Transforming Internal Formations pt. 3

So the question is, how would I or Jim Bootman establish sufficient conditions for the harmonization of the Seven Factors of Awakening right here in the face of afflicted consciousness arising in my everyday life?

When you first start meditating, you can hardly sit for thirty seconds without your mind drifting to the thought of a delicious toaster-pastry or the unbelievably curt tone of that man from customer service. With a little practice, however, you develop the capacity to sit still for twenty or thirty minutes, and at the end, your mind is calm and stable. But when you glance at your phone and see a missed call from the man from customer service at the toaster-pastry company, your blood boils instantly. You sorrow, grieve, pull out your hair, beat your breast. You lament that your practice has borne no fruit whatsoever. You bemoan the sufferings of samsara. You yearn for rebirth as a son or daughter of good family with ample conditions for monastic practice.

But living is not a skill. In meditation, you do not practice being calm so that you can eventually master being calm and then be calm all the time. Stabilizing the mind is only a means to create conditions for careful observation. In insight meditation, the roots of your habitual ways of functioning are seen, not overwritten. It is not that once they are seen, you will put something new in place, the thing that you have been practicing. Spontaneity does not require rehearsal. Training stillness with the hopes of liberation is like doing bicep curls with the hopes of growing wings.

That being said, in the traditional practice path–the one that Joe Boatman took–the means to that liberating seeing is massive, unshakeable stillness. When equanimity is listed as one of the Seven Factors of Awakening, we’re talking about a dump-truck load: years of continuous formal practice, in solitude and silence. Practically speaking, this is necessary for two main reasons. The first is that in that tradition, insight into dependent origination is investigated in relation to certain meditation events that happen in deep retreat. The second reason, the important one for our purposes, is that one aspect of the conditioning that continuously re-instantiates grasping is affective. We could say that at the center of the whole story of “me” and “mine” is a tender little feeling. That feeling needs space to be, unmodified, and in the back of a dump-truck full of equanimity is as good a place as any. To be clear, the equanimity doesn’t do anything. It is the support for the non-doing that allows the feeling to be experienced as it is, just as a feeling, one of many conditions that can coalesce into a mind that is structured in terms of a self, or not.

When I toot the horn of Mahayana Buddhism, it isn’t because I’ve been all around the world looking for the highest and bestest path, and that I finally found it in the “Great Vehicle.” It’s because, underneath all of the lofty symbols and mythology, the Mahayana approach is built upon a core structural insight: non-reactivity in the face of affect can be trained now, in the face of affect. Rather than seeking an environment where I can avoid perturbation, I will simply transform perturbation directly. There is a factor of mind that enacts non-resistance, non-reactive engagement with painful feelings. It is called compassion. And conveniently, it isn’t just a means to an end, another thing to appropriate. It’s more like a kind of deep honesty that requires no justification, and I believe that if you inspect your experience carefully you will be forced to agree. Feelings just feel however they feel. Resistance and avoidance can obscure and redirect, but they cannot change the fundamental truth that the present moment can only be exactly how it is. The cultivation of compassion is nothing more than the gradual integration of this simple fact into your way of seeing.

In both approaches, the actual mechanism of liberation is the same. What differs is first of all the container. In the Nikaya approach, the container is externalized. It is a retreat environment. In the Mahayana, it is internal: compassionate regard directed away from oneself. Both of these can provide conditions for the unobstructed functioning of the Seven Factors of Awakening. Only one can be practiced where you are now.

The second major difference is the raw material that those factors operate upon. Here, I’m not referring to the presence of the various emotions that are activated by the conditions of everyday life, but rather to the internal formations that those emotional tones are a part of. Hey! Isn’t that what these articles are supposed to be about? In deep retreat, those formations are not activated. What is activated and investigated is a tiny sliver of the conditioning-pattern without any reference to the details of everyday life, just the little bit that can allow insight into how “I” becomes “me” over and over again. This is the kind of raw material that the Nikayas emphasize: becoming, clinging, I-conceit, etc., the fine-grained phenomena appropriate for an audience of renunciants that have very low external activation and very high internal acuity, living a daily schedule engineered to support the inquiry. For the rest of us, and I’m afraid that this may be terribly anticlimactic, but the hidden secret, the jeweled key to the great city, the magical formula revealed only to the spiritually elect, is simply to practice with whatever comes up. This has the downside that it cannot be located on a particular page of a text, and appears not to be a specifiable thing such as “I-conceit.” On the bright side though, the present moment never goes out of print, and nothing can possibly get more specific than “this.” When you meet the unfolding of experience with compassionate, non-reactive awareness, everything that needs to be done has already been done. The more you understand why this is true, the truer it becomes.

To understand how a compassionate regard for everyday phenomena such as boating related anger or fear of footwear can lead eventually to the complete exhaustion of the conditions that underly the concepts of self and other, I will need to schematize the anatomy of an internal formation in a way that would probably not endear me to my Yogacarin spiritual ancestors. O! Venerable Vasubandhu! Please forgive me!

Remember that our beloved internal formation, patiently waiting in store consciousness for transformation, can be conceived of in two ways: as a cluster of seeds, each of which can contribute something distinct to a moment mind-consciousness, and as a conditioning-pattern, the habituated coordination profile of those seeds that determines what conditions will likely activate them, in what ways the various seeds of the cluster are likely to co-arise, and what the strength and coherence of that arising will be. Remember also that, depending on the history of the formation, it may show considerable diversity of manifestation.

Now, at the risk of making store consciousness sound like a place where things are arranged spatially, which it most certainly is not, I will say that every internal formation can be described in terms of a root and a periphery. Here, we’re talking about seeds in the cluster. When Joe Boatman is fuming about the shortcomings of the clove-hitch as a mooring knot, we can say that the dharmas he is contemplating are squarely peripheral to his larger internal formation. They are a part of it, and they are coordinated by the overall conditioning-pattern of the cluster, but we can say without condescension that what’s going on here doesn’t really have that much to do with knot-tying. Does that mean that Mr. Boatman should try and push this topic from his mind? No! This is it, Joe Boatman! Don’t wait for your big retreat! Don’t disregard your curious fixation on mooring knots! Find the emotional tone, right now! Find the sense of unpleasantness, right now! See the aversion, the resistance, the tension, the motive force that propels the thoughts onward, right now! Breathe mindfully and allow them all to be exactly how they are, Joe Boatman! Go, Joe, Go!

If Joe follows this admonition, a number of things may happen:

1. The whole formation may just go back to sleep. This is fine. Joe’s only job is to practice with whatever comes up.
2. A new object may arise that fits the old pattern, and the anger will re-cohere. Joe may need a moment to reorient himself, and then his practice will be the same as before.
3. Joe may have an insight into the dependent origination of knot-tying preferences.
4. The narrative component of the formation may go quiet, and Joe will enter into a period of what Thay would call “embracing feelings with mindfulness.”
5. The root of the internal formation may reveal itself and Joe may have an insight into the dependent origination of the whole cluster. This, again, is not something that Joe “does.” It is something that happens on its own under the gaze of non-reactive seeing.

Oh, the root, the root! What do I mean by the root? The root of the formation is central only in the sense that it has causal force. If Joe has a big insight that allows him to finally see with tender-hearted understanding that some people just don’t know any better than to use a clove-hitch to tie up a boat, the rest of the internal formation can still cohere. That is why we call knot-tying peripheral relative to the formation. When he sees the conditioned functioning of the root dharmas, however, the whole formation will come apart at the seams, including every part of the periphery. When that happens, the formation can be said to have been transformed at the base. It no longer has conditions to arise.

Now, this makes the root look like the kind of delicious turnip that hungry practitioners long to sink their teeth into. Back, snarling vegetarians! Back! Before continuing I want to be crystal clear about this: dependent origination will not reveal itself under the tyranny of conceptual labels. It is something seen, not something declared. In a moment with high emotional charge, the impulse to classify things is most likely just another avenue of expression for reactivity. It is to be met with non-reactive awareness just like the rest and allowed to recede into the background. In the moment, you do not need to know if this is the root or not. You just need to be open and compassionate enough to see what’s really happening. The root is not a thing, it is a collection of conditions that have been mistaken for a thing in relation to “me.”

These conditions are only called the root functionally and retrospectively. They are the last ones observed before the formation ceases to arise, just as your keys are always found in the last place you look. Next week in, part four of this apparently endless article, we’ll work through the whole process with a hypothetical internal formation and see what it looks like. Until then!