99% Get ＂Luminous Mind＂ Wrong — It Is Not Enlightenment (Yet)

99% get luminous mind wrong. It is not enlightenment yet. We had a visitor the other day who made a strange comment that my approach to insight followed Majjhima 64. I always thought my approach to insight followed Ajahn Fuang. Majjhima 64 does talk about one way in which insight develops, in which you analyze your concentration first into the different aggregates. When you're sitting here, you've got form, which is the breath. Feeling, which is the feeling of pleasure you're trying to develop. Perception, the image you hold in mind of how the breath moves through the body, where it starts, where it finishes. Fabrication, how you talk to yourself about the breath, evaluate it, make adjustments. And then consciousness, which is aware of all these things. As you reflect on these activities, you're aware of how they're inconstant, stressful, not self. That provides an opening to the insight to release. That's one way in which insight can arise. But living with Ajahn Fuang, I discovered he had lots of different ways that he would recommend for insight to arise. There's another way that corresponds to another sutta. I've forgotten the number and name of the sutta, in which the insight arises as you go from one level of concentration to another. And you see the different fabrications fall away. Verbal fabrication falls away as you move from the first to the second jhana. Bodily fabrication falls away as you move from the third to the fourth. Then mental fabrication would fall away when you move from the dimension of neither perception nor non-perception to the cessation of perception and feeling. That's way up there. That's another way in which insight can arise. You see how the mind constructs things and how you can move from one construction to another. You begin to see how each is fabricated, how you put these things together. That insight helps you develop some dispassion for the concentration. That's the important thing, how you develop dispassion. And that's going to vary from person to person. Which level of concentration it's going to happen in and whether it's going to happen in the concentration as you move from one level to another or as you leave concentration. There are also stories in the canon where people are washing their feet, they gain concentration and then from the concentration they gain insight. So, all kinds of things can spark your insight. That was one of the things I learned from Ajahn Phuong. He said, you can hear about other people's strategies for developing discernment or insight. But you can't assume they'll work for you the way they worked for the other people. It's good to read about them, to get some ideas of what kinds of things have helped other people. But you're going to have to look at your own mind and see what works. And you're going to have to use your own ingenuity. This boils down to those two words that I keep repeating over and over again. Because Ajahn Phuong kept repeating them over and over again. You have to be observant and you have to use your ingenuity. That's how you develop in your meditation. Now, an important part of being observant is something that he would teach across the board. Which is that you've got to get a very strong sense of the watcher or the knower in your meditation, the part of the mind that can watch anything and not get excited by it, not get upset by it, but just witness what's going on. This is an ability that you have to consciously develop. Some people have more trouble with it than others. But time and again, I would hear people coming to see Ajahn Phuong and say, as I watch my mind and if something bad comes up, I try to get rid of it. If something good, I allow it to continue. And he would say, well, learn how to watch the bad things too. You don't follow them. You don't act on them. But learn how to watch your defilements because, he said, sometimes your defilements have their good side. This is a point he picked up from Ajahn Lee. If we didn't have desire, for instance, we wouldn't be here practicing. If we didn't crave the end of suffering, we wouldn't be here practicing. If we didn't realize that we have some ignorance, we wouldn't search for knowledge. So even the defilements can have their good side. But to see that requires developing a very resilient observer inside. An important part of the observer is learning to be aware of things and then just drop it at that. You don't continue, as they say in Thai, weaving things. You notice the presence of something. You observe what it's doing. But you don't play along with its games. You're gaining a sense of how to watch something in the mind and yet be separate from it. This is one of the important principles in gaining discernment. You hear so much about the importance of seeing the oneness of all things. But when the Buddha talks about insight, it's all about seeing things as separate. Your awareness is one thing. Your greed is something else. Your anger is something else. If you're watching pain, the pain is one thing. The awareness is something else. The body is something else. It's this ability to watch, to step back, that allows you to see the whole story of how different things interact. One of Ajahn Phuong's students complained to him once that the insights she gained in her meditation were all very fragmentary. He said, It's like listening to a record. He was thinking of the records in the old days. Those long playing records where a needle had to be put into a groove. He said, The needle has to stay in the groove. It can't jump around. When something good comes up, you stay in the groove. When something bad comes up, you stay in the groove. That reminded me of a novel I taught when I was teaching English in Chiang Mai University. I had the students read Ford Maddox Ford, The Good Soldier, which admittedly, even for a native speaker, is not an easy book to read. But I wanted to stretch the students to get them to think about the narrator. Because that's what the book is all about. This man is narrating basically his wife's suicide and his best friend's suicide. And he plays a role in both. He doesn't intervene, doesn't help to stop them, when he could have, perhaps. But he doesn't want to assume any guilt for what he failed to do. As he's telling the story, anytime he comes across some incriminating evidence of his own complicity, he jumps over it. When he's telling of an incident and it looks as though he's portraying himself in a bad way, he'll suddenly switch to something else. So, the book jumps around, which is why it's a difficult book to read. But our minds are just like that. We're thinking along and something makes us look bad or just shows us something about ourselves that we don't like to see. And we jump. The needle jumps out of the groove. When a record is like that, when the needle's jumping around, screech, scratch, screech, scratch, there's no sense to anything at all. If you want to make sense out of your own mind, you have to stick with things, good and bad. And just tell yourself, as Ajahn Fong told one of his students, look, the mind can think good things, so why can't it think bad things? Just make sure you don't fall under the power of the bad things. You learn how to step back from both. Because that's when you get to see the mind in and of itself. Because that's the real culprit. It's not the good or bad things that are the culprits. It's how we relate to them. Like that passage in the canon where the question is, when you have two oxen, a black one and a white one, is the black one the fetter of the white? Is the white one the fetter of the black? No, it's the yoke that's holding the two together. That's the fetter there. In the same way, sights are not the fetter of the eye. The eye is not the fetter of sights. And so on down with all the senses. It's the passion and desire between the two of them that connects them. That's what you want to see. Where does the passion and desire come from? It comes out of the mind, of the… So whatever comes up, you want to learn how to keep the observer in control as you just watch. You don't act on it, but you see it. This is an event in the mind. When you can see the events in the mind simply as that, as events, then you're going to learn about them, in whichever way your insight is going to come. Whatever questions you ask about why something makes inroads into the mind when it doesn't have to, that's what you have to realize. Things don't have to make inroads into the mind. We let our minds get colored by its objects, but they don't have to be. Yet we take it so much for granted. Something sad happens and the whole mind gets sad. Something pleasant happens and the whole mind gets happy. This may be one of the reasons why the Buddha uses the word Raga to describe these fetters. In addition to passion, it also means color. It's like putting dye into a glass of water. You put some blue dye into the water and it doesn't take long for the whole glass of water to get blue. You put red in and it doesn't take long for the whole glass to get red. That's our problem. We allow our minds to be colored by what we see and what we know. But in developing this sense of the observer, you have to learn how to say, Okay, the observer is one thing. Your awareness is something else. The object is something else. And they don't have to be connected. That way, your observer and your awareness can stay clear even in the presence of red or yellow or blue or green things. This is a part of the training of the mind that's constant for everyone. Now, how you're going to gain your insight, what questions you're going to ask that are going to break things open, that's going to be an individual matter. We learn from the strategies of others, what's possible, what could work, but that's not necessarily going to work for us. This is where you're encouraged to ask your own questions, to understand your own greed, aversion, delusion, your own desires and passions, and to learn to develop some dispassion around them. Basically, it comes down to that old pattern of seeing the allure, seeing the drawbacks, and catching yourself going for the allure when you realize at the same time, this is nothing worth going for. Now, when that's going to happen, how that's going to happen, we can't say. But what you can create are the conditions for it to become likely to happen. That's all dependent on learning how to make this sense of the observer strong and independent and not colored by anything it knows. Develop your inner observer. The mind is luminous. That's what the Buddha said one time. And it's defiled by incoming defilements, which means the defilements don't have to stay there. He says it's because the mind is luminous that it can be developed. That means that when he's talking about the luminous mind, he's not talking about the awakened mind. He's not saying that our nature is awakened or already pure. If something's to be developed, it's part of the path. It's not the goal. What the Buddha is talking about when he says luminous is the mind's ability to observe itself. We want to make use of that as we practice. It's part of the training from the very beginning. As the Buddha said, the Dhamma is nourished by commitment and reflection. You do what's required by the path, and then you reflect on how well it's going. And a large part of what you're doing is learning how to train that ability to reflect well. That's where the luminosity comes in. The Buddha started with his instructions to Rahula, basically telling him to act only on skillful intentions. That's the commitment part. Then, as he's doing his actions, and after they're done, he should reflect on the results. If he sees any harm coming up while he's doing the action, he should stop. If he sees no harm, he can continue. If after the action is done, he sees that he caused some harm, he resolves not to repeat the mistake. If he sees no harm, he takes joy in that fact and continues training. This is how you perfect your ability to reflect. Most people use their ability to reflect in some fairly unskillful ways. A lot of us have an inner critic who's pretty merciless, but also pretty dumb. It may be clever in pointing out ways in which you've been deficient, but for what purpose? It picked up the voices of who knows who, people who have criticized you in the past, parents, teachers, friends, and they all gang up on you. As you come here to meditate, you have to ask yourself, what do they know? When you're training the mind through virtue, concentration, and discernment, you're going into territory that most of them never knew before. So, you've got to train your inner critic to actually be helpful as you train in these skills. Some people say they just want to get rid of their inner critic. But if you don't have the ability to reflect, you're not going to get anywhere on the path. It's only through reflection that we notice where we can still improve and we can come up with ideas of how we can improve. So, listen to what the Buddha has to say about how to talk to yourself. The more I go through the canon, the more I see him saying train yourself this way. We should train ourselves. We will do this. We'll train ourselves. We will do that. Or I will try to do this. I will try to do that. That's how you talk to yourself. And it's not just in the beginning stages as when Rahula was told to ask himself about this action I want to do, this action I'm doing, this action I've done. When the Buddha is talking about developing discernment, developing mindfulness as a governing principle, he has you say, I will try to develop any discernment that I haven't developed yet. And when I have developed discernment, I'll try to maintain it. I... You're responsible for what you're doing. Even when you train yourself that I will try to dwell in the utmost emptiness, there's still an I in that determination. That's the I of the inner commentator. And as you're training the inner commentator, you're also training your ability simply to observe. Because a wise commentator doesn't just keep jumping to conclusions. The wise commentator will stop and watch for a while. That ability just to watch with a minimum of commentary, that's a useful skill. It's a level of consciousness that we're trying to develop. It plays a really important role in concentration practice. You get the mind still and then you watch. Because if you start jumping to conclusions or getting impatient, you can ruin the concentration and you don't gain any knowledge. So your ability to get to this knower inside, what the Thais call Furu or awareness itself, is an important part of developing your ability to reflect. But it is conditioned. Some people mistake it and say, this must be the unconditioned mind. Well, any consciousness that has an object is conditioned by the object. Consciousness may seem to be continuous. But that's because moments of consciousness blend very easily into one another. We tend to glom them together. But each time the object changes, that's a different moment of consciousness. So we're developing this quality of the luminosity of the mind the mind's ability to observe itself as we use it to reflect. When we're not sure about what to think about what's going on, we just get very quiet. We can get through a lot of the suffering that we've caused ourselves simply by learning this skill. Think about the Buddha's instructions about harsh speech coming into the ear. Just tell yourself, an unpleasant sound has made contact at the ear and that's it. Anything beyond that is your elaboration on that sound. The actual contact with the ear may have ended a long time ago. But if it's still reverberating in your mind, that's the sign of an untrained commentator. The trained commentator stops. He says, anything beyond that contact I'm responsible for. So why am I doing this to myself? This is where we get to the question we had this morning about seeing things in terms of the four noble truths. The four noble truths provide a framework for how to look at things so that we can stop suffering. Now, we may have other purposes. We may be looking at things in terms of how to maintain our self-image, how to maintain what we see as our image in the society we inhabit, how to settle scores. Those are all different frames of reference, different ways of looking at things with different purposes. Most of these purposes are ways to keep samsara going along. The Buddha is offering us another frame, teaching our ability to reflect, to look at things for the purpose of ending suffering. That's a very different thing. So you have to ask yourself, what is your purpose in talking to yourself? What is your purpose in practicing? Train your commentator in the direction of the four noble truths, seeing the extent to which you're burdening your own mind, and you don't have to. So we start with this luminous mind, this ability to observe, and we try to develop it, both in getting down to the mere act of consciousness and also in seeing the different ways we go beyond that mere act of consciousness, and we don't have to. This luminosity is a quality to be developed, which means it's part of the path, which further means it's conditioned and fabricated. But it's a really useful thing to fabricate. The more sensitive you get to how the mind fabricates, even on the bare level of bare awareness, the more likely you are to get the mind inclined to want to find something that goes beyond this, something that's not fabricated. But in the meantime, work on developing this skill because it helps you sort out a lot of things in the mind in terms of comprehending suffering, abandoning its cause, developing the path so that you can realize the cessation of suffering. All the duties of the noble truths are contained right here, or they should be contained right here. I mean, you can commit and reflect around all kinds of things. But if you can commit and then reflect in terms of the four noble truths, that's something special.