Eknath
Easwaran, “The Dhammapada”, an excerpt, as an example of modern Hindu
mysticism.
THE STAGES OF
ENLIGHTENMENT
Despite the Buddha’s extraordinary capabilities, we must
accept his own testimony that until the night of his enlightenment he saw life
essentially the way the rest of us do. Yet
after that experience he lived in a world where concepts like time and space,
causality, personality, death, all mean something radically different. What happened to turn ordinary ways of seeing
inside out?
In the Vinaya
Pitika (III, 4) the Buddha left a concise roadmap of his journey to
nirvana—a description of the course of his meditation that night cast in the
kind of language a brilliant clinician might use in the lecture hall. In
Buddhism the stages of this journey are called the “four dhyanas” from the Sanskrit word for meditation which later passed
into Japanese as zen. Scholars sometimes treat passage through the
four dhyanas as a peculiarly Buddhist experience, but the Buddha’s description
tallies not only with the Hindu authorities like Patanjali but also with
Western mystics like John of the Cross, Teresa of Avila, Augustine, and Meister
Eckhart. What the Buddha is giving us is
something of universal application: a precise account of levels of awareness
beneath the everyday waking state.
On that night, he tells us, he seated
himself for meditation with the resolve not to get up again until he had
attained his goal. Then, he continues,
I roused
unflinching determination, focused my attention, made my body calm and
motionless and my mind concentrated and one-pointed.
Standing
apart from all selfish urges and all states of mind harmful to spiritual
progress, I entered the first meditative state, where the mind, though not
quite free from divided and diffuse thought, experiences lasting joy.
By putting
an end to divided and diffuse thought, with my mind stilled in one-pointed
absorption, I entered the second meditative state quite free from any wave of
thought, and experienced the lasting joy of the unitive state.
As that joy
became more intense and pure, I entered the third meditative state, becoming
conscious in the very depths of the unconscious. Even my body was flooded with that joy of
which the noble ones say, “They live in abiding joy who have stilled the mind
and are fully awake.”
Then, going
beyond the duality of pleasure and pain, and the whole field of memory-making
forces in the mind, I dwelt at last in the fourth meditative state, utterly
beyond the reach of thought, in that realm of complete purity which can be
reached only through detachment and contemplation.
This was my
first successful breaking forth, like a chick breaking out of its shell….
This last quiet phrase is deadly. Our everyday life, the Buddha is suggesting,
is lived within an eggshell. We have no
more idea of what life is really like than a chicken has before it
hatches. Excitement and depression,
fortune and misfortune, pleasure and pain, are storms in a tiny, private,
shell-bound realm which we take to be the whole of existence.
Yet we can break out of this shell and enter a new
world. For a moment the Buddha draws
aside the curtain of space and time and tells us what it is like to see into
another dimension. When I read these
words I remember listening to the far-off voice of Neil Armstrong that evening
in 1969, telling us what it felt like to stand on the moon and look up at the
earth floating in a sea of stars. The
Buddha’s voice reaches us from no distance at all, yet from a place much more
remote. He is at the center of
consciousness, beyond the thinking apparatus itself. As in some science fiction story, he has
slipped through a kind of black hole into a parallel universe and returned to
tell the rest of us what lies outside the boundaries of the mind.
To capture this vision will require many metaphors. Like snapshots of the same scene from
different angles, they will sometimes appear inconsistent. This should present no problem to the modern
mind. We are used to physicists
presenting us with exotic and conflicting models—phenomena described as both
particles and waves, parallel futures where something both takes place and does
not, universes that are finite but unbounded.
The mathematics behind these models is consistent, experts assure us,
and the models are the best that imagination can do. And we laymen are satisfied: we cannot check
the mathematics, but we are quite content to get an intuitive sense of what
such radical ideas mean. Let us give
the Buddha the same credence. Beneath
the simple verses of the Dhammapada he will show us a universe every bit as
fascinating as Bohr’s or Einstein’s.
The Buddha’s dry description of the four dhyanas hides the
fact that traversing them is a nearly impossible achievement. Even to enter the first dhyana requires years
of dedicated, sustained, systematic effort, the kind of practice that turns an
ordinary athlete into a champion.
This is an apt comparison, for the word the Buddha chose for
“right effort” is one that is used for disciplined athletic training in general
and gymnastics in particular. When the
Buddha mentions with what determination he sat down for meditation that night,
I remember the look on the face of Mary Lou Retton when she stood waiting the
launch the gymnastics routine that won her an Olympic gold medal. She had trained her body for years, sharpened
her concentration, unified her will, and that moment she had one thing on her
mind and one thing only. Nothing less
is required for meditation. Behind the
Buddha’s apparently effortless passage through deeper states of consciousness
lie years of the most arduous training.
The First Dhyana
When a lover of music listens to a concert, she is likely to
close her eyes. If you call her name or
touch her on the shoulder, she may not even notice. Attention has been withdrawn from her other senses
and is concentrated in her hearing. The
same thing happens as meditation deepens, except that attention is withdrawn
from all the senses and drawn inward.
Western mystics call this “recollection”, a literal translation of what
the Buddha calls “right attention”. No
one has given a better comparison than St. Teresa: attention returns from the
outside world, she says, like bees returning to the hive, and gathers inside in
intense activity to make honey. Sound, touch, and so on are still perceived,
but they make very little impression, almost as if the senses have been disconnected.
Gradually, as the quiet settles in, we realize we are in a
new world. For a while we cannot
see. Like moviegoers entering a dark
theater for a matinee, our eyes are still dazzled by the glare from
outside. To learn to move about in this
world takes time. A blind man has
hearing and touch to help him from place to place, but in the unconscious, with
the senses closed down, there are no landmarks that one can recognize.
At this level we begin to see how the mind works. Cut off from its accustomed sensory input, it
runs around looking for something to stimulate it. The Buddha specifies two aspects of this:
“divided thought”, the ordinary two-track mind, trying to keep attention on two
things at once, and “diffuse thought”, the mind’s tendency to wander. The natural direction of this movement is
outward, toward the sensations of experience.
To turn inward, this movement has to be reversed. Throughout the first dhyana the centrifugal
force of the thinking process is gradually absorbed as attention is recalled.
Ordinarily, thought follows a course of stimulus and
response. Some event, whether in the
world or in the mind, sets off a chain of associations, and attention
follows. To descend through the personal
unconscious, we need concentration that cannot be broken by any sensory
attraction or emotional response—in a word, mastery over our senses and our
likes and dislikes. Most people work
through the first dhyana by developing this kind of self-control during the
day. The Buddha, however, has covered
this ground already. His passions are
mastered and his mind one-pointed. When
he sits down to meditate, he crosses this region of the mind without
distraction.
This is only the first leg of a very long journey, but even
in itself it is a rare achievement. The
concentration it requires will bring success in any field, along with a deep
sense of well-being, security and a quiet joy in living. No great flashes of insight come at this
level, but you do begin to see connections between personal problems and their
deeper causes, and with this comes the will to make changes in your life.
The Second Dhyana
To talk about regions of the mind like this, I confess, is a
little misleading. Between the first and
second dhyana, there is no demarcation line.
Both are areas of what might be called the personal unconscious, that
sector of the mind in which lie the thoughts, feelings, habits and experiences
peculiar to oneself as an individual. In
the second dhyana, however, concentration is much deeper, and the demands of
the senses—to taste, hear, touch, smell or see, to experience some sensation or the other—have become much less
shrill. The quiet of meditation is
unassailed by the outside world.
Distractions can still break the thread of concentration, but much less
easily; gradually they seem more and more distant.
Here the battle for self-mastery moves to a significantly
deeper leve. Associations, desires, and
thoughts generated by the preoccupations of the day leave behind their
disguises of rational, unselfish behavior and appear for what they are. The ego has retreated to more basic demands:
the claims of “I” and “mine”. Here, to
make progress, we become eager for opportunities to go against self-will,
especially in personal relationships. There
is no other way to gain detachment from the self-centered conditioning that
burdens every human being. The Buddha
calls this “swimming against the current”: the concerted, deliberate effort to
dissolve self-interest in the desire to serve a larger whole, when eons of
conditioning has programmed us to serve ourselves first.
This is terribly painful, but with the pain comes the
satisfaction in mastering some of the strongest urges in the human
personality. When you sit for
meditation you descend steadily, step by step, into the depths of the
unconscious. The experience is very much
like what deep—sea divers describe when they lower themselves into the black
waters hundreds of feet down. The world
of everyday experience seems as remote as the ocean’s surface, and you feel
immense pressure in your head, as if you were immersed under the weight of a
sea of consciousness. The thread of
concentration is your lifeline then. If
it breaks, you can lose your way in these dark depths.
Here all the mind’s attention—even what ordinarily goes to
subconscious urges and preoccupations—is being absorbed in a single focus. This seemingly simple state comes
spontaneously only to men and women of great genius, and it contains immense
power. The rush of the thinking process
has been slowed to a crawl, each moment of thought under control. The momentum of the mind has been gathered
into great reserves of potential energy, as an object gathers when lifted
against the pull of gravity.
In these depths comes a revolutionary realization: thought
is not continuous. Instead of being a
smooth, unbroken stream, the thinking process is more like the flow of action
in a movie: only a series of stills, passing our eyes faster than we can
perceive.
This idea is one of the most abstract in Buddhism, and
movies make such a concrete illustration that I feel sure the Buddha would have
appreciated having a reel of film to show intellectuals like
Malunkyaputra. “You wouldn’t say a move
is unreal, would you?” he might ask.
“But the appearance of continuity is unreal, and confusing a movie with
reality is not right understanding.”
Most of us find it easy to get involved in certain kinds of
movies. We get caught up in the action
and forget ourselves, and our body and mind respond as if we were there on the
screen. The heart races, blood pressure
goes up, fists clench, and the mind gets excited and jumps to conclusions, just
as if we were actually experiencing what is happening to the hero or heroine. The Buddha would say, “You are experiencing it: and that is the way
you experience life too.”
This may sound heartless, as if he is saying that excitement
and tragedy are no more than a celluloid illusion. Not at all.
What he means is that as human beings, our responses should not be
automatic; we should be able to choose.
When the mind is excited, we jump into a situation and do whatever comes
automatically, which often only makes things worse. If the mind is calm, we see clearly and
don’t get emotionally entangled in events around us, leaving us free to respond
with compassion and help.
Most of us have never thought much about the mechanics of
film projection, so we are surprised to learn that every moment of image on the
screen is followed by a moment of no-image when the screen is dark. We do not perceive these moments of
emptiness. Action stimulates the mind;
no-action bores it. Attention follows
the desire to be stimulated and skips over what the mind finds
meaningless. The power of imagination
jumps the gap between images, holding them together in our mind. Only when the projector is slowed down do we
begin to see the flicker of the screen.
When this happens in a movie, our interest wanes. Our attention is not powerful enough to hold
together in a continuous flow of images that are broken by more than a fraction
of a second. Such a feat requires the
concentration of genius. I think it was
Keynes who said that Newton had the capacity to hold a single problem in the
focus of his mind for days, weeks, even years, until it was solved. That is just what is required at this depth
of meditation. The thinking process is
slowed until you can almost see each thought pass by, yet instead of one
thought following another without rhyme or reason, the mind has such power that
the focus of concentration is not disturbed.
At this depth in consciousness, the sense world and even the
notion of personal identity are very far away.
Asleep to one’s body, asleep even to thoughts, feelings and desires that
we think of as ourselves, we are nevertheless intensely awake in an inner
world—deep in the unconscious, near the very threshold of personality.
The Third Dhyana
If thought is discontinuous, we want to ask, what is between
two thoughts? The answer is,
nothing. A thought is like a wave in
consciousness; between two thoughts there is no movement in the mind at
all. Consciousness itself is like a
still lake, clear, calm and full of joy.
When the thought-process has been slowed down to a crawl in
meditation, there comes a time when—without warning—the movie of the mind stops
and you get a glimpse right through the mind into deeper consciousness. This is called Bodhi, and it comes like a blinding glimpse of pure light
accompanied by a flood of joy.
This experience is not what Zen Buddhists call
“no-mind”. It is only, if I may coin a
term, “no-thought”. The thinking process
has such immense momentum that even at this depth, concentration has power enough
to stop it only for an instant before it starts up again. But the joy of this experience is so intense
that all your desires for life’s lesser satisfactions merge in the deep,
driving desire to do everything possible to stop the mind again.
This point marks the threshold between the second and third
dhyanas. Crossing this threshold is one
of the most difficult challenges in the spiritual journey. You feel blocked by an impenetrable
wall. Bodhi is a glimpse of the other
side, as you get when you drop a quarter into the telescope near the Golden
Gate Bridge and the shutter snaps open for a two-minute look at sea lions
frolicking on the rocks. But these first
experiences of Bodhi are over in an instant, leaving you so eagerly frustrated
that you are willing to do anything to get through. You feel your way along that wall from one
end to the other looking for a break, and finally you realize that there isn’t
any. And you just start chipping
away. It requires the patience of
someone trying to wear down the Himalayas with a piece of silk—and you feel you
are making about as much progress.
This is a rarefied world.
Like the outside world, personal identity is far away. You feel as if the wall between yourself and
the rest of creation were paper-thin.
If you are to go further, this wall has to fall. For on the opposite side lies the collective
unconscious: not necessarily what Jung meant when he coined the term, but what
the Buddha calls “storehouse consciousness”, the strata of the mind shared by
every individual creature. Here are stored
the seeds of our evolutionary heritage, the race-old instincts, drives, urges,
and experiences of a primordial past.
To dive into these dark waters and stay conscious, you have to take off
you individual personality and leave it on the shore.
Paradoxically, this cannot be accomplished by any amount of
will and drive associated with the individual self. It is not done just in meditation but during
the day. Doing “good works” is not
enough; the mental state is crucial.
There must be no taint of “I” or “mine” in what you do, no self-interest,
only your best effort to see yourself in all.
One way to explain this is that karma has to be cleared
before you can cross the wall. All the
momentum of the thinking process comes from the residue of karma. To clear our accounts, we have to absorb
whatever comes to us with kindness, calmness, courage, and compassion. Karma is not really erased; its negative
entries are balanced with positive ones in a flood of selfless service.
When the books of karma are almost closed, the Buddha says
you “come to that place where one grieves no more”. Then you see that the mistakes of your past
and their karmic playback were part of a pattern of spiritual growth stretching
over many lives. Once paid for, these
mistakes are no longer yours. They are
the life history of a person made up of thoughts, desires and motives that are
gone. The karma of those thoughts applied to the old person; it cannot stick to
the new. Then the past carries no guilt
and no regrets. You have learned what
was to be learned. Recollecting past
errors is like picking up a book about someone else, reading a page or two, and
then putting it back on the shelf.
You may wait and wait on this threshold, consumed in a
patient impatience, doing everything possible during the day to allow you to
break through in your next meditation.
This can go on for days, months, even years; it is not really in your
hands. But then, suddenly, the mind
process stops and stays stopped. You
slip through and the waters of the collective unconscious close over your head.
Beyond this, words are useless. Time stops with the mind, and many
physiological processes are almost suspended.
But there is an intense, unbroken flood of joy to which even the body
and nervous system respond.
This experience cannot last. Like a diver, you have to come up for
air. But unity has left an indelible
imprint. Never again will you believe
yourself a separate creature, a finite physical entity that was born to
die. You know firsthand that you are
inseparable from the whole of creation, and you are charged by the power of
this experience to serve all life.
The Fourth Dhyana
Even this is not journey’s end. Like a traveler returning from another
country, you remember clearly what you have seen in Bodhi; yet during the day,
the everyday world closes in around you again.
Such is the power of the mind
that the mundane soon seems real, and unity something far away. In the third dhyana the conditioned instincts
of the mind are stilled but not destroyed.
They remain like seeds, ready to sprout when you return to surface
awareness. The experience of unity has
to be repeated over and over until those seeds are burned out, so that they can
never sprout again.
We know what power a compulsive desire can have at the
surface of the mind. In these depths,
that power is magnified a thousand times.
You feel as if you are standing on the floor of an ocean where no light
has ever reached, buffeted by currents you cannot understand. Then you know
that the mind is a field of forces.
But that does not tell you how to deal with these
forces. In the unconscious, the will
does not operate. Yet to make progress
you have to learn to make it operate, so that you can harness the power of the
unconscious in everyday life. That is
the challenge of crossing the third dhyana, compared with which sky-diving and
whitewater boating are armchair exploits.
Your goal is to reach such a depth that even in dreams the
awareness of unity remains unbroken.
Then every corner of the mind is flooded with light. The partitions fall; consciousness is unified
from surface to seabed. You are awake
on the very floor of the unconscious, and life is a seamless whole.
This is nirvana. The
seeds of a separate personality have been burned out; they will not germinate
again. When you return to the surface
of consciousness, you will pick up the appearance of personality and slip it on
again. But it is the personality of a
new man, a new woman, purified of separateness and reborn in the love of all
life.
Those who achieve this exalted state, the Buddha says
simply, have done what has to be done.
They have fulfilled the purpose of life.
They may be born again, if they choose, in order to help others to
attain the goal. But this is their
choice, not a matter of compulsion.
Therefore, the Buddha says, this body is their last. Samsara, the ceaseless round of birth
and death, has no beginning, but it has an end: nirvana. Nirvana has a beginning, but once attained it
has no end.
As a word, nirvana
is negative. It means “to blow out”, as
one would extinguish a fire, and the Buddha often describes it as putting out,
cooling, or quenching the fires of self-will and selfish passion. But the force of the word is entirely
positive. Like the English flawless, it expresses perfection as the
absence of any fault. Perfection, the
Buddha implies, is our real nature. All
we have to do is to remove the veil of self-centeredness that covers it.
Someone once asked the Buddha skeptically, “What have you
gained through meditation?”
The Buddha replied, “Nothing at all”.
“Then, Blessed One, what good is it?”
“Let me tell you what
I lost through meditation: sickness, anger, depression, insecurity, the burden
of old age, the fear of death. That is
the good of meditation, which leads to nirvana.”
What draws one back from this sublime state? The separate personality is lost, yet we
cannot say nothing remains. There is a
kind of shadow which the Buddha wears, clothing him in humanity, yet it is so
thin that the radiance of infinity transfigures him. Siddhartha dissolved in the fourth dhyana,
and one called the Buddha returned from it; that is all we can say.
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