollingwood, where they gave a talk entitled " We Are What We Think", which outlined a course of action we can take to work on the global epidemic of bullying. Rob: Yes, I’m aware some people really don’t like the title and don’t get it, and some people love it.

So in some sense, the premise of the book, or one of the premises, one of the sort of starting strands of the book turns out to be the actual delivery point where it all ends up. So that’s part of it. I think maybe another sort of weave in the story was – and again, it’s today’s story, right now, at this time, when you’re asking me – I think, perhaps, I certainly felt helped by a lot of the teachings that were out there. Certainly, as I mentioned, Ajahn Geoff, and Christopher Titmuss, and Christina Feldman – actually lots of teachings. But I also felt, somehow, nothing fully satisfied me. There were lots of questions that I couldn’t really find answers to, or people with the same degree of burning interest in them. So I had a lot of time on retreat – years, in fact. And I was, to a certain extent, it was a natural kind of move for me to just begin experimenting and seeing what happened and getting super interested in stuff, with this burning curiosity about it. More than that, though, we see that if I really start practicing this – let’s take that as an example because I started with it – way of looking, ‘not me, not mine,’ it doesn’t just stop there, bringing a momentary release of suffering. I actually start to see, if I really practice it, and I get quite skilled at it, and develop it over a range of different objects of my experience, then I notice other things. The sense of self starts to change. In other words, this way of looking starts to affect not just the dukkha, the experienced suffering in the moment, but also the sense of self, the experience of self in the moment. That becomes, for example, less solid, less separate, more spacious, et cetera, lighter, through that way of looking. And if I take it even further, I find that with that same way of looking, this anattā way of looking, the very perception of the world starts to change. Certainly these objects themselves, of course they’re seen as ‘not me, not mine,’ but that perception of objects itself starts to – in the language of the book, and the other central premise – be fabricated less. They start to appear less solid – not just that they’re kind of unhooked from my identification, unhooked as belonging to me or being me, but they actually, with practice, over time, start to feel less solid, less substantial. It’s almost like they’re less intense as experiences. We say they’re fabricated less, those perceptions are fabricated less. That lessening of fabrication moves along a spectrum with the development of my skill in that way of looking, and in some instances can go all the way to those sensations, et cetera, not appearing at all – they’re not fabricated at all. This is just one example.

Practising the Jhānas

Almost miraculously, Rob taught a three week retreat at Gaia House in December 2019 - January 2020. Rob had long wanted to teach a retreat on the Jhānas, and he did so in almost virtuosic form despite the worsening pain of his cancer. Experiencing Rob teach on Practising the Jhānas was like watching a master musician perform, holding as he did the kind of deep knowledge of his subject's form and structure that allows for organic and fluid improvisation. It was during this, Rob's last retreat, that the holistic nature and stunningly cohesive integrity of his teachings became clear through his full and deep exposition. CATHERINE McGEE has been teaching Insight Meditation at Gaia House and internationally since 1997. Her teaching emphasises working with perceptions of the body on the path of awakening and in the healing of the individual and collective crises of our times. She is an advisor to One Earth Sangha . Between 2014 and 2020 Catherine collaborated with Rob Burbea in shaping and teaching a Soulmaking Dharma. LEIGH BRASINGTON has been practising meditation since 1985 and is the senior American student of the late Ven. Ayya Khema. Leigh began assisting Ven. Ayya Khema in 1994, and began teaching retreats on his own in 1997. He teaches in Europe and North America and is the author of the books Right Concentration: A Practical Guide to the Jhanas and Dependent Origination and Emptiness: Streams of Dependently Arising Processes Interacting. Find more information about Leigh’s teaching and schedule at leighb.com

Michael: This is really interesting. You know, when we’re doing a more phenomenological deconstruction of, let’s say, a meditative object, it’s very often the case that it starts to kind of dissolve before the meditative gaze, right? It fades away or whatever, starts to vanish in one way or another. You seem to be describing something similar happening with this other way, with this analytical way of working. Do you get that same – I think you call it in the book a fading of perception? But I remember getting the idea of that from him. It’s a certain translation of the word saṅkhāra, fabrication. The experiment thing, I think…I don’t know, maybe it’s just a kind of personality type I have. I was a jazz musician for a long time. It was my work before I was a full-time Dharma bum. I think that kind of idea of improvising and being creative and trying things out, it’s just, it’s kind of my type, maybe, to a certain extent. ROB BURBEA (1965-2020) was Gaia House’s much-loved resident teacher for 10 years, from 2005 to 2015 when he had to leave after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.Michael: It’s today’s answer. Perfect. So I’m just going to ask you an impossible question, which is, okay, Rob, you have this deep insight into emptiness – what can you say about emptiness? What is it? Why does it matter? Why should someone care? Remember there is always a person behind the post or comment you’re objecting to. They may just be having a bad day… If you’re upset, perhaps let a little time pass before responding to them or us. Stephen Batchelor's Talks at Gaia House on 24.07.2015: Instructions - Behold the Ceasing (Duration 34:23) Lama Rod’s mission is showing you how to heal and free yourself. He activates the intersections of his identity to create a platform that’s natural, engaging, and inclusive. Learn more at lamarod.com.

Michael: Yeah. This is fascinating. You are preaching to the choir here of meta-rationality or metaconceptuality. We talk about that on the show quite a bit, particularly with David Chapman. I’m not sure if you’re familiar with his work, but he’s a Vajrayāna practitioner with quite a large body of work describing meta-rationality, which is essentially what you just described – being able to switch conceptual frameworks based on what’s most useful, most beautiful, most helpful, most whatever right now, and do that very fluidly. Rob: Yeah. As I said before, this was very strange to me when I came across this kind of talk and these kind of teachings in, for instance, Tibetan Gelug traditions. So one example would be – you mentioned the chariot earlier. It’s something that appears in the Pali Canon, the original Buddhist teachings. A nun introduces the teaching of deconstructing the self like you would deconstruct a chariot. It’s given there as a sort of philosophical argument, but in the Tibetan Gelug teachings they develop that into a meditation with certain instructions. I guess, for me, again, the instructions that I found for that were – they didn’t feel very satisfying or very powerful, and I certainly never met anyone who had any really liberative power for. So I just experimented with finding ways that they would be really satisfying for me. SOPHIE BOYER has been practicing meditation for 20 years during her time providing nursing care. After years spent in hospices, she became more interested in exploring silent meditation retreats in Europe, and in the US and spent 2 years in Myanmar as a buddhist nun. What people might not know is that Rob struggled with finishing his book and not only because had a heavy teaching round at Gaia House and many students to meet. By 2012 he had already begun on a new phase in his practice and thought. He said his experience of Dharma practice left various important questions unanswered. After all, one cannot spend all one’s time in the realm or neither-perception-nor-non-perception, can one? Rob had turned his attention to the much broader and possibly more vital matter of how we really breathe life or soulfulness into our Dharma practice, in an age which is dominated by modernist, reductionist and materialist assumptions about reality.Rob: Well, there is a whole other category that I would call soulmaking perception, which might be skillful fabrication. Michael: Yeah, it’s something I found really interesting about the book. You do have experiential meditations, and then you have these analytical meditations where I would even call them philosophical meditations because you’re deconstructing the object philosophically or conceptually. I wonder if just for listeners you could give the briefest hint of an example of how that actually works in practice. That one, for me, for example, takes me automatically to a very, very deep level of unfabricating. For someone else, they might not find that argument convincing, or they might not be able to work it quite dexterously into meditation. Maybe something else works. But basically a rational argument has to be woven in to the present moment meditation with all that delicacy and subtlety, and then it can function really, really powerfully. For many though, their first encounter with Rob was in his seminal book Seeing That Frees, published in 2014. After a startling chapter laying out the connections between Samadhi and Insight practice, the reader is guided deep into the heart of emptiness and dependent arising. In his inimitable prose - gentle, precise and inviting of personal exploration - Rob sets out what he had discovered about how to use the wisdom teachings with skill, subtlety and without limiting the profundity of the Buddha’s core teaching to any single conception. Seeing That Frees joins up the dots and has become a classic manual for practitioners, one to take on a solitary retreat and really soak up. DENE DONALDS Committed to socially engaged Buddhism. Dene has helped establish a number of social enterprises working with people with learning disabilities , people with autism, and with refugees. He also offers the teachings of Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh in prisons.