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From a talk given on the winter retreat at Chithurst Buddhist Monastery, February 1991

This evening, on the verge of people entering into great conflict in the Middle East, I thought I would talk on the fundamental causes of war. Even though we are in retreat and somewhat secluded from the events of the outside world, still we keep our eyes and ears open and feel a sense of sympathy and compassion for all the beings caught up in this conflict. Our efforts in the spiritual life are not to evade such actualities in the world – just because these events happen outside the walls of this monastery doesn’t mean to say that we feel exempt or not interested or not a part of it. How many times have we been in conflict ourselves, even in this life, caught up in contention between ourselves and others; probably in hundreds of thousand of past lives we have taken up arms against others, shed blood and died ourselves in conflict.

In considering this, and looking at the workings of the mind, one sees that the fundamental problem arises from the ability that we have to discriminate and take sides. When the mind I clouded and caught up, then ‘this’ and ‘that’ seem to be completely different from each other, they seem to be inherently separated and apart. Black seems to be completely separate and different from white; ‘you’ separate from ‘me.’ The more caught up and clouded by ignorance the mind is, the more absolute that separation seems to be and the common ground that exists between us becomes in-visible; we lose it. In a personal clash we forget that we are actually both human beings – both people who enjoy pleasure, who feel pain, who love life and fear death – and the particular point that we are squabbling about possesses our minds so much that it becomes the most important thing. Even if it was something absolutely miniscule, the mind can take hold of anything, make a cause out of it and become completely blind to the common ground, Page 2 of 11

the common unifying bonds there are between us. This is how wars begin.

I remember, before I was a monk, I used to find that I lived in about four different worlds; there were five distinct circles of people that I moved around in and some of these were ideologically very opposed to each other. When I was a child I did a lot of horse riding; I grew up around horsey people and spent a lot of time going to horse shows, fox hunting and hanging out with horsey types, believe it or not! This is a group composed of very conservative country people who liked to ride and go hunting, out for a good day’s sport. (This I might add is attended by such pagan rituals as ‘getting blooded’ – when you are in on your first kill you get your face wiped with the fox’s blood – just one of the delightful aspects of polite country society!)

The other spheres that I moved in were: my family, my old school friends, my academic life at university and lastly there were the freaks and hippies – underground people in London living in squats and antiestablishment collectives. I often thought, when sitting slumped against a heap of cushions in some dive in Bayswater, “I wonder what they would say if anyone knew that three days ago I was having stirrup cup with the Master of Foxhounds at the local meet!” Or once, when I at-tended a press-conference at Whitehall for the Royal Tournament, still in an altered state of consciousness from an all-night party, “If only they knew…”

It used to disturb me sometimes how easily I moved between these different realms. I noticed that each group seemed to be under the impression that it was the only thing in the world that existed – perhaps not completely but certainly to a great extent.

Within the sphere of the family I was the youngest child, the only son, so with the family that was my identity. They called me ‘Jim” and there was the whole Page 3 of 11

web of unique family relation-ships and family activities and events. When I was with my old school friends – who were heavy-drinking, materialistic, public school rowdies – I would become completely involved with that. When I was with the horsey people I would be fully involved with that; when I was with university people I would become a studious academic and attempt to be a scintillating intellectual; and finally, when I was with the underground types, hippie radicals and so forth, I would become completely involved with that.

I used to think, “There must be a real me in here somewhere. Which one is the real one, and which ones are just a front?” I could see that there was a lot of contention and negativity between some different aspects of the worlds I moved amongst, but somehow I realised it was all quite all right. I wasn’t being two-faced or hypocritical; there were very good aspects to all of these people and I really enjoyed being with them, the local hunting set, the academics, the pub-crawlers, all of them. What my mind homed in on was the good, appealing qualities, the friendly noble qualities that existed within all of these spheres of activity.

One could witness the judgements one group made about another. The conservative country people would make scathing remarks about hippies and condemn them, they would be critical be-cause of superficial characteristics or through the emblems of that tribe being different from their own: beards, patchouli oil, hashish and The Politics of Ecstasy rather than green Wellington boots, tweeds and Horse and Hound (and gin and tonics, of course). One could easily see how people become divided and drawn into contention with each other simply through not seeing our common humanity, what actually lies at the heart of our life. Amongst every single one of those groups there were good people doing what they felt was right, living in a way that seemed a reasonable, whole-some and humane way to exist.

The causes of conflict arise from identification, blind adherence to a rôle, a position, Page 4 of 11

to at-tributes of our personality or some aspects of life. There is an incredibly vast array of different things we can identify with. We can identify with our family and our name: “These are my parents, this is my relationship with them, I get on well with my father, trouble with my mother, bit of a dodgy relationship with my brother.” The family bonding that goes on can seem very real, we can become deeply involved in the emotional pulls and struggles of family life. Reminiscences of family history can also be involved with sustaining who we think we are. I notice wherever I visit my family (I don’t know if other people’s families are the same) there is an enormous urge to fix everyone as a particular identity; stories about embarrassing things that we did when we were small get told repeatedly. Many times I have heard the tale of how my parents came back from a dinner party to find the babysitter watching television and myself on the kitchen table with the lid off the treacle tin, with me and everything covered in a black sticky mess. The tales are varied and numerous.

The family is a particular group of human beings and our relationships, our past, the events of our childhood, our upbringing and all those triumphs and disasters are the cement that helps us form together as a distinct group, so it can very easily become a strong identity.

The physical body is probably the most powerful source of identification we have: our physical frame, the appearance of being female or male, being young, being old, being attractive, being unattractive – these can make a tremendous difference to us. “I am young. I am old. How old are you?” We don’t say, “My body is thirty-four years old.” We say, “I am thirty-four.” Our mind doesn’t really have any age, only our body ages. The more concerned with appearance one is, the more the importance of the body inflates. When we’re young, as teenagers particularly, there can be an absolutely earth-shattering terror of a spot Page 5 of 11

appearing on our face, just when we have an important party coming up at the weekend. Some great blob tries to manifest around our chin, or in some unhideable place and we feel totally destroyed – God has betrayed us. The body becomes an enormously powerful influence on how we feel.

I have quite unusual physical features, so I grew up with a bewildering array of nicknames. I used to have long curly hair, which would turn blondish in the summer sun, a great crown of ringlets and a very muscular body, so one group of women friends used to call me Adonis – I quite liked that. Then there was another group of friends, some obnoxious males who, because of my long nose and prominent ears called me Dumbo – I didn’t like that so much. (I think I must have been an elephant in a past life.)

Identification with the body is something that has a very powerful effect on us as we age, the feeling of seeing the wrinkles arriving, the flesh beginning to sag and the lustre disappearing from our skin, our health and vitality fading, our hair beginning to silver and disappear. Men will try to convince themselves that they have always had a high forehead rather than recognise the fact the hair is actually receding – “It’s a sign of intelligence, a high forehead!”

We can also cause a tremendous amount of identification around health – fearing illness, fearing pain, wanting to be healthy and vigorous. A great deal of time and energy can be spent trying to become healthy, trying to overcome sickness, or in feeling hard-done-by if we have a sick body – feeling we have been cheated or that something terrible has been done by us or has happened to us because our body is so sick.

We identify with the personality: “This person is always such a nice person, so outgoing, so intelligent. I am such a clumsy, socially inept type.” Or the reverse, “I’m so wonderful, I am brilliant. So and so over there is foolish Page 6 of 11

and stupid, a hopeless case.” One can judge oneself against other people very easily over personality characteristics. Are we quiet or talkative? Are we bright or are we dark? Are we moody or enthusiastic? It is very easy to judge, “This one is good, that one is bad. That one is right, this one is wrong. I like this one, I don’t like that one.” We can create endless judgements and comparisons. The materialistic society spends an incredible amount of time in judging people against each other in competitions, seeing who is the most athletic, talented, attractive, most appealing. We put billions into endless contests to spruce up, fire up our enthusiasm for making these kinds of discriminations.

Another area is our achievements: the kind of things that we have done in our lives, our successes and failures. We catalogue our ambitions, what we hope will happen in the future and also all the terrible things we have done, the crimes we have committed. We can identify with and carry these things around with us perpetually. “I had an abortion when I was seventeen,” “I am the head of the team” or “I was caught stealing comics from the local newsagents at the age of nine,” a crushing moment, caught in the act. All the successes, failures, good and bad things in our lives one can home in on and make a big thing out of. We can see ourselves as a high person, a low person, a weak person or a strong person just because of the events that have occurred – whether we are a victim or whether we are a success, a winner or a failure. How well we do in the kind of profession that we have, our abilities in the social world – “I am a teacher, “ “I am unemployed,” “I’m just a housewife,” “I’m a Member of Parliament, “ “I’m a meditation teacher, “ “I’m a failed Buddhist” – all of these masks can be picked up and believed in endlessly.

There are also innumerable things in the social realm that we Page 7 of 11

can tie our name onto and claim to be who and what we are: “I’m a conservative,” “I’m a liberal,” “I’m an anarchist,” “I’m a royalist,” “I’m for the war,” “I’m against the war,” “I think it’s right,” “I think it’s wrong” – there are political opinions of an incredible variety of shades and strengths that we can identify with. Then there are things like football teams that we can tie ourselves to – “I’m an Everton supporter,” or “the San Francisco ‘49ers are the best” – just to have a hero and to root for them.
There are any number of things that we can align ourselves with on the social level and take that to be our group – “This is my team, this is important and real to me.” So when the group wins, we are happy and we celebrate. Then when they lose we die, we feel sad and depressed, and in aligning with one group we are automatically in conflict against the others. If our mind absorbs into politics and we are into the Conservatives, then we inevitably feel pitted against the other political par-ties, and the more fully we adhere to that, the more full the contention is. Identification causes that absoluteness of division.

We can identify with our astrological make-up: “Well, of course, he’s a Scorpio, I can’t talk to him, you know what Scorpios are like – appalling!” We can get an enormous amount of mileage out of astrology, palmistry, psychoanalysis, the Enneagram and all the rest of the great variety of different ways of mapping our characteristics, giving them labels and categories and relationships. All of these have a certain validity, but the more we buy into it the more we can see this pattern of division occurring. Even if that to which one is adhering is wholesome and good and helps in some respects, still one sees, however, that the more we take it to be ‘I’ and ‘me’ and ‘what I truly am’ – “A Virgo with Sagittarius rising, the Moon conjunct with Uranus in Leo; Sun and Jupiter Page 8 of 11

conjunct at the mid-heaven….” The more we take it that “This is what I am, this is the revelation of my true nature,” the more we miss the point. It can never be the whole story, it can only be partial.

We could go through the entire list of things to identify with in our present situation and, as if that were not enough, we have got past lives to play with as well! “Well, of course, this life is pretty mediocre, I’m not really anybody special, but you should have seen me when I was Queen Nefertiti or Josephine, Empress of France, that was a real event – you should have seen me then!” We can make a big deal out of the idea of past lives; who we were can become much more significant than who we are. “Well, I was a priest at a temple in Lemuria, then I showed up in Egypt, got stoned to death for stealing a watermelon in Alexandria in about 200 BC. Then of course I was a nun with the Cathars and got a bit of karma going with the Catholic Church when they walled me up….” We can really get some wonderful stuff going!

One can see that in the midst of it all there is the search for the real ‘me.’ Which one is the real me? It’s like trying to figure out which one of the social groups that I was describing did I really belong to? Within all the different strata of our existence we can be hunting for the ‘real me,’ and the mind in its hunger for security and belonging will catch on to some aspect and claim it, own it, be it, saying, “This is what I am, this is my true self.”

Anything that we identify with in this way, we find that it always leads us to a sense of separation, barrenness, loneliness, a sense of incompleteness and conflict, afraid of what others think, wanting to be whole, wanting approval, fear of attack and friction. As soon as I am Page 9 of 11

isolated and separated from the rest, then there is suffering, dukkha comes into being, it’s inevitable. So with the spiritual path, what we are aiming at is to penetrate the question of what we are. I came across a wonderful statement that was made by Sri Ramana Maharishi – “Why are you so concerned about getting things and doing things when you don’t know who it is that is going to get them? Why are you so concerned about knowing who you were in the past when you don’t even know who you are now?” We can be so interested in doing and getting and becoming, so interested in who we were in the past that we forget – “Do I really know who I am? Do I really know? What is a human being? What is anyone? What is this?” The spiritual path is the path of enquiry into the very roots of our nature. “What are we…?”

In meditation one can develop this enquiry in a very distinct way, using the mind’s reflective thinking abilities to look into ‘who I am,” When the mind is reasonably calm and quiet, and we raise the question “Who am I?”, we start to challenge all of those identities: the identification with the body, with our family, our gender, with our social group, our memories, our successes and failures, with our occupation and the whole array of different things. When we contemplate: “Who is it that knows masculinity? Who is it that remembers? Who is it that feels pain? Who is it that is sick?” – when we raise the question in that way, clearly and consciously bringing it into the mind, then there is a moment when the thinking mind stutters; just for a moment, there is a realisation, a recognition – there is that which is knowing and then there is that which is the feeling of pain or the idea or whatever. We bring our attention to home in more and more directly on that gap, that moment when the mind halts, because quickly afterwards it says, “Well, of Page 10 of 11

course, I am Amaro Bhikkhu, I am 34 years old, I am a Buddhist monk, this is my father, this is my mother, I am living in Chithurst Monastery and today is Saturday. This is your reality, be satisfied with it!”

The thinking mind will rise up and fill the gap with all these conventionally true attributes, but there was a moment, there was a moment when there was a clear space and it was seen that the ‘Knowing’ was one thing, the ‘known’ another. And, most importantly, in our hearts we realise that the ‘Knowing’ is much, much more truly ‘me,’ ‘what I am,’ or what truly IS than any thoughts, any feelings, or any designation of young, old, happy, unhappy, depressed, elated. Those are seen more and more clearly as simply patterns of consciousness, patterns in the play of nature that there is an awareness of. With the contemplative, reflective mind we can pursue this kind of enquiry, learn to keep challenging over and over again the assumptions that we make, and simply abide at the end of the question.

As the mind becomes more calm and we begin to use this practice in a systematic way, we discover a strange process occurring – we ask

“Who am I?”
After some time the word ‘Who’ starts to sound ridiculous
so then it changes to,
“What am I?”
Then the ‘I’ starts to sound very weird so you ask,
“What is it?”
which then changes to
“What is?”
which reduces to
“What?”
then only
“?”
then just the
•
then the point vanishes,
and there is only pure Awareness –
we are left completely pointless….

This is a process that we can see distinctly when it is followed carefully and systematically; the mind is more and more firmly allowed to rest in the quality of pure ‘pointlessness.’ In some ways this is a good word, being pointless, because it means we are not making the mind have a point, an abiding place – we are allowing it to rest, simply aware of its own nature, aware Page 11 of 11

of both its emptiness and its suchness, and the arising and passing of all things. We are not defining reality, giving it a limitation or a location.

Somebody asked Krishnamurti one time, “What would you say is the meaning of life?” He said “MEANING!?! – how do you think our puny little thoughts can cast the nature of life into some kind of words that can truly express what IS? Life IS – it doesn’t mean anything! What does air or moonlight mean!?” This is very true; this is very, very true. To believe that we can express what life’s meaning is is to assume that we can put into words, into some formula, the entire nature of the cosmos – the universe and the mind in all their infinite and inconceivable stratifications and their incredible complexity and interdependence – to try and put that into the expression of human mouth noises is just absurd.

When the mind is allowed to rest in that sense of complete clarity and choicelessness, we find that it is beyond dualism – no longer making preferences or being biased towards this over that. It is resting at the point of equipoise, where this and that and black and white and where you and I all meet; the space where all dualities arise from.

With the mind thus resting, all conflicts are healed. This is the way that war is ended; affliction and conflict are drawn to a close because the very root delusion of separateness has been dissolved. It would be like our left hand going to war against our right – it’s not going to happen, even in the craziest of people, since the commonality is much more obvious than the differences.

(All twelve-parts of this series are accessible on the Ajahn Amaro | Articles page )