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Mindfulness of Breathing (72) Independence, Freedom, Ending

So over these more than 70 talks and guided meditations, we've gone through a particular discourse of the Buddha called the discourse on mindfulness of breathing, mindfulness of breathing in and breathing out^[1]. The heart of it is these very simple—almost like cliff notes maybe—instructions on mindfulness of breathing.

The text goes on, and there's more teaching the Buddha gives that builds on these 16 steps of mindfulness of breathing that also represent the development, the growth, and the onward-leading nature of this practice. As we do this practice, something gets born inside, something begins to unfold or express itself. A variety of things arise, and some of those things are called the Seven Factors of Awakening^[2].

The way it's presented in the text, it isn't so much that we practice the Seven Factors of Awakening, as it is we recognize them. In other places, the Buddha is quite explicit that for some of these factors of awakening, the very recognition of them is the nourishment, the food that allows them to keep growing. So there is an organic growth that happens as we start to learn how to give ourselves over and trust this process of being aware of our breathing, being aware, being present, not caught up in our thoughts, distractions, and preoccupations, and learning to be with ourselves in a caring way.

And so these Seven Factors of Awakening develop. They're called factors of awakening for two reasons. One reason is that they lay down the foundation, or lay down the conditions, upon which awakening can happen. The word Buddha means "the one who is awake"; it comes from the word "awake." Buddhism, in a sense, could be translated into English as "awake-ism." It's the "ism" that has to do with liberation, with freedom of mind and heart, in such a way that something wakes up—some kind of awareness.

When a person has a first taste, a first glimmer of what this awakening is, what this liberation is, it's so profound that it gets their attention. It's like, "Oh, this is central. This is really what this practice is about," or, "I want to make this the center of my life. Nothing else is as important." Even the tremendously valuable love and compassion I have for others, nothing compares to freedom. A freedom that allows the love and compassion to be clean and supportive for everyone, including oneself.

When we have that first taste, it's described sometimes in English as entering the stream^[3]. Literally, the language in the Pali is entering the current of a river. If you can stay in the current, it'll carry you all the way to liberation. And so learning to recognize that current, learning to stay in it and to be carried by it, then becomes part of the practice after the first glimmer.

The discourse on the Seven Factors of Awakening ends with a little section that has a lot of ellipsis, so it's not always really spelled out all the way. It's very short, and I think it's really easy for people reading the text to just skip over it and not see it. But it picks up first talking about the Seven Factors of Awakening and how they arise out of the practice of mindfulness. And then it goes on to talk about how those Seven Factors of Awakening come into play, how they develop, keep growing, and support us after awakening.

And that is, now they are based on something. I'm going to give you my adaptation of the Pali words because if they're translated literally into English, I think they don't mean as much for an English-speaking audience. But the fullness of these words is closer to what they would be in English in the best senses of the terms. Now they're based on a sense of independence. Someone who's entered the stream, entered the current, is said to be independent in the dharma^[4]. Now they know what the dharma is for themselves. They know, and they don't need more books or more teachers or anything; they just know. They know what the practice is about, so there's an independence.

It's also based on freedom, a sense of real freedom that we're no longer in bondage or entangled in things. And there's a sense that all the suffering, all the attachment, clinging, and the conceits we have—there's a stopping, there's a phenomenal ending that's happened. It's always here.

These three qualities—independence, freedom, and the ending of things—are usually translated in English as seclusion, dispassion (or the fading away of clinging), and cessation. Those last two—the fading away or dispassion, and cessation—that's in the Anapanasati Sutta^[5], steps 14 and 15.

Now these qualities are available to a person. They've experienced a degree of independence, a degree of freedom, a degree of stopping or cessation that is memorable, and now it's ever-present in some kind of way. It's not that they're always aware of it, but it's just right there, sitting on your shoulder or close by. Just like in the guided meditation, I talked about silence, stillness, and spaciousness kind of always being here in some fashion. Once we have a really clear and powerful experience of those, maybe there's always some sense that these are ever-present as well.

When love is associated with this, then some people say that yes, love is always present. Or when all these together give a sense of real peace, peace is always present.

And so with awakening, some quality of that awakening remains available or is recognizable, and then it becomes a basis for doing the practice further. Now we know what the practice is about, and now the idea is we want to practice in harmony with that. We want to practice in that spirit, or with those attitudes.

If part of it is this independence or seclusion, we want to do it in a way that when we practice, the awareness itself has a feeling of being independent from what it knows, independent of what we're aware of. We're not entangled or caught in it.

We want to recognize how to be free, where the freedom is in awareness. There's no freedom in clinging, wanting more, and expecting. There's no freedom in reacting—saying, "This is terrible, I'm a bad meditator," or "This shouldn't be here, this is embarrassing." Of course, there are all these ways we're still not totally free. All kinds of things arise and bubble up, the mind gets busy and distracted, and difficult states of mind might arise. But it's possible that at some point, in spite of those, we don't get tricked by them, we don't get pulled into them. We stay independent of them, and we stay free of them, so we're not caught and entangled. They still arise, but because we're independent and free of them, there's a disinclination to identify with them, to say, "This is who I am."

And then there's this last quality of something having ceased, something having stopped. One of the things that has stopped is the preoccupation, beliefs, and attachments to ideas of self—ideas that tend to bring conceit and self-concern. The stopping of self-preoccupation, self-concern, being self-conscious—not totally, but to have some flavor, a taste of that, and letting that be part of the mindfulness as well. Where the mindfulness is not entangled or caught up in being self-conscious or self-critical. There's a clear sense that awareness itself is free of this self-concern, or self-preoccupation, or self-identity kind of things that we're doing.

Mindfulness then becomes a very different quality. It becomes more an expression of the dharma moving through us than it is something that we identify as the doer or the agent of. To the degree to which we're an agent, we're more the enabler of it; we get out of the way of it, we allow awareness to be there.

We notice, in this field of freedom and independence and where something has stopped, there's space for everything. That's why I like to think that liberation in Buddhism is we give liberation to everything else. Everything becomes liberated from our entanglement and concern, rather than "I am liberated." It doesn't really make sense anymore to say "I am liberated, I'm free."

Over and over again, we've seen in the suttas^[6] in the teachings of the Buddha that the ultimate goal is described in terms of a kind of negation. Liberation is a kind of negation of being entangled, being in bondage—we're free now. Seclusion or independence is a kind of liberation from being dependent in an unhealthy way, perhaps, or being claustrophobic in the middle of all kinds of concerns. Cessation, or the ending of something, is an ending of suffering, of clinging.

There's a strong tendency for the Buddha to repeatedly give the ultimate goal of what practice is really taking us to by defining it as an absence, not as the presence of something. If he talks about the presence of something, the most he seems to do is to talk about it in terms of peace.

What's beautiful about this is that even the experience of liberation—that palpable feeling of freedom and independence and the absence of suffering—when we're free, there's no inclination to make it into something, to make it something we hold on to, to say that it is the presence of something. Because even asserting the presence of something is a way of a little bit grasping and clinging. This uncompromising attitude of just trust, letting go, being free, the mind not clinging to anything—in doing that, there's this beautiful way in which there's maybe a nourishing stillness, silence, and spaciousness.

Maybe that's interpenetrated with love, compassion, care, and wisdom. It's not being frozen, it's not being disconnected, but it's not exactly the same as being connected either. It's being free.

So the practice of Anapanasati ends this way. It ends with this reference point of practicing based on the qualities of awakening itself. And that, in some ways, is available for everyone well before they become liberated. In fact, that's often what dharma teachers are trying to do—to say, "Practice with non-reactive awareness," "Practice non-judgmental awareness," "Practice open awareness." What they're doing is really trying to get these qualities of awakening that are already there, and so we grow into it, and it grows and develops and comes to fulfillment.

Finally, don't worry so much about this path of practice. The only thing to be concerned about and happy about is exactly where you are in your practice. That's the place where practice in the dharma unfolds. Be content and happy, and discover awareness of where you're at, not where you think you should be.

So thank you, and we'll have one more talk tomorrow on this topic. And maybe for this next day, you can look around and see if you've been overlooking things like silence, stillness, spaciousness, or independence, freedom, cessation, endings. See if you can be nourished by that and supported by it. Thank you.