The 11th Dimension： The Buddha on Happiness Beyond Space and Time

The Eleventh Dimension The Buddha on Happiness Beyond Space and Time When the Buddha taught breath meditation, he started out with four very simple steps. You discern long breathing. You discern short breathing. You try to breathe in and out aware of the entire body. Then in the fourth step, he introduced a technical term. Fabrication or Sankhara. You try to breathe in and out calming bodily fabrication. That's another word for the in and out breath. The question is, why did he use the technical term? You see it again in the next four steps. First, you try to breathe in and out sensitive to rapture. Any sense of refreshment that you feel while you're sitting here. Try to focus on that. Let it spread throughout the body. Then breathe in and out sensitive to pleasure. A sense of ease. Then he says to breathe in and out sensitive to mental fabrications. Which are feelings and perceptions. Now, you're already dealing with feelings. And in particular, that feeling of ease. Then there's the step of breathing in and out calming mental fabrication. So again, why did he use the technical term? The answer is that the Buddha's trying to get you to think in terms of fabrication. In general, fabrication means things that are put together. Processes that put things together. But specifically, the term refers to what you're doing to fabricate your own experience. Input comes into the senses. And you don't receive it with everything already marked and identified as to what's what. What's important and what's not. You have to do the identification. That's perception. You have to do the evaluating. That's more fabrication. In these ways, you shape your experience. We play a much bigger role in that shaping than we tend to think. And the Buddha wants you to get sensitive to that role. For instance, simply the way you intend to breathe, consciously or unconsciously, has an impact on how you experience the body. The feelings you focus on, the perceptions you use, have an impact on the mind. Then there's a third kind of fabrication called verbal fabrication. Where you talk to yourself. That plays a role in the instructions to the meditation themselves. Things you tell yourself, such as, I'm going to breathe this way. I'm going to breathe that way. I'm going to focus on this. Focus on that as I breathe in and out. The Buddha wants you to calm that fabrication too. This helps you gain a sense of how the way you normally fabricate things causes a lot of unnecessary stress and suffering. The more stirred up your fabrications, the more you're going to suffer. One, simply out of the effort to put these things together. And two, you can come up with all kinds of ideas, perceptions, thoughts, feelings that can wreak a lot of havoc in the mind. When the mind is punishing itself this way, it's going to suffer. And the punishment doesn't stop there. It spreads out to other people. So, follow the Buddha's instructions. Try to get sensitive to how the way you breathe has an impact on the body. And use the breath in a way that feels soothing. Gives rise to feelings of pleasure. Gives rise to feelings of refreshment. When the body's been energized, then you can allow it to grow calm. At the same time, look at the perceptions you're holding in mind right now. What kind of perception do you have of the breath? If you think of it simply as air coming in and out through the nostrils, it's going to be hard to use the breath to help spread those feelings of ease and well-being around the body. But if you think of the breath as a flow of energy, it'll be easier. After all, the muscles have to move. The body has to move so that the air can come in and out of the lungs. Well, what is that movement? It's breath energy. Where does it come from? Where does it originate in the body? And as you feel that movement spreading through the body, does it feel good or does it feel constricted? Try to become sensitive to these things so that you can use the breath energy skillfully. We're perfectly free to breathe any way we want. Why let yourself breathe in a way that's creating unnecessary stress? The usual reason is because you're not paying attention. You think other things are more important. But here again, the Buddha's pointing your attention to how the way you breathe is going to have an impact on your mood. Your mood, of course, is going to have an impact on the things you do and say and think. So, it's wise to get sensitive to this aspect of your experience. To get more and more sensitive to how you really are shaping things. To see the potentials you have here and how you can make the best use of them. We focus on fabrication because ultimately, we're looking for an unfabricated pleasure. Something you don't have to put together. But you won't really know the unfabricated until you've gotten very sensitive to how you fabricate your experience of the present moment. It's not that everything is served to you, ready-made, already finished. You have to put things together. You have to put the finishing touches on them so that they become a coherent experience. The mind is active in its creation of the present moment. Now, we don't create it totally out of whole cloth. Some things do come in from our past actions. But when the Buddha explains the list of causes for suffering, the input from the senses, which is what comes from your past actions, comes after this process of fabrication. The way you fabricate your experience, if you do it in ignorance, already primes you to suffer from that experience regardless of the input from the senses. If you fabricate with knowledge, that fabrication and everything following from it will become a path to the end of suffering. The more sensitive you become as you fabricate a good path here, in other words, a good state of concentration, mindful, alert, ardent, the more you can develop a sense of ease that you can spread through the body. You get a sense of refreshment you can spread through the body. You spread your awareness through the body. Your sensitivity develops and grows. Things that used to strike you as okay suddenly feel a bit too stressful. You begin to notice more and more how you're shaping things and how there's stress in the shaping and you look at why. Why are you creating the stress? Well, there's desire and as the Buddha said, not all desires are bad. Some desires, when you engage in them with knowledge, can be part of the path. But often, our desires are ignorant and they fuel our fabrication in lots of ways that are conflicting, afflicting. As you get more sensitive here, you begin to wonder why you get engaged. Why create these things? After all, you're not simply on the receiving end. You're creating these things and then you're suffering from them. When you see that the suffering coming from these things is far greater than the allure that makes you want to create them to begin with, then you feel dispassion. Dispassion then allows these processes of fabrication to fall away because passion was what was driving them. When these processes fall away, then something unfabricated can appear. It's always there. But we're too busy to see it. Busy creating our fabrications as to what we want here, what we want there, what we think this is, what we think that is. And if it's not what we want it to be, what can we do to make it what we want it to be? That kind of stuff. That's always getting in the way. But when you stop that process, then something outside of processes, outside of time, appears in the mind. That's the ultimate happiness. That's the unfabricated. I've known people who ask, how can we as conditioned beings find something unfabricated? But they're assuming that we're conditioned by something totally outside of our control. Either a creator God or just material laws, physical laws. But the Buddha's analysis is that, no, we're creating the present moment on our own initiative using the raw materials, as I said, that come from past karma, pointing the present moment in different directions. Because we're creating it, we can take it apart. When we take it apart, that's when we can find something that's not fabricated. This afternoon, we talked about the image of happiness as being like a roller coaster going up and down, up and down. And then thinking of Nibbana as getting to the up and then not going down again. But it's not like that. It's actually beyond the up. Wherever there's up, there's going to be down. The roller coaster is in space and time. The happiness of Nibbana, the well-being of Nibbana, the bliss, all that's covered by one word in Pali. Happiness, bliss, well-being, pleasure. The word is sukha. That's not dependent on anything in time. It's not dependent on anything fabricated. It's not dependent on anything at all. Which is why it doesn't change. It's in a different dimension. But it can be contacted here at the mind when the mind stops its fabrication. So listen to the Buddha's instructions. He's showing you that even the way you breathe is fabricating your experience of the body. And your experience of the body is going to have an impact on feelings. Those feelings are going to have an impact on the mind. The way you talk to yourself, the perceptions you hold in mind as you identify this, as this, and that, as that. What you want out of this and want out of that. Try to get sensitive to all these things to see where they're placing unnecessary stress on the mind. The more you can get sensitive to different levels of stress, the more you'll be able to unravel the process of fabrication to that point of awakening where the unfabricated appears. As the Buddha said, it's true happiness. Harmless happiness. Blameless happiness. One of those rare forms of happiness that really is more than worth the effort that goes into finding it. Both for your own well-being and the well-being of people around you. Maintained by fabrication. There's a passage where the Buddha asks, what is one? And the answer is, all beings are maintained by food. Well, it turns out there's another answer to that same question in another passage. All beings are maintained by fabrication. The fact that we exist depends on fabrication. We're taking the results of our past fabrications and we're using them as raw material to fabricate the present moment. In doing so, we provide raw material for the future. Each moment, we're constantly moving on, moving on. But the problem is that we're often blind as to where we're going. All fabrication is done for the purpose of something, which means we have something in mind. Even animals with minimal brains have something in mind as they act. Think of the sea squirts. When they're born, they're looking for a place to stay permanently. They have a little brain that moves them around, directs them, chooses a spot. They settle in and then they digest their brain because they feel there's nothing else they have to think about. They just feed from that point on. The fabrication in that case gets pretty minimal, just feeding without anything else in mind. We can see that that's a very limited idea of happiness, a limited idea of well-being. Well, the Buddha looks at us and sees us as sea squirts. We have very limited ideas about what happiness can be, what's available to us, what's possible. And we content ourselves with things that are not really worth being content with. Often we're headed to places, but we have no idea where we're going. The Buddha talks about different beings headed on the path to hell, headed on the path to the animal womb, headed on the path to the realm of the hungry ghosts, or human beings, or the heavens. A lot of those beings have no idea where they're going. Those on the path to hell don't think they're going to hell. Their picture of reality tells them something else. The same for those who are going to the womb of the animals, the realm of the hungry ghosts. No one intends to become that kind of animal, that kind of being. But they've been fabricating in that direction blindly with an idea in mind about what's possible, what works. So when the Buddha is teaching beings, he's not teaching people who are suddenly deciding they want to follow a path. They are already following paths. And his task as a teacher is to alert them as to what kind of path they're on and to the better paths that are available. This is why right view comes at the beginning of the path. Right conviction in the Buddha's awakening comes as the first strength, the first faculty. He's giving us a picture to hold in mind, opening up possibilities for us to keep in mind as we keep fabricating. I was talking the other day to someone who was saying he came to the meditation thinking that at the beginning he would just find his mind where it was, what was going on on its own and then decide to fabricate a state of concentration. Suddenly it hit him that he was already fabricating something else. We're fabricating all the time. It's just that we do it blindly or as the Buddha would say, without alertness. So we want to be alert to what we're doing. But even so, it depends on having a picture and choosing whose picture we're going to take as our guide. As a philosopher once said, we live forward but understand backward. Well, we're fabricating forward, fabricating forward. And often it's too late when we realize which direction we've been going. So we're fortunate to have the Buddha's teaching available. It gives us an idea of what's possible, what works in the world, how it works in the world, what kind of happiness we can attain through our fabrication. And it turns out we can arrive at something unfabricated. That's what makes this so special. Everything else in the world is fabricated and goes to fabrications. Fabrications creating more fabrications, creating more fabrications. And it just goes on and on and on without end. But he's telling us the unfabricated is possible. At that point, we don't have to be beings anymore. That's a bit scary because the unfabricated is going to require that we abandon a lot of things that we've been fabricating for in the past. Things we thought were good. Things we thought were worthwhile. Which is why we have to keep reminding ourselves of what Right View says. That our intentions really do matter. And that intentions can be developed to a level of skill that can take us all the way to the unfabricated. And that it's the ultimate happiness where you don't have to intend anything anymore. You want to keep that in mind. Otherwise, we get tied up in the affairs of the day. This person said this. That person said this. This person has it in for me. And this person, whatever. As the Buddha said, what other people do to you is not going to take you to hell. What you do, though, can take you to hell. And you don't have to wait for hell at the end of this lifetime. Hell right now. At the same time, it's getting in the way of what opportunities you do have to search for something better. So remember, you're always fabricating. You are the product of fabrications. Your identities depend on the ones that you've latched on to. So ask yourself, if the Buddha saw you, which path would he see you on? And what would he tell you so that your fabrications are not blind, so that you can fabricate with some understanding? Now, granted, we take a lot of the Buddha's teachings on faith. But that's the position of all beings. Everybody's acting on faith. I was reading a while back, someone claiming that the beliefs of a scientific worldview are not like the beliefs of a religious worldview. The scientific worldview is true. It's been proven. That's what the person said. But I can't think of anybody who holds on to a belief without some sense that it's been proven one way or another. And there's still so much, even in the scientific worldview, that we don't really know. Dark energy and dark matter are called dark because no one knows what they are. We don't even know if the future is going to happen. Time could end at any point. There are so many things we take on trust. So the question is, who's trustworthy? And look at the path that's being recommended. If it's a purely materialistic worldview, everything would depend on survival. That's basically the road to hell. When you say that survival is the highest goal that we can have, because without the physical survival of the body, we can't do anything else. So that's the number one prerequisite. Oftentimes, to survive, people have to do some pretty nasty things. We see this all around us. Those people are on the road to a rebirth in an animal womb or hell, but they don't know. Then you look at the Buddha's path. It's a path of dignity, a path of honesty. It's built on virtue. And that right there has a lot to recommend it. Of course, it's not proof. As the Buddha said, you don't really have proof of his teachings until you've seen the deathless for the very first time. You're like the hunter in the forest looking for an elephant. You see likely signs, even in the practice of jhana, even in the psychic powers that can be attained through jhana. Those are just likely signs. The real proof comes when you actually see the elephant, when you get to the unfabricated and realize that it's true. It can be done. It can be attained. The fabrications that create you, the fabrications that you're creating all the time can't cause the unfabricated. But if you fashion them well, they can get you to the threshold. And from the threshold, you can go to it. That's when you know the people who come back from that experience are people who are trustworthy. Again, we take this on faith. We take this on conviction. But it's a good faith. It's a good conviction. And it's a good thing to keep in mind as we practice. Because as the Buddha warns us, a lot of the other for the sakes of that we could follow, the ones we take as a guide, as we keep fabricating ourselves, fabricating our experience, and then using those fabrications to fabricate more entail a lot of suffering. We need a guide so that we're not totally blind as we head into the future. So choose your guide well. When you have a guide like the Buddha, keep his teachings in mind all the time. Because it's so easy to fall back into other paths, other ways of fabrication. After all, that's what we've been doing in the past. It comes easily. But when you look at what you fabricated so far, and decide that it's not good enough, then it's up to you to fabricate with more skill. That's when you can get on the right path.