Awareness and Skillfulness

M.G. (Dr Matei Georgescu): We are living a losing game of impermanence. So, what to do?

A.A.: The Buddha maintained that it is possible to realize a kind of well-being which is self-sustaining, which is independent of the quality or content of our experience, which doesn’t depend on anything that we can experience through our senses.

M.G.: So, no causal conditioning; it’s beyond causation, this is something that we can rely on.

A.A.: Yes, I think that is correct. It is something we can realize, but which is not caused. The Buddha also referred to it as something that is uncreated, unborn, undying, something prior to cause and effect.

M.G.: A negative definition.

A.A.: Right, he wouldn’t give a positive definition. He would sometimes speak about it in a metaphorical way, calling it for example the island or the other shore, but obviously those are poetic, inspirational descriptions to explain that it is really worthwhile to make the effort to find it. He even calls it ultimate happiness at some point. So he was talking about something that we can discover, something that is already there, not something we would create; which perhaps makes it sound rather mysterious.

G.P. (George Petre): But at the same time it is something you can train for? That is an interesting point because even though it is uncreated, even though it is unborn, even though it is unconditioned, it seems you can train toward that idea.

A.A.: Training according to the Buddha means to purify the mind to a point where it becomes ready to realize this possibility.

M.G.: We have to train what? The dual consciousness ? The subject-object capacity of focusing?

A.A.: First of all, when we see that we participate in creating our reality, we try to become more skilled in doing that. I don’t mean to say that our world is entirely our creation, but obviously the experiences that arise for us as we interact with our environment, and the ways in which we organize and interpret those experiences, have a very strong subjective quality; they depend on our biological, social and personal conditioning. We see the world differently from the way dogs see the world.

If you grew up in an urban environment you will probably interpret reality differently from if you’d grown up in a rain forest; if you grew up in Romania, you are likely to perceive some things differently from if you’d grown up in Germany. And then there is the personal conditioning depending on your childhood, your education, the ideas you picked up from your parents or your friends – ultimately, all the experiences you have had in the past.

All of that will contribute to the way in which you are predisposed to register new information or even to your choice of where to pay attention, often not even consciously. That is one of the reasons why in an argument about some political issue, it is extremely difficult to convince an opponent of your viewpoint. An opposing view on a particular issue is only the tip of an iceberg of all kinds of previous conditioning which have predisposed you to see things from a particular angle.

So this is a very complex process, and it has a lot to do with saving energy. If you had to process all the information arising from your interactions and always compute all your responses afresh, from scratch, so to speak, your brain couldn’t possibly cope with the amount of work involved. Powerful as it is, it just doesn’t have the computing power to do that.

So, firstly, we already save a lot of energy by screening out most of the potential information we could receive, allowing only a small number of nerve signals to go into advanced processing and even fewer to become conscious. Secondly, when we decide to respond to or initiate an interaction with our environment, we have already stored away a large number of fixed action patterns, some learned, some innate and refined down by experience, which save us a lot of energy because we don’t always have to figure out afresh how to do things.

We accumulate habitual and automatic ways of doing things from brushing our teeth to even having an argument. They are not wrong. Without them it would be difficult to function at all. But if we don’t have any awareness around these conditioned responses, we become very rigid and limited.

So the first element of the training the Buddha advocated is to become more aware of how all of this functions. The second element is to become more skillful about how we work with it, to try to use our awareness to find ways to weaken and perhaps finally abandon those habits that we recognize as being harmful or not helpful and to reinforce the skillful ones.

As we become more adept at this, the burden of our conditioning becomes lighter, and our ways of getting involved in creating our reality become more skilled and more flexible. Then we can increasingly use the inner space we have gained to question the whole process.

How much of my experience is constructed? How am I involved in constructing it? Do I have any authority over it? If so, which kinds of construction are useful, and when? Are there times when I can let go of constructing, and to what extent? What is a less constructed reality like? Is it possible? Is it possible to let go of constructing altogether? What would be left then? By letting go of the mental activities involved in construction, is it possible to get a glimpse of what the Buddha referred to as the unconstructed?

This reflection by Ajahn Abhinando is from the article Awareness and Desire, (pdf) pp. 6-8.