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Be, See, Free, We (1 of 10) Doors of Liberation

So, for this week, we'll do seven days of this 7:00 a.m. morning sitting, going through Saturday and Sunday as well. Because this weekend, starting Thursday evening, I'm teaching a retreat, I will just fold this 7:00 a.m. sitting into the retreat, and the retreat into this sitting. There is a multi-faceted theme for this week.

I'll introduce it this way: the core of the meditation practice that we do is called insight meditation. That's a translation of vipassana^[1]. Vipassana means to see clearly or to see with emphasis. In the ancient texts, vipassana is not a meditation practice, but rather a result of meditation practice in the form of insight. As we develop and cultivate meditation, at some point there is a revelation that happens. I use the word "revelation" because we don't have the sense that we're probing or doing the analysis; we're just seeing what's there and allowing what's there to show itself in a deep way.

There are three insights: a deep insight into impermanence or inconstancy, a deep insight into suffering, and a deep insight into not-self. That is one piece of a larger process of practice. The idea is to get there, to have these deep insights. To get to those insights, meditation practice is about cultivating and developing ourselves in such a way that we can have those insights. We don't "do" the insights. The insights just happen as we become stable, focused, and clear.

How do we cultivate ourselves? Well, maybe a little bit paradoxically, we cultivate the opposite of the three characteristics. We cultivate stability and stillness so that we can see impermanence, change, and inconstancy really well. We cultivate happiness and well-being, as we talked about last week, so that we can have the capacity to truly have deep insight, a capacity to be able to look at suffering and be with suffering in a very deep way without it being a negative experience. And then we cultivate something that can be called, in English, self-confidence or self-efficacy. That strong sense of self-confidence allows us to see what is called not-self. So, that's what we cultivate.

Why do we cultivate these insights? We have the insights in order to bring the mind to a place where it has no fixations. It's not fixating on wanting something or resisting anything. It's not fixating on desires, aversions, delusions, ideas, and fears. Often the mind is fixated. It's focused or about something, and really is stuck there, or wants that, or is that, in ways that we don't really begin to see until we start calming and settling the mind deeper, and deeper, and deeper.

At some point, we'll notice that the mind keeps being preoccupied. There's a tension, a momentum, a holding pattern in the mind. Some of this is almost below the level of thinking—the very attachment or fixation to being alive, or being a self, or even things like being safe. There is a fixation on having opinions or holding on to stories. There's nothing necessarily wrong with those things, but there is no freedom with a fixated mind.

The purpose of these deep insights into inconstancy, suffering, and not-self is so the mind can release its fixations. Doing that very deeply brings the mind to something the Buddhist tradition calls the three doors of liberation. Those are the doors that lead to the mind letting go in a deep way, letting go of its deepest fixations—liberation, awakening. Those three doors are the door of the signless, the door of the wishless, and the door of emptiness. I'll explain this a little bit.

The signless is the door where we no longer fixate on any of the projections we have on the reality around us. This certainly includes the more abstract or complicated projections we have about people, bias, prejudice, and judgments we hold. But it also includes the simplest projections, even the projection on something like a door that it's a door, or a chair that it's a chair. Given a chair's function in our society, it's a completely appropriate and, to some degree, accurate idea that we apply to this piece of furniture that we call a chair. But if you brought that to people 50,000 years ago on this planet, they wouldn't know it was a chair. Maybe they would think it was a stepping stool to get up to the fruit in the tree; it wouldn't occur to them that it was a chair. But we see it that way. Even the simplest forms of attributing concepts to things can be a fixation. When the mind is no longer projecting anything, that's called the signless. When the mind gets to the point where it's relaxed, still, open, safe, and peaceful enough that it's not making any projections on anything at all, then something can release. There's something about seeing inconstancy and impermanence; we realize that the more we see things constantly changing, the more we see our concepts don't fit. The projections don't quite work. So, the projecting mind can finally release or relax.

The wishless is when we experience suffering, when we see the unsatisfactory nature—the degree of stress or tension that is somehow inherent in so many things, surprisingly even the smallest movements of the mind. To really see that, and to see it from a place of happiness, allows the ways in which we get fixated on the pursuit of happiness or fixated on our suffering to release. Then something very deep can let go.

Then, there is the door of emptiness—to really see something about how things are not-self, the not-self characteristic of phenomena. I'll talk more about that later. But it's fair to understand how much fixation human beings have on themselves, on self. By cultivating a lot of self-confidence, there is enough self-confidence that one can begin to let go of the fixation on self. When the mind stops that fixation, for some people that is the door they step through for a deeper liberation.

So that is liberation. There is what we cultivate, there is what we see, and there are the doors to freedom. That is followed by how we live in the world. Each of these three doors can open to a different benefit for living in a good, wonderful way in the world. But for now, I want to say that there are these four different steps in this larger process. That could be summarized in a little saying: First, you be. Then, you see. Next, you free. Finally, you are we.

First, you be. You become someone who is stable, has a sense of well-being, and confidence. First, you be.

Then, you see. You see the three insights of inconstancy, suffering, and not-self.

Then, you free. You step through the doors of liberation. The mind settles very deeply through the doors of the signless, the wishless, and emptiness.

And then, you're we. The solid barrier, the solid walls between self and other, dissolve. The concern, care, and love for the whole world becomes much more natural, an expression of the freedom that comes. How could there be freedom without that freedom opening us up to care about the world around us?

So that's an overarching overview of some of what will happen this week. Some of this will happen at the retreat, and I'll arrange to have those talks also posted together with the series so that those of you who want easy access to the whole thing can have it. Some of these retreat talks will not happen during the 7:00 a.m. sitting, so if you want the whole package, it will be easily accessible for you in other ways, and I'll talk more about that later.

I hope that this is nice for you. In these first days of this week, I will talk mostly about the three doors of liberation. In a sense, we're starting with the advanced teaching as the background, as the direction we're going in practice. Then, for the retreat, I'm going to talk about the cultivation of being—what we develop—and the insights.

Q&A

Someone is asking: signless or sightless? Signless. No signs. No projections of concepts or ideas is what the signless is.

I look forward to continuing this theme over the next days. Thank you.