Reflections on the Five Wisdoms Mandala as a Framework
for an Approach to Buddhist Self-Enquiry Practice Informed by
the Experience of Eugene Gendlin’s ‘Focusing’ Dyads

 

This is the third article in this series – you can read the previous article here and the first article here. While this is essentially an essay on the profound and comprehensive spiritual psychology that we find in the Tibetan Vajrayāna Buddhist tradition, my main purpose is to highlight the many areas of common ground with Gendlin’s Focusing model. It is my hope however, that this series of articles may serve to educate Focusing practitioners about Buddhism just as much as it educates Buddhists about Focusing. I am also wanting to acknowledge my debt to Focusing – a practice that has profoundly supported my practice of Mindfulness, and allowed me to approach aspects of Buddhist wisdom that I had previously found somewhat confusing or impenetrable.

In my twenties, and again in recent years, I have been studying and practicing Buddhism in the context of the Triratna Buddhist Community. I feel to emphasise however, that while I gratefully make use of particular practice models that have been proposed by Urgyen Sanghakshita and his students, I am not in this essay pretending to be any sort of authority in regard to these models. On the contrary, the analysis offered in this series, engages in a critical contemplation of that material, in order ‘make them my own’, and also in order to contribute to the ongoing work of refining those conceptualisations and making them more congruent and useful.

Approaching the contemplative process from this wish to contribute my own individual learning to the collective learning process of Triratna, and of the wider Buddhist community, I have been especially keen, in this article, to show how the brahmavihāras fit within the Tibetan ‘mandala wisdom’ – and to show how they relate to the Buddha’s foundational ’emptiness of the Five Skandhas’ teaching. This complex and difficult enquiry takes us, in my view, to the experiential heart of Buddhist meditative and contemplative practice. By drawing on the Tibetan psychology of the Five Wisdoms, and by going deeply into the archetypal psychology of Buddhism’s ‘Six Realms’, we have the opportunity to bring clarity to the skandhas-brahmavihāras relationship, and to both of these key practice frameworks within the Buddha’s teachings.

I have given this Tibetan model of mind a great deal of thought over nearly four decades, so I often speak with a corresponding degree of conviction about this material. It is especially important therefore, that I emphasise that ultimately, what I am offering here is just a personal point of view. My process to arrive at these perspectives has been one in which I have given much thought to the objective source material of our Buddhist texts (especially the Bardo Thodol and the Pali Canon), and the objective source material of other attempts to understand the nature of mind as it is described within other psychological traditions (including that of Eugene Gendlin). Instinctively following the principle that the Buddha (and Gendlin) emphasised in this regard, I have tested that objective material in the light of my own experience.

While the spiritual realisation Gautama Buddha and the great Tibetan Masters like Padmasambhava was essentially the same, there is a clearly discernible process of ongoing refinement within the long history of the Buddhist tradition. I shall be referring, once again to this evolution within Buddhism’s two inseparable domains of philosophy and practice in terms of Dharmachari Subhuti’s ‘Three Myths’ model. The work of creating a comprehensive three-fold framing of Buddhism, that is also cultural adapted to the modern Western cultural situation is ongoing, I regard it as integral to our engagement as Buddhist practitioners that we also participate in this work. This critical and creative engagement with the Buddhist tradition’s translations and conceptualisations, follows naturally and inevitably from our deep contemplative engagement with the historical material. I regard this work as urgent and necessary, and integral to the goal of creating a Western Buddhism that can meet, and challenge, and engage creatively, with the modern version of samsarā that is the Western cultural and geopolitical situation.

 

Part 3 – The ‘Emptiness’ of All Five Skandhas, and the Mandala Wisdom

 

Padmasambhava’s Hermetic Psychology

I regard the Bardo Thodol texts that are attributed to Padmasambhava, as a profound source of spiritual knowledge. I am often surprised to find that other Western Buddhists find them either rather inaccessible, or simply not very useful. This is perhaps not surprising however. The central text of the Bardo Thodol does appear to be a strange Tibetan Buddhist funeral rite – a text to be read over the dead body during the days after death, to provide reassurance and guidance to the spirit of the deceased. I find that particular text to have an extremely profound general relevance in at least two ways. Firstly it provides answers to the perennial human question of how best to ‘Be With’ the presence of a loved one after their body has died. While the cultural and spiritual context of the text may be foreign to us, it expresses a beautiful response to the event of a death, and a very helpful general approach to prayer and meditation on that occasion – one that we can all learn from.

Secondly, and perhaps even more importantly, that same central Bardo Thodol text – the one that describes visionary journey of the deceased person, and the spontaneous appearance of each of the figures of the ‘Mandala of Peaceful Deities’ (that came to be called the Dharmadhātu Mandala). By stating the skandhas, kleshas and Realms, Elements, and Wisdoms associated each of the ‘Buddha couples’ that are revealed in the intermediate state, or bardo, between lives, the text presents a powerful and sophisticated spiritual psychology, and is a treasury of Dharmic riches about the nature of mind. Each ‘day’ within the first five ‘days’ (not days in our mundane time, of course) of the bardo process, the spirit of the deceased person encounters one of the Jinas, the five great archetypal Buddhas of the sambhogakāya – Vairocana (white), Vajrasattva-Akshobya (white/dark-blue), Ratnasambhava (yellow), Amitabha (red), and Amoghasiddhi (dark-green). So on each of the ‘days’ of the intermediate state process, we encounter different dimensions of the fundamental dichotomy – the polarity of the reality of Enlightenment, on one side (the five Wisdoms and Buddha couples that embody them); and the tendencies of the egoic mind, on the other (the skandhas, kleshas, and Realms).

So, the Tibetan tradition tells us that, in the intermediate state, we are shown the way karma works, and get an opportunity to experientially recognise the momentum of the egoic mind, and to sense the particular energetic characteristics of each of the Realms of rebirth that have been our destiny in previous lives. At each stage, we are also presented with an opportunity to see ourselves very clearly indeed – to see that, even though the karmic momentum of each aspect of the egoic mind may be very strong, we are also innately drawn to the corresponding Wisdoms and Buddhas. We have an opportunity to recognise the habitual choices that we have been making – perhaps over innumerable lifetimes, or perhaps even more immediately in intermediate state. If, through our contemplation of these choices in our spiritual practice, we have sufficient clarity of intention and presence of mind, we may even gain liberation right there in the intermediate state – recognising the radiance of one of the archetypal Buddhas as the light of our own true nature.

For me, the question that some Western Buddhists often ask, as to whether the intermediate state process that is described in the Bardo Thodol is objectively true or not, is irrelevant and a distraction. The wisdom in these texts is abundant and obvious. They communicate profound and comprehensive information about the sambhogakāya level of mind and our relationship with it, and they do this powerfully through the symbolism of the archetypal Buddhas and archetypal Realms – while also setting out a comprehensive system of the Dharmic psychology. I shall, in the five sections below, be attempting to outline something of the meaning that is presented to us in the Bardo Thodol texts – something of the nature of these five dynamic relationships between the opposing reactive and creative potentials within the mind. These polarities play out in our minds every day throughout our lives. It is of great importance that we become deeply familiar with them.

 

 

In order to highlight these five fundamental choices, these five dichotomies, I am especially keen to establish an understanding of the correct correspondences between the skandhas and the brahmavihāras. Because the brahmavihāras are not mentioned in the Bardo Thodol, I, like many practitioners, have had to work these out for myself. To do this ‘working out’ of the brahmavihāras that correspond to the Wisdoms, we need to unpack as much of the Bardo Thodol symbolism as we can, and we need to get very clear on the nature of each of the skandhas – something that requires very deep reflection in itself. If we approach this in a multidimensional way (addressing all of the elements of the model simultaneously if we can) we find that this working out is easier – or at least is very much easier than if we take only the skandhas, or only the kleshas, or only the Realms as our starting point, as many often do.

In essence, our guiding question in regard to each quadrant of the mandala, is: Which brahmavihāra pair (i.e. ‘self-regarding’ and ‘other-regarding’ pair) best corresponds with the pair of qualities that a particular archetypal Buddha couple embodies – given their associated skandha-Wisdom-Element? Each of the elements in this complex system of Dharmic psychology, serves to bring additional dimensions of clarity to our understanding of these apparent polarities. By understanding these polarities deeply, we can go beyond seeing them as opposites. We instead start to see them as hermetically related – as lower and higher expressions of the same archetypal principle.

While I believe this hermetic, or archetypal approach to the integration of the brahmavihāras into the Bardo Thodol’s psychological system, is the traditional one – and certainly the most true to the Vajrayāna method and philosophy – it may not be familiar. Indeed, I have several dear friends, whose opinions differ. It is has been very unsettling for me to find that the contemplations of others has brought them to a different set of correspondences. I have been grateful for these discussions and differences of opinion however, because they have taken me back to the enquiry in a fresh way, and with a renewed commitment to objectivity. I have not however been able unlearn what I found to be deeply and consistently true in my contemplative experience over the years. I need to emphasise once again however, that what I am offering, even if it is offered with conviction, is a merely point of view – and it is offered with an invitation to the reader to engage in their own enquiry, their own contemplation of the traditional material.

The ‘internal’ and ‘external’ aspects of the brahmavihāras have been the foundation of my meditation practice for many years. I have found this deep engagement with the brahmavihāras to be powerfully transformative. Indeed I attribute the depth of transformation that I have experienced in recent years to brahmavihāras practice. When we practice the brahmavihāras in the spirit of the Other Power, and of ‘self-discovery’, we come to recognise the ‘always on’ availability of these dimensions of Positive Emotion. They are direct bodily-experienced reflections of the skandhas and Wisdoms, and they are experienced as objectively and collectively existing archetypal, or sambhogakāya, realities.

Briefly, the correspondences that work for me are the ones set out in the diagram above. If, when you read through the rationale for these associations that I have set out below, you find that they really do not work for you, please just continue to utilise your own preferred set of correspondences. Please also contact me and share your alternative perspective and alternative rationale. I would very much appreciate your detailed feedback, even if it is critical. Please be sure to read the previous article however. In the later half of the last article, which you can read here, I have discussed, in some detail, the various alternative sets of correspondences that I have come across – and have sought to distinguish the ‘self-discovery’ (Vajrayāna) approach to the correspondences, such as I have used below, from other approaches that are guided by other principles, or by the perspective of the ‘self-development’ (‘self-power’) approach.

The Rūpa Skandha and Equanimity (upekshā)

When we see through, and release our identification with the conceptualising, concretising, ‘form-creating’ rūpa skandha, the mental clarity, stability and peace of Equanimity arises. This is because the rūpa skandha is that function of mind by which we mentally define, reify and structure our experience, and frame it with defensive descriptions and narratives. It is not enough, in my view, to translate rūpa simply as ‘form’ as we often do. If Buddhism is to work as a system of moral philosophy and as a critique of our ethics of body, speech and mind – in the sphere of personal relationships, or in the political and geopolitical domains – we need clarity about the negative part played by this narrative-forming, self-justifying, rationalising function of the mind. We need to recognise its capacity to profoundly distort our individual world-view, to establish group-think, and to create erroneous collective narratives. The Buddhist tradition invites us to recognise the negative emotional colour (dvesha, or ‘hatred’) that the rūpa skandha gives to our world – to release our habitual judgements and mental reactivity, by allowing ourselves to rest back out of identification with the momentum of the egoic mind’s inaccurate descriptions, reifications and conceptualisations.

What I am describing here in regard to the rūpa skandha and the klesha category of dvesha (hatred), is the archetypal psychology of the Hell Realms of Buddhist tradition. I personally find the imagery of Buddhism’s ‘Six Realms’ to be a powerful source of wisdom when we are seeking to understand the corresponding skandhas and kleshas. The Hell Realms contain two classes of beings – firstly there are the demonic who judge and condemn and torture; and secondly there are the victims of that judgement, condemnation and torture. This dark and violent imagery is powerfully illuminating of the rūpa skandha and the klesha category of dvesha. We are all familiar with these archetypal dynamics, both internally, within our own minds; and externally within our global society, within our nations, and within our families and social groups.

While I shall be touching only very briefly on each of the Realms, I regard then as hugely important to our understanding of Buddhism. It is insufficiently appreciated that the construction of egoic identity is a collective, or archetypal process. Our failure to realise true individuality is a group process – we are immersed in the archetypal group dynamics described by the Realms, and these prevent our spiritual progress. Each Realm describes one of the ways in which the egoic mind keeps us enmeshed in a group identity and a group psychology. The collective manifestations in history, of the egoic mind, have often been so dark, violent and extreme, that we find ourselves speak of them, perhaps appropriately, in terms of ‘evil’. In general however, there is a resistance to seeing these collective processes as archetypal in the way that Buddhism does.

When we understand the Hell Realms, and understand how the rūpa skandha leads to rebirth in them, we have an opportunity to see how easily we allow the thinking of ‘the group’ – the thinking we have been educated into, and has created our social world – to shape our personal identity. To function as an individual, while also being immersed in, and connected with, our world, requires Mindfulness – and in particular it requires the mental and emotional non-reactivity that we call Equanimity, and the mental clarity and objectivity that the Buddhist tradition came to call the Mirror-Like Wisdom.

To dis-identify from the rūpa skandha, we need that aspect of Mindfulness that notices our thoughts, and recognises that as often as not they are not our own, and actually not true – that they are either just received opinions; or ‘external’ and ‘internal’ judgements; or rationalisations that we have ‘thought-up’ in an attempt to achieve cognitive congruence. We need an approach to Mindfulness that allows us to step out of our habitual immersion in the flow of thought and seeks an internal place of objectivity – a place from which it is possible to know what it objectively true. This is an aspect of Mindfulness that is strongly encouraged by Eugene Gendlin’s Focusing practice, which always endeavours to find that place of internal spaciousness and objectivity from which we can see the rūpa skandha ‘point of view’ that is describing self and world, and giving them ‘form’. The process of ‘seeing’ these mental patterns requires the relational approach to mind that is emphasised by Focusing. We need to dis-identify from the mind’s ‘points of view’ before we can release them.

Buddhism invites us to release our identification with the thinking mind’s constructions and projections, and speaks of this using the metaphor of the mirror – since a mirror is unaffected by the reflections that pass across it. Hence the ’empty’ rūpa skandha and the brahmavihāra of Equanimity (upekshā) are associated with the Mirror-Like Wisdom – and also with the dark blue eastern quadrant of the mandala, and with the figures of Vajrasattva-Akshobhya and Buddhalocanā who are embodiments of the Mirror-Like Wisdom. The dark blue figure of the imperturbable Akshobya Buddha, was in the course of Buddhist history increasingly often replaced by the pure white (primordially pure and also imperturbable) figure of Vajrasattva – hence the two figures share the same qualities, but personify the equanimous Mirror-Like Wisdom (and the ’emptiness’ of the rūpa skandha) in slightly different ways.

In his ’emptiness of the five skandhas’ teaching, the Buddha is challenging the literalism and materialism of our habitual assumption that the form of our world is as it appears, and the personalising and dualistic assumption that we are fundamentally separate from it. He is asserting the primacy of mind – of Consciousness and cognition and perception – and saying that the ‘form’ (rūpa), or our appearance, of self and world, is constructed, or ‘given form’ by the mind’s narratives and descriptions. Developing Mindfulness of thought and language – of the conceptual forms by which we describe self and world – is a key aspect of Buddhist practice. At the deepest level, our challenge to this mental aspect of egoic ignorance takes place through our study of the Buddhist wisdom teachings, which challenge us to adopt a radically different understanding of what it is to function as a creative and moral agent in our world.

Thankfully Buddhist philosophy now has many allies in this regard. Neuroscience affirms the same insight that mind is primary and that our apparently objective world is actually assembled (‘formed’) within the mind by mental processes – by personal and collective mental processes of which we are mostly completely unconscious. Quantum Science also offers a profound challenge to our scientific materialist assumptions – reminding us that what we take to be ‘form’, is ultimately actually just empty space – an unknowable and un-measurable Quantum reality that defies description. The parallels between Quantum Science and Buddhist wisdom are uncanny – and they provide a profound doorway into wisdom for the modern Western practitioner.

The academic fields of Psychology and Sociology provide further reinforcement of this unknowability of the self and world. In these domains of knowledge we need to be careful not to fall into nihilism. The insight that our belief in an objective perceived world, peopled by objectively perceived ‘others’, is in some sense an illusion, can be taken in the wrong way – embraced by some as the basis for a form of dark nihilistic metaphysics. We need to challenge mankind’s tendency to adopt these modern mechanistic and materialist assumptions, and the judgemental, even inhuman, psychology that arises from unconscious identification with the undifferentiated rūpa skandha. These modern narratives prevent us from entering the domain of Equanimity and the Mirror-Like Wisdom, and are at the core of all the challenges that the world is facing – war; empire; injustice; man-made climate catastrophe; mental illness; genocide; wealth inequality; and the failure of the institutions of liberal democracy and international law.

Whether we are looking at the biological mechanics of the sense organs and nervous system; or the construction of our beliefs through social and psychological processes; or the creation of our ‘Classical’ physical world through the ‘collapse’ of a Quantum waveform into an appearance called a particle, there is no objective form ‘out there’. All of the skandhas participate in the illusion of creating apparent ‘form’. Our processes of cognition and perception do not describe an objective reality. Rather they create a reality – an illusion that we do not have to reject entirely, but should view as provisional. While the provisional reality that is collectively created by the egoic mind ‘works’, it does not work very well – not very well at all in the view of the Buddhist tradition – since it is the domain of dukkha and of the cyclical wandering of samsara. Foremost among the reactive processes of cognition and perception is the rūpa skandha – the describing and conceptualising mind; and the erroneous mental convictions that hold the whole ‘form-creating’ skandha system together.

Gendlin’s Focusing practice shares this deep level of enquiry with the Buddhist wisdom tradition, but also skilfully addresses the psychological detail of how personality is constructed through a series of egoic adaptations and reifications – understandable defensive responses to life’s challenges, which solidify into egoic points of view that do not reflect reality. The wisdom of the Buddhist tradition is a resource that we can use to challenge the momentum of the conceptual assumptions that are the mental foundations of the egoic mind, and to challenge the way the egoic mind constructs (i.e. ‘forms’) our reality. Gendlin’s phenomenological and relational approach to mind clearly has the character of Buddhist wisdom in this respect. Very like the Buddhist tradition, it challenges us to go beyond our mental assumptions about the nature of mind – to look at our actual experience of mind, and to develop a more accurate language for describing it.

By dis-identifying from the conceptualising rūpa skandha function of mind, and from the form-creating mental contents that we call ‘thought’, ‘thinking’, labeling, naming and describing; and by aspiring to rest ‘as’ Consciousness (i.e. ‘as’ the ’empty’ vijñāna skandha), and as the Equanimity of the mind’s spacious, pure and Mirror-Like true nature, we endeavour to break the momentum of the kleshas of the dvesha (hatred) category, and to enter into a profound healing process – a process of purification which leads to increasing mental clarity, and to an increasing access to mental stillness and Being. The kleshas in the dvesha category include all manner of judgmental, attacking and aversive mental states, including condemnation and its justifications, and especially the mental impulse to punish – and the creation of judgemental rationalisations that deny the value and humanity of those who are to be punished. The klesha category that we call dvesha, encompasses the collective psychology of the archetypal Hell Realms of Buddhist tradition. Eugene Gendlin was expressing a deep alignment with the core values of the Buddhist tradition when he taught his students to dis-identify from the mind’s judgemental attacks, including our attacks on ourselves – to return to the clear space and to Presence, and to find a Mirror-Like objectivity and Equanimity in our relationship to the body-mind’s contents.

Because none of the five components of the skandhas model is really available to conventional rational understanding, Buddhists usually take the skandhas as an article of faith, rather than as an attempt to actually describe, or at least point to, the components of the mind’s functioning. This attitude has led to an ongoing confusion where it has become acceptable to teach the skandhas framework without really attempting to deeply engage with it as a model for Mindfulness and self-enquiry, or for understanding the Buddha’s anatman (‘no-self’) teaching. In effect, the tradition has generally put the ’empty’ skandhas teaching in the too-hard basket, hoping that its truth will eventually reveal itself – rather than engaging in the sort of contemplative, or ‘self-discovery’, practice that is necessary to make sense of the model. Because of this, it would seem that the five skandhas are generally either poorly understood, or understood in a way that is substantially incorrect. This deficit is particularly evident in regard to the rūpa skandha, and our lack of recognition of the reifying rūpa skandha serves to profoundly undermine our ability to understand the skandhas teaching as a whole.

Indeed, the skandhas are often presented as ‘things’, and in a way that entirely fails to acknowledge the core of the Buddha’s critique of the original vedic model. The understandable predicament that Buddhists find themselves in, is that some degree of real understanding of the skandhas is needed in order to begin to understand the skandhas. We are faced with the need to pull ourselves up by our boot-laces. To understand the skandhas as a mandala with the vijñāna skandha at its centre, is a great help in this regard – especially if we then also understand the other four skandhas as activities, or processes, or functions, of vijñāna. Another key to breaking through the double bind that prevents us from understanding the five skandhas system, is to start by gaining an understanding the particular activity or process, or function of the mind that we call the rūpa skandha.

The Mirror-Like Wisdom is a mode to thought that includes the capacity to think systemically and to see ‘process’ – it uses process language, and uses words with an awareness that they are only symbols – only symbols of symbols. The ‘internal’ and ‘external’ aspects of the rūpa skandha are described by the Buddha as ’empty’ precisely in order to alert us to the erroneous way in which rūpa concretises and reifies everything in our experience – literalising and reducing everything, including the Dharma itself, to ‘form’, and to a collection of separate ‘things’. So the Buddha was expressing what would later be called the Mirror-Like Wisdom in his description of the skandhas as ’empty’. The ’emptiness’ of rūpa is a traditional place to begin our self-enquiry, and is strongly emphasised in the Heart Sutra of Mahayāna Buddhist tradition. I shall be talking a little more about the Heart Sutra later in this article. It is essential that we understand that none of the skandhas are ‘things’.

So the rūpa skandha is that function of the egoic mind that takes the five ’empty’, intangible components of the Buddha’s extremely subtle and sophisticated model of mind and world, and reduces them to apparent ‘things’, or objects. Both the self and the world however, are ’empty’ – but are given form every moment, by the mind’s reifying description of them. The ‘form’ (rūpa) of our self is made to appear fixed, separate and ‘physical’ by our habitual description of it as such – when in reality that is not our true nature. To start to recognise how much we limit ourselves by giving ‘form’ (rūpa) to the self-illusion is a great freedom, but the rūpa function of the mind has a great energetic momentum – a karmic momentum that is hard to recognise and turn around. This is why we need penetrating self-enquiry practice (i.e. ‘self-discovery’) of the sort that we find in the Buddhist tradition and in the Focusing community that was initiated by Eugene Gendlin.

There is a common modern analysis of the skandhas model which incorrectly uses rūpa to denote the ‘body’ or the ‘physical world’ in a dualistic mind-and-body (or mind-and-world) system. In this understandable but erroneous analysis, rūpa is the ‘body’ (or the ‘objective’ and ‘physical’ component), and the other four skandhas are regarded as ‘subjective and mental’. While it is completely understandable for a Westerner to assume that this sort of presentation is accurate, at worst, this is a deeply unhelpful analysis, since if falls into exactly the sort of reification and concretisation that the Buddha was trying to free us from. It is essential that we see rūpa as the objectifying function of the mind, rather than as an ‘objective’ aspect of self and world. Rūpa is that primary ‘mental’ activity of the mind which turns the activities, or processes, or functions of the mind into ‘things’. To truly recognise the form-creating rūpa skandha is to recognise that most of us are captured by the bogus metaphysics of various forms of materialism.

When we start to make the rūpa skandha conscious, we release our identification with it; and as we release our identification with it, its functioning becomes more differentiated – it starts to be informed by the brahmavihāra of Equanimity and by the Mirror-Like Wisdom. One of effects of this is that the rest of the Buddha’s five skandhas model of mind becomes more understandable – there is a new critical engagement with what previous seemed impenetrable. This deeper engagement has an ‘internal’ and ‘external’ aspect – corresponding to the ‘internal’ and ‘external’ aspects of the rūpa skandha that we find described in the Pali Canon. The ‘external’ aspect involves a deeper engagement with objective sources of spiritual knowledge like the Pali Canon and Bardo Thodol. The ‘internal’ aspect involves a deeper engagement with ‘self-enquiry’ or ‘self-discovery’ – a contemplative engagement with the material, through which we make new connections, and allow ourselves to push beyond the boundaries of our previous interpretations. The Buddha, in various different ways, continuously invited his students to go beyond the ‘external’ thinking of merely memorising his teachings – to enter into an ‘internal’ thinking-style, a contemplative mode of thought through which we ‘make the teachings our own’ and glimpse the wisdom beyond the words.

This idea of seeking an integration of the ‘internal’ and ‘external’ aspects of each of the skandhas is a fundamental one, in my view. This example of going deeper into the Pali Canon texts, taking the Buddha’s reference to ‘internal’ and ‘external’, and then contemplating that idea deeply in regard to each of the skandhas, is a very good example of the power of this general principle of integration in the context of the rūpa skandha. This idea of the integration of ‘internal’ and ‘external’ is also fundamental to our understanding of the brahmavihāras, in my view, since each of the brahmavihāras has a ‘self-regarding’ and an ‘other-regarding’ aspect – aspects that must be first distinguished clearly, and then combined and integrated. This need to first separate and distinguish the inner and outer aspects of the brahmavihāras – to recognise the degree to which they are qualitatively different – is generally insufficiently acknowledged.

It has been acknowledged for example that while ‘self-regarding’ upekshā (Equanimity) is understandable as a state of peace, or of receptive connection with the primordial peace of the dharmic reality, the extraverted and relational ‘other-regarding’ upekshā is harder to grasp. To say that we feel Equanimity towards someone does not begin to express the sublime nature and profound importance of this aspect of Positive Emotion. Once again Eugene Gendlin can help us here. The two-word phrase that he uses for that aspect of Presence that Buddhists can recognise as the ‘other-regarding’ aspect of upekshā, is ‘Being With’. This capacity to Be With – to support a person by offering them our Mirror-Like non-judgemental Presence and the stillness and non-reactivity of our relational Being – is a surprisingly neglected virtue in Buddhist circles. Perhaps because we have not generally have an adequate well-established a name for it, we can find ourselves failing to realise how fundamental it is to our experience of spiritual friendship. My intention here, is only to introduce these themes, and to highlight how Focusing can provide illumination. I hope I can provide some sense of these important ‘internal’ and ‘external’ dimensions below, in regard to each of the skandhas and their corresponding brahmavihāras.

When we start to recognise rūpa as the descriptive, conceptualising and narrative processes that give self and world their apparently objective ‘form’, we begin to glimpse a very important dimension of what the Buddhist tradition means by ’emptiness’. The recognition of this aspect of the mind’s activity brings a flood of personal psychological insights. Perhaps more importantly however, it also throws us into a whole knew depth of social engagement with our world, because we recognise that our society and everything about our world at any particular time in history is being given ‘form’ (rūpa) by a vast collective description process that we are participating in – a description process in which most of the fundamental assumptions, and almost all of the foundational conceptualisations and narratives that our creating our reality, are actually untrue. It is not putting it too strongly, in my view, to say that the implication of this is that the normal state of the human mind is one of unconscious ideological possession.

This recognition brings compassion and ethical discernment. We see the people in our life in a whole knew way. We have a sense of how lost and confused humanity is – how lost in delusion we all are. Although the underlying characteristic is compassion, this insight into the ’emptiness’ of the rūpa skandha brings the more obvious characteristic of critical thinking – we find ourselves feeling called to push back against the flood of untruths, and to articulate a more accurate description of mind and world. We naturally find ourselves wanting to use language with a rigorous semantic accuracy, and feel motivated to cut through the delusional narratives that pervade our world. This inner call to describe mind and world in a way that takes us closer to the truth, is exemplified by all the great teachers of the Buddhist tradition – they all show this particular style of incisive and penetrating intelligence that arises from recognising the ’emptiness’ of the rūpa skandha. It is a quality of mind that Buddhists sometimes associate, not only with the mirror (as in Mirror-Like Wisdom), but with the vajra. Within the symbolism of the Buddhist tradition, the wielding of the vajra – the diamond thunderbolt of Indian legend – is symbolic of the impulse to patiently speak the truth in the face of lies and ignorance.

The Samjñā Skandha and Loving Kindness (mettā/maitri)

On the opposite, western side of the mandala from rūpa in the east, we have the evaluative and emotional samjñā skandha, by which we discern and make decisions via that subjective mode of discrimination that in English we call ‘feeling’. Unfortunately we use that same word ‘feeling’ in English, both for the act of subjective discernment and evaluative discrimination, and for the act of ‘sensing’, as in ‘attending to sensations’. The correct equivalent for the perceptual activity of sensing (or attending to the data of sensation) in the skandhas model, is vedanā, and we definitely shouldn’t be rendering vedanā as ‘feeling’. The double meaning of the word ‘feeling’ in the English language has caused enormous confusion among the globally influential English-speaking Buddhist scholars – a confusion that appears to have spread beyond the English-speaking world. This confusion is a huge obstacle to rational discourse on the Buddha’s skandhas model among English-speaking Buddhists – so I shall be talking further about this below when I address the vedanā skandha.

When we learn to both release our identification with the evaluative and discriminative mode of cognition that the Buddhist tradition calls samjñā, while also making it more conscious and causing it to become more differentiated (Gendlin’s Focusing teaches us to do both of these things), we can start to use feeling as a mode of evaluative discrimination in a whole new way. The transformation is extremely profound, because we discover within ourselves (beyond the egoic mind) a source of unconditional love (mettā/maitri, or Loving Kindness), and begin to glimpse what the Buddhist tradition means by the Discriminating Wisdom. By turning towards and familiarising ourselves with this source of contentment and benevolence, we begin to release kleshas in the category of rāga – our compulsive cravings, our greed, our avoidance of emotional pain, and our obsessive, addictive seeking after things that cause fleeting feelings of satisfaction but cannot truly nourish us or serve life.

The polarity of the Mirror-Like Wisdom and the Discriminating Wisdom, and the corresponding polarity of rūpa and samjñā, can helpfully be thought of as akin to the polarity of ‘reason’ and ’emotion’. Buddhist psychology engages with this polarity in a very subtle way, as does the psychology of Gendlin’s Focusing model. These two areas of cognitive function are in fact bound together in the mind – a fact borne out by the way the Buddhist tradition represents them as an East-West polarity in the mandala. Rūpa claims to be objective, but in reality is profoundly subjective, playing the role, as often as not, of rationalising our subjective evaluations (samjñā) – giving plausible mental ‘form’ to perceptions that are primarily shaped by our emotional reactions, and by the perspectives generated by our, always very individual and particular, life experience. In the egoic mind, the rūpa skandha, as I explained above, rather than being a source of objectivity, has an objectifying function – giving an appearance of objectivity to the mind’s subjective perceptions. So, samjñā, when we see it clearly, is recognised to be subjective, and for this reason is very often translated simply as ‘perception’. It is that subjective, emotional, evaluative function of mind that continuously colours our perceptions – in effect shaping our perception by unconsciously drawing on our memories.

So the samjñā skandha refers to cognitive processes that draw on emotional memory and therefore profoundly shape perception. The mind is inherently subjective and emotional because of the activity of the samjñā skandha. While in the West we often tend to think of the mind in terms of its predominantly mental reactivity, the early Buddhist tradition more often acknowledged the emotional reactivity of the mind to be predominant. Hence, one of the main words for mind in the Buddhist tradition is citta (pronounced ‘chitta’) – a word which carries connotations of feeling and emotion, such as we find in the English words ‘heart’ or even ‘soul’. We need to remember that the klesha category associated with the samjñā skandha is rāga – a word which is usually translated simply as ‘craving’, but which connotes strong emotion, and can even mean ‘passion’. A further reinforcement of our awareness of the way that the mind is viewed in early Buddhism as predominantly emotional, comes when we remember that the Foundation of Mindfulness that is associated with the samjñā skandha is citta.

The confusion regarding the meaning of the rūpa skandha that I have outlined above, has understandably led to confusion in regard to the samjñā skandha also. If rūpa is rendered literalistically and incorrectly as the objective ‘form’ of things, rather that as the mentally ‘objectifying’ and ‘form-creating’ function of the mind, then it seems logical for some Buddhist thinkers and translators to make up for the lack that this creates in the resulting skandhas model – the lack of a mental, or conceptualising, or describing function of mind – by making a further error, by rendering the samjñā skandha as ‘thought’. A common example of this that many will be familiar with, is in Phillip Kaplau’s wonderfully chantable and poetic translation of the Heart Sutra (from Chinese) – a translation that I love despite its errors.

Those that are familiar with Phillip Kaplau’s pared-down translation of the Heart Sutra will remember the dramatic description of Bodhisattva Āvālokiteshvāra’s recognition of “the emptiness of all five skandhas”:

Form is only emptiness,
Emptiness only form.
Feeling, Thought and Choice,
Consciousness itself,
Are the same as this.

While these lines have a very appealing poetic ‘flow’ and even a ‘ring of truth’, and they serve to evoke this mythic moment for us, they are technically inaccurate as a translation of the five skandhas – they are not intended to provide an accurate and comprehensive synopsis of the Buddha’s subtle ‘process description’ of reality. While it works – I might even say really works – as poetry, it is just not a great translation. Indeed it is not even intended to be a great translation, and probably cannot be improved. It seems likely, that even the greatest Buddhist poet writing in English, could not render the depth and complexity of the Buddha’s five skandhas teaching in a short stanza of poetry like this. ‘Form’ however, as I have explained above, is a confusing and inaccurate translation of the mental and ‘form-creating’ rūpa skandha function of mind; ‘feeling’ is not a good translation of the sensing and sensory vedanā skandha; ‘thought’ is a terrible translation of the emotional and subjectively evaluative samjñā skandha; and ‘choice’, while it has an appropriate simplicity and directness, cannot begin to express the Buddhist tradition’s subtle notion of the ’empty’ samskāras skandha – the intuitively recognised volitional energies of the mind.

Experienced meditators are very familiar with the way our cultivation of, and embodiment of mettā/maitri, changes our perceptions. Metta/maitri allows us to more accurately recognise our world and the people in it. It allows us to see people without the distortions caused by the emotional nature of conscious and unconscious memory. As our emotional patterning is made conscious and released, and we more and more fully embody Loving Kindness (mettā/maitri), we increasingly recognise people as beautiful. Similarly, the discipline of Focusing teaches us to experientially track and deeply explore the currents of feeling (samjñā) that are shaping our perception. By acknowledging the way our emotional history shapes the currents of feeling in our mind, and recognising both the complex sensory felt-experience (vedanā) of how we carry these evaluations in our body, and the volitional components (not-wanting and wanting), or samskaras, associated with them, we are able to cleanse ourselves of the emotional kleshas that are clouding our perception. As samjñā is seen through, and begins to evolve towards Loving Kindness and the Discriminating Wisdom, it become a mode of increasingly fine subjective judgement – a mode of cognition that is akin to what we can call aesthetic judgement.

The Buddhist tradition tells us that the kleshas of the ‘craving’ category (rāga) lead to rebirth in the Preta Realm, the Realm of the pitiful and insatiable Hungry Ghosts. Whereas the samjñā skandha, as it manifests in the egoic mind, is subjective and reactive, and often deeply conditioned and emotional in its subjective perceptions and cravings; the Discriminating Wisdom is unconditional. In essence, the Discrimination Wisdom is a mode of perception and judgement that is informed by unconditional love – the capacity to be warmly and unconditionally present, to give unconditional value to everything in our experience within, and every person that we encounter without. Its perception and its capacity for attention and for loving relationship is no longer subject to emotional memory, and therefore uncontaminated by craving and attachment. This is what the Buddhist tradition means by mettā/maitri, or Loving Kindness – personified in the mandala by Amitābha and Pandaravārsini. Eugene Gendlin has much to teach us about the transformative power of this unconditionally valuing and warmly relational attention toward everything arising in our experience – it was, I think we can say, the most foundational characteristic of the Mindfulness practice that he called Focusing.

The curious archetypal imagery of the pretas, of addictive beings who are drawn to externals in their world that have no value, while being alienated from their internal emotional connection to their own unconditional value, deserves more attention than I can give it here. I would like however, to acknowledge that the archetypal Preta Realm is telling us that our alienation from mettā/maitri is a collective process. We grow up in, and are immersed all our lives in, a world-view that tells us that our value and our well-being are dependent on externals – we are taught to ignore the nourishing and guiding power of the unconditional love that is perhaps the most fundamental feature of the dharmic reality.

Without that internal connection to mettā/maitri, it is difficult for us to grow toward true individuality, since we are left always looking for value outside of ourselves, through our relationships with ‘the group’ – looking to be ‘given value’ by significant others; or attempting to ‘gain value’ by associating with idealised others in our spiritual community; or changing ourselves in order to become more valuable and loveable in our own eyes, and in the view of others. Obviously, these are not entirely negative processes, but we need to bring a deep Mindfulness to them, such as may be cultivated, I believe, through the Focusing dyad practice – a practice that brings dis-identification from, therefore deep critical awareness of, our emotional inner world, and of our habitual styles of relating. In my experience, this evaluative, emotional and relational aspect of Mindfulness, needs to go hand in hand with the practice of mettā/maitri on the path of the Discriminating Wisdom.

Our embodiment of the Discriminating Wisdom requires the healing of the ‘internal’ and ‘external’ aspects of the emotional and subjective dimension of the mind that we call samjñā – an enormous and difficult task. Only by releasing the corresponding kleshas, can we achieve a clarity of perception. Without going into too much detail here, I would like to distinguish the ‘internal’ and ‘external’  aspect of samjñā from each other. The ‘internal’ aspect of the evaluative samjñā skandha is related to the inner, or ‘self-regarding’, aspect of mettā/maitri (Loving Kindness). Just as the ‘internal’ aspect of mettā/maitri involves a relationship of receptivity to the mahabrahmavihāra of mettā/maitri, so too does the ‘internal’ aspect of samjñā involve a receptive relationship with our accumulation of evaluative and emotional experience.

It is my conviction, and the Tibetan Buddhist tradition believes this too, that this accumulation of evaluative and emotional experience is not just an accumulation of memories within the nervous system, but is an energetic phenomena that science has yet to explain. The Tibetan tradition speaks of an Emotional Body – a layer within our somatic experience, in which an energetic residue, or energetic record, of our experiences are held, so that they continue to shape our perceptions. While Gendlin never speculated as to the origin, or storage location, of these traces of emotional memory, the experience of practicing Focusing certainly affirms the existence of a reservoir of these evaluative and emotional impressions such the Tibetan tradition describes.

Focusing, can be enormously valuable in a Buddhist context because it in some ways serves us better than solitary meditation practice as a way of relating, in a very affirmative way, to this difficult subjective domain of emotional memory. Focusing dyads can provide a structured practice by which we can be supported to free our perception of these mostly unconscious processes, especially if we have an accumulation of emotional deprivation and trauma that is making solitary meditation difficult. Ultimately, the healing of the ‘internal’ aspect of samjñā arises, in my view, from establishing ourselves in self-mettā. The depth of self-mettā that we ultimately need however, only comes when we enter into an Other Power, or receptive, or ‘self-surrender’ relationship, with the mahabrahmavihāra of mettā/maitri. The recognition that Loving Kindness is a given – an inherent reality in the depths of the mind – changes everything. Once we glimpse this primordial reality, and gain a confidence in it, we enter a new mental and emotional stability, and gain easy access to Presence – and enter a much more natural and easeful process of emotional healing.

The ‘external’ aspect of the evaluative samjñā skandha can be illuminated by comparing it with the ‘external’ aspect of mettā/maitri. A meditation practitioner who is resting ‘as’ the ‘other-regarding’ mettā/maitri, will experience a deep sense of valuing others, of valuing their wellbeing, and of wishing them happiness. In a similar way, the ‘external’ aspect of the evaluative samjñā skandha allows us to attune to the feeling life of others – to instinctively attend to their emotional states and attitudes. If we are habitually identified with the ‘external’ aspect of samjñā however, and therefore not using that function of mind in a conscious and balanced way, we will find it very difficult to access any degree of Presence in our meditation, or contentment in our lives, because we will be making our happiness dependent on external things, and on the wellbeing of those around us.

To transform the functioning of the evaluative samjñā skandha, we need to be much more deeply open to feeling and emotion than we are generally used to in the West, and we need to feel in a much more detailed and conscious way. Becoming Mindful of samjñā is paradoxical, because it involves both stepping back out of identification with some aspects of feeling (where that identification is preventing feeling processes from unfolding); while also welcoming currents of feeling that we have not previously been willing to experience fully (where, in effect, we have become dissociated from some aspect of our feeling life). The essence of the Mindfulness of samjñā (or Mindfulness of citta) practice, from a Focusing point of view, is that we seek to come into a relationship with the emotional and evaluative (samjñā) currents in the body-mind. By doing this we learn to also discern the way these are carried in the body as sensation (vedanā), and the way each current of feeling carries a volitional dimension or energetic direction (samskāras) – a fear or a desire, or an energy of not-wanting, or wanting. It is these energetic or volitional components of the mind that the Buddhist tradition calls the samskāras, which I shall be briefly outlining below after talking a little more about vedanā.

The Vedanā Skandha and Appreciative Joy (muditā)

The vedanā skandha is the sensory, or sensing, component of the body-mind – referring to both the function of sensing and the data of sensation. As well as its more obvious ‘external’, or extraverted, function of perceiving our physical world, vedanā has a profoundly important ‘internal’ dimension, by which we perceive the internal sensory space of the body – a profoundly important but neglected reality that was the focus of Gendlin’s work and which we can distinguish by referring to it as the domain of the somatic. Together, these two functions of mind – the ‘internal’ and ‘external’ aspects of vedanā – tend to very strongly affirm our sense of separate selfhood. This sense of separation is at the core of that negative pole of human experience that the Buddha called dukkha – the suffering, or inherent unsatisfactoriness, of the human condition. The Buddhist tradition tells us that our personalising identification with vedanā leads inevitably to a preoccupation with the personal body; with personal identity and social status; with personal achievement; with the accumulation of personal possessions and experiences; and with social difference and prestige – all of these being the characteristics of the archetypal Human Realm in Buddhism’s ‘Six Realms’ cosmology.

The tradition speaks of the way our personalising identification with the vedanā skandha causes an accumulation of kleshas in a category that is called māna, which we can translate as ‘pride’, or even ‘conceit’, but which needs to be understood in terms of our all-too-human sense of separation – the existential isolation that the egoic mind creates because of the separation that is inherent in our identification with our physical bodies. When we learn to rest as Consciousness, and to become more familiar with our true nature, the vedanā skandha manifests in a new way. It becomes informed by what the Buddhist tradition came to call the Equalising Wisdom, and by the brahmavihāra of Appreciative Joy (muditā). Rather than highlighting our separateness, and the differences between us, the Equalising Wisdom highlights our common humanity and our connectedness with all of life.

The archetypal Human Realm in this context, is often compared with the other Realms and characterised as a very fortuitous place of rebirth because it is a Realm in which there is a balance of positive and negative experience – a balance that provides ideal conditions for gaining Enlightenment. When we see the Human Realm as a domain where the sensing and sensory vedanā skandha is the dominant perceptual function, we recognise what Buddhist tradition is telling us about one of the most important ways in which we lose our individuality and become immersed in a group identity. Our identification with the vedanā skandha is always, at the same time, an identification with various human group identities – we cannot separate the social dimensions of the process by which our self-view is constructed. These group identities give expression the klesha category of māna, and to the various ways in which we are different and separate – the ways in which we are inferior or superior; accomplished or not accomplished; material wealthy or materially poor.

So our identification with the vedanā skandha brings the particular sort of social self-obsession that we find pictured in the Human Realm – a way of being that is very focused on the various ways that our narrow experience of the body and the physical world affects the way we construct our social identity. The state of true individuality that the Buddhist tradition came to call Enlightenment however, involves a recognition of, and a transcendence of, this aspect of our conditioning – and frames that process of transcendence in terms of the brahmavihāra of Appreciative Joy, and the Equalising Wisdom.

I hope to show in the paragraphs below, that these two (Appreciative Joy, and the Equalising Wisdom) form an important pair of closely-related principles that together allow us to expand our perspective beyond scientific materialism and beyond a utilitarian and physicalist world-view that is over-focused the physical body; the material world; and material accomplishments. Especially important is the ‘internal’ aspect of Appreciative Joy, which is a key doorway into the ‘internal’, or somatic aspect of vedanā, and to the experience of samādhi, or meditation. I hope also to show that Eugene Gendlin’s Focusing practice is a profound support for Buddhist meditators, because it gives such detailed attention to the internal sensory space of the body – the domain of the ‘internal’, or ‘somatic’ aspect of the vedanā skandha.

In my previous article, I gave time to acknowledging the close connection between the Equalising Wisdom and the notion of Buddha Nature (Tathāgatagarba), which has an important place in the ‘self-discovery’ perspective of Vajrayāna Buddhism. The point made by the tathāgatagarbha teaching, and also by the trikāya doctrine, is that our concrete and sensory world – the world of vedanā (and of the nirmānakāya level of the trikāya) – rests inseparably within the eternal dharmakāya. It is this universal and all-pervading presence of the dharmakāya that is Equalising. The Equalising Wisdom highlights the paradoxically close relationship between the absolute sameness of the eternal dharmakāya level of mind (whose presence we can speak of in terms of Buddha Nature) and the absolute uniqueness of the true individual. Paradoxically, it is by dis-identifying from the superficial way in which the vedanā skandha constructs our identity, that we find our true uniqueness.The Equalising Wisdom allows us to find a human expression that is truely unique, and that, because it is rooted in the dharmic reality, is also characterised by an instinctive sense of connection and solidarity with all of humanity – and perhaps even all of life.

Some Buddhists express the concern that too much emphasis on the Equalising Wisdom leads to a bogus egalitarianism – a sentiment which undermines the inherently and necessarily hierarchical nature of spiritual communities. We do indeed need to guard against reification in our thinking about the Equalising Wisdom, and the whole notion of spiritual development does indeed require us to accept that some people are more developed than others. There is however, an equally grave danger of reifying that idea into hierarchical and even elitist ways of thinking that paradoxically do not support development. This is too big an area of discussion to go deeply into here, but it can be argued that the Equalising Wisdom provides an necessary counterpoint within our overall Dharmic perspective, without which we easily fall into a rigidly hierarchical ordering of our Buddhist social world – ways of thinking that the Buddha always sort to challenge.

Through a process of dis-identification, the self-referencing tendency of the vedanā skandha has the potential to transform into the mutuality, solidarity, and humanitarianism of the Equalising Wisdom. It can become generously appreciative and empathetic, and appreciative in a completely non-acquisitive, non-attached way, sympathetically celebrating the achievements of others – indeed muditā is often translated as Sympathetic Joy. While Sympathetic Joy works to an extent, as a translation of the externally relational, or ‘other-regarding’, aspect of muditā, Appreciative Joy works better for the very important receptive, or ‘self-regarding’ aspect of muditā, which is foundational for meditation practice.

When I first learned about the brahmavihāras, I was taught to translate muditā as Sympathetic Joy, so I do not suggest this different translation lightly. For me however, the idea that there is an unconditioned inner joy – an inner Appreciative Joy that we can access regardless of external circumstances – is central to the Buddha’s message. The more relational, extraverted and externally appreciative aspect of mudita is, of course, hugely important, but the use of ‘Sympathetic Joy’ for both the ‘internal’ (‘self-regarding’) and ‘external’ (‘other-regarding’) aspects of muditā, has the potential to create confusion within this sublime teaching. Thankfully, I am not alone in thinking in this way – most Buddhists who practice all of the brahmavihāras regularly, come to the same position.

For brevity, I have been forced to skirt over some of the differences between the ‘internal’ and ‘external’ aspects of the rūpa and samjñā skandhas and their corresponding brahmavihāras, but in regard to vedanā, the distinction needs to be highlighted, since the difficult-to-define receptive and self-appreciative attention of ‘self-regarding’ muditā plays such an important role in our Mindfulness of the ‘internal’ aspect of vedanā, and is so very important to the deepening of our practice of samādhi. I also need to address the more generally important pattern of close connections that I have been highlighting between the ‘internal’ and ‘external’ aspects of rūpa, samjñā, vedanā, and samskaras, and the corresponding ‘self-regarding’ and ‘other-regarding’ aspects of upekshā (Equanimity), mettā/maitri (Loving Kindness), muditā (Appreciative Joy), and karunā (Compassion). When we recognise the connection between the four ‘internal’ skandhas and the corresponding ‘self-regarding’ brahmavihāras that unfold out of them, we are also called to recognise how very limited and limiting is the language of ‘self-regarding’ in this context. Clearly this way of talking represents a very crude conceptualisation, since the four ‘self-regarding’ brahmavihāras, once they are explored deeply are found to involve a receptivity, or Other Power orientation, towards the mahabrahmavihāras – the sources of the brahmavihāras on the dharmic level of mind.

As we move from a ‘self-development’ or ‘self-power’ mode of practice, to one that may be better characterised in terms of a ‘self-surrender’, or Other Power, perspective, we encounter this need to redefine our terms. Attending precisely to the words that we use to name these Dharmic principles is important. Indeed, our recognition of the semantic limitations of our words is an important aspect of our growing awareness of the reifying and limiting activity of the rūpa skandha. Once we go further still in our practice and incorporate a ‘self-discovery’ perspective, we are even more keenly aware of the limitations of language, and of the way in which the egoic mind rests on dualistic assumptions that are patterned into our thinking and our forms of speech.

While I have become keenly aware that this term ‘self-regarding’ is conceptually incorrect and ultimately extremely limiting, I have continued to use it much of the time – always in single inverted commas (i.e. ‘self-regarding’) – aware that this is the terminology used by most practitioners of the brahmavihāras. I do however, feel a strong need to challenge the use of the term ‘self-regarding’ in regard to the receptive, or Other Power experience of the brahmavihāras, and will sometimes simply use ‘internal’ instead, since this is the terminology used in the English translations of the Pali canon in connection to the corresponding skandhas and the Foundations of Mindfulness.

Carl Jung’s very precise and deeply explanatory term ‘introverted’ is another possible translation in all three of these contexts, but I have generally stayed with ‘internal’, since the meaning of the term ‘introverted’ is not well understood. My wish is that my readers will recognise that I am using the terms ‘self-regarding’ and ‘internal’ with an awareness of their limitations in this context. In connection with the ‘self-regarding’ brahmavihāras, the word ‘internal’ is clearly also inadequate, since it does not begin to express the profundity of the practitioner’s sense of revelation as they enter into an Other Power mode of practice – recognising, with a sense of wonder, that they are resting receptively ‘in’ and ‘as’ the benevolent and beneficial dharmic reality of the mahabrahmavihāras. It would seem that we are already beginning to reach the limits of language when we enter the transition into that Other Power phase of the path that we call ‘self-surrender’.

To understand all this better we need to understand that in meditation practice, the transcendental dharmic reality is felt to have the qualities of the mahabrahmavihāras – the ‘great’ brahmavihāras. Of these qualities, the easiest to recognise and name are the primordial stillness (upekshā); the primordial love (mettā/maitri); and the primordial compassion (karunā). More subtle and difficult to name is the fact that the dharmic reality is experienced as primordially generous, and as a primordial abundance that is always overflowing into more and more concrete and tangible levels of emanation – eventually finding expression in this concrete physical world of which we are part. The tradition tells us that the benevolent, beneficent and beneficial dharmic reality pervades the universe completely equally and evenly so that everyone is touched by the generosity of its blessing, so that every last human being receives the gift of Consciousness – and therefore also receives the great gift of Buddha Nature, the indwelling potential for Enlightenment. When, either in the experience of samādhi (meditation) or, in our wanderings through the wonderland that is planet Earth, we experience this sense of the universal blessing, and perhaps also a sense of the extraordinary particular blessing of having encountered the Dharma, we experience muditā – we experience the ‘internal’, receptive, or ‘self-regarding’ aspect of muditā, which is Appreciative Joy.

When the appreciation of muditā is extraverted and externally relational, and directed toward people in our lives, we can sometimes call it Sympathetic Joy, if we prefer that translation. Sympathetic Joy communicates a quality of self-lessness, non-attachment and non-envy in our appreciation of those who are blessed and who have achieved much in their lives. Our appreciative and celebratory response to them includes a sympathy – we are feeling with them in their achievement. It is usually helpful however, to recognise that the base note of the refined emotional response that the Buddhist tradition calls muditā, is Appreciative Joy – we ourselves feel blessed and grateful when we witness the wonderful qualities and accomplishments of others.

I have been emphasising the fact that the brahmavihāras, while they profoundly affect the quality of all the relationships in our personal lives, ultimately arise from the dharmic reality, and are therefore in a sense non-personal. In my experience, people go deeper in their practice if they allow themselves to think of the brahmavihāras as emanations, or reflections, or resonances, in our world of separation, of the higher, non-personal reality of the mahabrahmavihāras. If we turn towards the dharmic reality consistently in this Other Power way, the impact that the mahabrahmavihāras have on our personal lives can be vast.

One of the profound ways in which muditā finds expression in our personal lives is in our experience of, and practice of, Gratitude – an emotional response that is very close to Appreciative Joy, but more personal and specific. The recognition that Gratitude is a dimension of muditā, is important because it highlights the connection with the concrete, sensory and practical skandha of vedanā – the skandha of the physical, and of somatic embodiment. As a starting point, in distinguishing Appreciative Joy and Gratitude, we can say that Appreciative Joy is more general and impersonal, whereas Gratitude is more specific and personal. When we are grateful we are acknowledging the very particular benefit of something that we are receiving, or have received. While our needs are always universal and in some sense impersonal (shared with the rest of humanity), the specific way in which our needs are met brings a specific response of Gratitude – which can nevertheless be recognised as ultimately non-personal.

Another way in which we can distinguish these two interconnected aspects of muditā, is to say that Appreciative Joy is the foundation for Gratitude – that it flows into Gratitude and finds expression in Gratitude. We can sometimes be appreciative without expressing Gratitude, since Gratitude is in some sense a personality quality and language skill that needs conscious development. By learning to find words for our Gratitude and Appreciative Joy, we deepen our connection with both of them, and we deepen our connection with muditā. Indeed, expressing Appreciative Joy, whether generally, or as Gratitude in the context of a particular relationship, is a powerful creative act. It not only positively impacts the quality of our relationships; it transforms our energetic relationship with self and world – since it opens us energetically to the life-energy of our true needs and to a deeper awareness of what specifically meets those needs in our own life context.

Much more could be said about about Appreciative Joy and the powerful way in which it functions in concert with each of the other brahmavihāras. In a future essay, I would also very much like to write about the way each of the brahmavihāras needs to be recognised as finding expression in our lives through a process of emanation. Emanation is a translation of an ancient Greek word that is used frequently in the context of Platonic thought, and which I shall be outlining in more detail in my next article. Like the notion of hermetic relationship that I mentioned earlier, emanation is a word that allows us to think in an Other Power way – and about the way in which the same archetypal principle can manifest in ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ ways, and in progressively more concrete forms of embodiment. So muditā finds expression in our personal lives and personalities because it exists a priori as a dimension of the dharmic reality. The brahmavihāras exist as the mahabrahmavihāras prior to our experience of a resonance of them in our minds in the context of our meditation practice – but they then continue to emanate, finding expression more and more concretely in our personal psychological attitudes and our personal communication skills.

There is a whole body of study and practice that explores the details of this emanation process by which we manifest the brahmavihāras in the specifics of our day-to-day communication and the particular forms of our language. While the late Marshall Rosenberg would not have referred to the brahmavihāras as such, he was aware that, through his Nonviolent Communication (NVC) model, he was teaching people to unlearn their egoic conditioning and to return to their deeper instinctive humanity, compassion, and emotional intelligence. Marshall Rosenberg’s NVC is doubly relevant in this context because his work, not only comes out of the same Humanistic Psychology stable as Gendlin’s Focusing, but shares Gendlin’s conviction that the transformation of personality that Buddhism might call Positive Emotion, springs from a deep commitment to meditative self-enquiry – from the self-healing and self-connection process that Rosenberg called ‘self-empathy’, which is almost identical to Gendlin’s Focusing.

Clearly these ideas are deeply relevant and powerfully supportive of both Buddhist practice and Gendlin’s Focusing. I have referred to Marshall Rosenberg’s model frequently in my articles on this website, but would very much like to write more. Another related model that may be regarded as describing a process of turning towards a source of objectivity within, is Sociocracy – in that instance we seek to go beyond the egoic mind in order to achieve efficient and effective collaborative creativity and group decision-making. Wherever we apply it, the logic of the ‘self-discovery’ approach brings a depth to our various personal development practices, and the skills of objective reflection and evaluative discernment that we learn through Gendlin’s Focusing bring a subtlety, refinement and deep intelligence to every aspect of our relating and creative engagement with life.

It is important, in my view, to acknowledge that the four brahmavihāras – perhaps better thought of as the eight brahmavihāras – when we consider that each one has an ‘internal’, or ‘self-regarding’ aspect and an ‘external’ and ‘other-regarding’ aspect, together present a complete and comprehensive model of Positive Emotion. If we fail to recognise that Appreciation is inherent in muditā, we find ourselves needing to introduce it as a separate dimension of Positive Emotion. When we do this – treating Appreciation as if it were a fifth component of Positive Emotion in addition to the four brahmavihāras, this has the effect of breaking the beautiful mandala-symmetry and archetypal pattern of the ancient Indian model. I take the view, that we need to deeply explore the Dharmic model that the Buddhist tradition has blessed us with, before we start finding it wanting and modifying it.

In the sambhogakāya mandala, the ‘other-regarding’ and ‘self-regarding’ aspects of muditā, are found symbolised in the southern quadrant and personified by the figures of Ratnasambhava and Māmaki. The cultivation of the ‘internal’ and ‘external’ aspects of the Equalising Wisdom and the appreciative sensibility, are beautifully expressed in Eugene Gendlin’s practice of attending to the ‘felt-sense’. Gendlin used the term ‘felt-sense’ to describe the complexity and beauty of the bodily-felt experience and of the somatic imagery, that emerge when we attend to the actual phenomenological sensation of those felt-experiences that we often refer to, rather vaguely, as ‘feelings’. He emphasised that a felt sense is a holistic phenomenon. In Buddhist terms we can think of the felt-sense as holistic because, while we might initially discover it as a form of sensation (vedanā) in the field of the body, we find as we attend to it, that it has an image quality (James Hillman called it an ‘image-sense’), and that it has the other cognitive-perceptual skandha components woven into it – the evaluative dimension of samjñā; the volitional dimension of the samskāras; and the descriptive, or ‘point of view’ dimension that is rūpa.

The translation of the sensory or ‘sensing’ perceptual function of vedanā as ‘feeling’ is understandable, but is terribly problematic, in my view – as I have tried to explain above. It leads to a disastrous confusion within the whole skandhas model because the word ‘feeling’ is the English verb for the act of subjective evaluation, or non-logical discernment, and includes emotional responses in general. One of the reasons that the skandhas model has such great explanatory power as a cognitive-perceptual model, and as a framework for Mindfulness and self-enquiry, is precisely because it separates the perceptual act of sensing or sensation, from the cognitive act of evaluation. By translating vedanā as ‘feeling’ – a word that has both sensing and evaluative connotations in English usage – we fundamentally undermine one of the main intentions of the Buddha’s model.

In my view, ‘sensing’ is a much better word for the vedanā skandha. For clarity, we would do better without the evaluative connotation that is present in the word ‘feeling’. ‘Sensing’ works better precisely because it is a word (a verb) that connotes, the non-evaluative sensing process that takes place prior to the evaluative process that in English we call ‘feeling’ and that we call samjñā in Sanskrit. The word ‘feeling’ is doubly confusing as a translation of vedanā. When it is understood as a verb, it brings, as I have explained, the connotation of active evaluation, which is the domain of samjñā, when we really need a word that communicates the simple act of non-evaluative sensing.

When ‘feeling’ is used as our translation of vedanā however, people tend to also use it as if it were a noun. This is profoundly undermining to our understanding of the Buddha’s skandhas model, which is, after all, trying to challenge our tendency to reify our experience. The intention of the Buddha in his adoption and adaption of the ancient Indian skandhas model was to turn the nouns into verbs – to turn the fixed ‘things’ in the original model into the cognitive-perceptual processes that we find set out by the Buddha in the Pali canon. His intention was to subvert the original vedic model, presenting it with a new dynamic style of language – an action language, or process language, in which verbs replace the static, concretising language of nouns.

In English, we use the word ‘feeling’ for the extremely subtle act of subjective evaluative discrimination, while also using it to describe the more concrete act of sensing sensations via the external bodily senses, and more subtly via our sense of the vague ‘cloud of sensations’ in the internal space of the body. Making matters worse, we have the common use of ‘feeling’ as a noun that describes a collection of categories of ‘feelings’. Furthermore, this use of the noun ‘feeling’ as in ‘I have a feeling of anger’ leads us to the rather crude habit of labelling bodily-felt evaluative responses and placing them in conventionally understood categories. Hence an English-speaking person will say that they have a feeling of annoyance, or a feeling of love, or a feeling of appreciation, or a feeling of fear – all of these expressions being essentially evaluative, and very lacking in the sort of linguistic and phenomenological specificity that Gendlin’s urged us to find in our description of bodily-felt experience. From the phenomenological point of view of Gendlin, or of the Buddhist tradition, this form of language is not only phenomenologically inaccurate – it also tends to both conflate and reduce our processes of bodily-felt sensation and evaluative response to fixed ‘things’. In the context of Mindfulness practice and the intimacy of spiritual friendship, we also become aware that it constitutes a terrible reduction of our rich, unique and personal evaluative response processes, to always place them in the conventional ‘feeling’ categories that our language affords us – however much this may be necessary for brevity in ordinary communication.

Whenever we think of a feeling as a thing, and label ‘feelings’ with nouns, we are working against the intention of the Buddha’s ’empty’ skandhas model of mind. Gendlin showed us that, in reality, that ‘thing’ that we label as ‘a feeling’, and place in a conventional category, is always a unique and particular felt-sense process. Each so called ‘feeling’ is actually a felt-sense – a complex process of evaluative discrimination or discernment waiting to unfold its wisdom to the extent that we are willing to pay attention to it. A felt-sense is very much more than a sensation. Rather it is a complex wholistic body-sense in which all four of the cognitive-perceptual functions of Consciousness come together – an objectifying conceptualisation, or point of view (rūpa); an experience of bodily sensation (vedanā); an evaluative response charged by conscious or unconscious memory (samjñā); and one or more volitional energies (samskāras). These elements are all tangled together within the system of the egoic mind until we begin to tease out the strands through Mindfulness practice.

Each of the skandha components of mind function very differently in the context of Mindfulness – very differently when they are conscious and differentiated, than when we are unconsciously identified with them. There is great value in recognising that the Tibetan ‘mandala wisdom’ provides us with a hermetic structure by which we can see the archetypal correspondences between the dimensions of the egoic mind and the corresponding dimensions of our experience of the dharmic reality. Within the framework of the mandala, Mindfulness can unfold either as a cyclical sequence (the clockwise sequence of the four quadrants of the mandala), or as processes of reconciliation within the two pairs of opposites – the two axes of the mandala. The mandala shows multiple polarities which are similar in some way, and hermetically related. The principles that are represented at opposite ends of the mandala axes are polarities of a different sort – what we might call true opposites. The mandala wisdom offers an understanding of how this opposites relate to each other, and complement each other, and how they can ultimately be integrated and reconciled through meditative practice.

Buddhist wisdom invites us to distinguish the sensory (vedanā); evaluative (samjñā); volitional (samskaras); and describing-objectifying (rūpa) functions of mind, and the point of entry in this practice is generally to engage in meditative attention towards our internal felt experience of sensation (vedanā) in the field of the body. By attending to this ‘internal’ aspect of vedanā – and being willing to be phenomenologically accurate in our description of our actual sensations in the internal field of the body, we resist the temptation to merely label our mental and emotional experience with the common ‘feeling’ words (nouns) that are the conventional categories of evaluative reaction. This discipline can be difficult to establish, but when we do manage to distinguish vedanā (sensing, or sensation) and samjñā (evaluation) from each other, our experience of the mind becomes much more differentiated, and we become much more Mindful in these domains. Most significantly, these subtle perceptions and cognitions then become ‘un-fixed’ – they are revealed to be dynamic and ever-changing processes.

The term Focusing was a metaphor from photography – since the act of attention that Gendlin called Focusing is like bringing a fuzzy photographic image patiently into focus. For Gendlin, the act of sensing (vedanā) the complex texture of our internal experience is foundational – for him it was the humble and humbling doorway into the mystery of real emotional transformation and deep personality change. In the early Buddhist formulation of ‘conditioned co-production’ we find the same emphasis on sensation (vedanā) – as the doorway into the core practice of distinguishing the sensory, evaluative, and volitional components of felt-experience within the body-mind. So Gendlin was very like the Buddha in the way he took bodily-felt experience to be our point of entry into profound personality change and wisdom.

As Western Buddhists we need to keep reminding ourselves that the Buddha’s practice of samādhi (meditation) is a body-mind practice. As my regular readers will have noticed, I use the terms mind and body-mind interchangeably. All of our thoughts have felt-senses that go with them, and when we manage to empty the mind of thought, there are always subtle felt-senses that remain – the difficult-to-describe felt-senses that we call Equanimity and Being, and the other brahmavihāras. The Buddha, ascending easily as he did, through the four foundational states of Integration that he called the four rūpa dhyānas, used to share felt-sense images with his students, to describe what he was experiencing in as phenomenologically accurate a way as he could.

I shall be describing the Buddha’s felt-sense images of the four rūpa dhyānas in detail in Part 5 of this mini series. I believe they provide a wonderful example of how vedanā unfolds as we engage deeply with it. Through meditation practice vedanā becomes, in the terms of Sangharakshita’s ‘System of Practice’, our point of entry into the experience of Integration, Positive Emotion, Spiritual Death and Spiritual Rebirth. In the Buddha’s rūpa dhyāna images we clearly see him describing what Eugene Gendlin would call a series of felt-senses. Since a felt-sense is not a ‘thing’ but a process, it is probably more accurate to describe the Buddha’s rūpa dhyāna images as stages in the felt-sense process of one who has learned to move through that integration process with ease.

While the Buddha’s rūpa dhyanā images appear to be universal, so that modern practitioners can recognise the Buddhas’s felt-senses in their own process, most of the felt-senses that we encounter when we learn Focusing are somewhat different, since they are unique and infinitely various. Logically, it would seem that the Buddha’s rūpa dhyāna images need to be thought of as images of our encounter with, and integration of, dimensions of the dharmic reality. While we can also experience these felt-senses if we choose to cultivate a relationship with the dharmic reality, most of our felt-senses are those of parts of the egoic mind – each one a manifestation of a process within the body-mind that is moving towards Integration and Positive Emotion; moving towards healing. What is perhaps most striking and useful about the Buddha’s four felt-sense images that have come down to us in the Pali canon, is the fact that we can use them as guidance in our own integration process.

The Samskāras Skandha and Compassion (karunā)

Opposite the vedanā skandha in the yellow southern quadrant of the mandala, we have the samskāras skandha in the green northern quadrant, where it describes the intuitive function of mind by which we recognise volitional dynamics (motivations, needs, purposes and energetic principles and processes) while also perceiving the volitional energies themselves – the volitional energies that give the egoic mind its momentum. Within the frame of reference of the five skandha self-illusion, these life energies are identified with, and experienced as a personal will.

Perhaps understandably, many Buddhists imagine that spiritual practice is about developing this personal will – regarding the cultivation of that personal will as providing us with our only means of moral agency. If we find ourselves thinking in these terms, we need to refine our conceptualisations however, because the Buddhist tradition tells us that identification with the samskāras skandha causes us to accumulate kleshas in a category that it calls irsha – envy. This category includes fear itself, and all of the various types of avaricious and envious desires that human beings are prone to – when they have lost their compassionate connection to the real human needs of self and other, and have lost their sense of deeper purpose, or meaning in life.

There is the potential, if we make this connection between the samskaras skandha and envy – if we see the extent to which egoic desire is almost always delusional – to see that it is not actually directed towards real needs and real satisfaction, but rather is the result of envious, or mimetic, social psychological impulses, that are very primitive, unconscious and misdirected. Mimetic means imitative, and I am using the term here as it was used by the great French literary critic, anthropologist, psychologist and philosopher, René Girard (1923 – 2015), aspects of whose psychological, sociological and anthropological thought are profoundly helpful as amplifications of the archetypal psychology that is personified in the Asura Realm of Buddhism’s ‘Six Realms’. I find that Girard, originally a literary critic specialising in French literature, provides a powerful elaboration and explanation of the Buddhist understanding of the way desire leads to personal and collective dysfunction and suffering.

The word mimesis essentially means ‘imitation’, but René Girard uses the word mimesis to name a much bigger idea – a universal dimension of psychological reactivity that goes to the heart of the human condition. For Girard, mimesis is the process by which envious, or mimetic, desire leads to violence. He presents a view that is essentially identical to that of Buddhism. He proposes that human desire is fundamentally imitative and essentially envious – that we desire things not because of their inherent value, but because others also desire them. This false, or mimetic desire, is a sort of collective insanity that has always seized human societies. In the light of Girard’s theory of mimesis, the only healing of this madness is through deep spiritual practice of the sort that we find in Buddhism and in Eugene Gendlin’s Focusing. We need, in a sense, to reorient ourselves toward ‘real’ desire, or real needs – and to an intuitive mode of perception that is guided by real Compassion (karunā).

So once again, in the archetypal imagery of the Asura Realm, the Buddhist tradition is showing us that individual and social psychology cannot be separated – that our tendency to surrender, consciously or unconsciously to group processes driven by imitation, is profoundly undermining to our individuality, and cuts us off from more authentic and life-serving sources of motivation. Individuality requires us to surrender inwardly to the beneficial life energies of the universal human needs that are inherent in the dharmic reality. Surrendering ‘outwardly’, allowing our lives to be guided by the motivations (samskāras) of those in our social world, may appear to animate us, for a while. The samskaras are the component volitional energies that give us a sense of personal will, so allowing ourselves to be animated by the envious asura energies of the samskaras may even leave us feeling strongly motivated and dynamic. We may feel ‘heroic’ and competent, and we may tell ourselves that we are ‘getting things done’ even when we have profoundly lost our way, and lost our Compassion.

One of the disturbing features of human groups that have become unconsciously immersed in asura psychology, is the identification of scapegoats – suitable victims onto which the dark Shadow of the group can be projected, and towards whom the inherent violence of the group can be directed. This sort of social psychology was, of course, very visible in the rise of fascism in the 1930s, but it would be a mistake to imagine that it is a historical anomaly that modern liberal democracies have left behind. In reality, asura psychology has always been with us, and always will be – it is an inescapable part of the egoic mind. Religious communities, including Buddhist communities, are certainly not immune to the envious dynamics of the klesha category of irshya – indeed they can be remarkably prone to them. It is not uncommon, both in history and in the present day, to see churches and religious orders that have become ultra-hierarchical power structures where the Shadow is either projected down through the hierarchy, or onto the out-group of non-believers.

The psychology of the samskāras skandha does not necessarily manifest in brutal interpersonal power games – the asura archetype may play out within us as internal conflict. There is conflict wherever there is fear – and there is fear everywhere, especially in those who claim not to be afraid, or are desperately trying not to be afraid. Where there is fear, there is a drive for control and all manner of conscious and unconscious manipulations and conflicts will follow. Fear is an area where Gendlin’s Focusing can be particularly helpful. As meditators, practicing alone or in a group, we can find it difficult to confront our fears and ‘Be With’ them and integrate them – we tend to disown them, unconsciously exiling them from awareness and developing compensatory strategies. The empathetic holding space provided by a Focusing ‘Companion’ may create just the conditions we need to address such stuck psychological processes. The Focusing model also has the great power of being able to support us to address two or more ‘psychological parts’ that are locked in unconscious conflict.

Religion and spirituality, in Girard’s view, has always existed as a response to, or challenge to, the culture of mimesis – as an attempt to manage the violence that inevitably springs from the psychological dynamics of envious desire. It names the way we use intuition and empathy unconsciously in order to achieve the comfort of group membership – always instinctively protecting the solidarity of the in-group by polarising against external others, or the chosen ‘scapegoat’. Girard unflinchingly addresses the way violence is pervasive but disowned, while also highlighting the way populations have always been manipulated by the ‘enemy images’ presented to them by their leaders. The propensity of even sophisticated, well-educated, liberal-democratic societies to fall into collective Shadow projections is insufficiently recognised. The scapegoating of other nations and groups, is evidence of the enormous psychosocial power of the dynamic that is outlined both in Buddhism and the Girardian view.

So, mimetic desire not only leads to conflict and rivalry, as individuals are seized by the impulse to compare and compete. Even more fundamentally, it drives conformity – and it profoundly undermines individuality. Girard warned us that the personal freedom that is held to be of such high value in the modern West, may paradoxically, be leading not to the real mental and emotional autonomy and rationality that we call individuality, and to an active, well-educated citizenry within a vibrant democracy, but to populations dulled by the obsessive accumulation process that we call consumerism, and who are in a state of ignorant and compulsive surrender of their individuality to group norms – and to the manipulations of the powerful. The fundamental dynamics remain those that the Buddha saw in ancient India. Like Girard, the Buddha’s view was that only a depth of spiritual vision can save us from this malaise. He told us that only samādhi – a radical mental and emotional transformation through meditative alignment with the dharmic reality – can lift us out of this violent social and psychological dysfunction. Focusing, in my view, is one of those meditative disciplines that offers the promise of this sort of psychological rebirth and social renewal.

Modern liberalism, while it appears to represent an advance on the ethical sensibility of previous, more conservative and religious generations, is subject to the same memetic social processes. The liberal mindset of the European Enlightenment arose historically as a form of reaction against the terrible moral failure of the previous era, with its oppressive religious authorities; absolute monarchies; social inequality; and intellectual stagnation. Lacking a sense of how true ethics and true individuality are rooted in a beneficial transcendental reality, liberalism can however fall into the same patterns of Shadow projection, intolerance and violence, and can be seen to be showing a desperate lack of depth and wisdom. In the light of the asura psychology that we find in the Buddhist ‘mandala wisdom’, or in Rene Girard’s analysis, we can see the same lack of psychological reflection on a societal level; the same willingness to engage in war; the same drive to find scapegoats and make them suffer. Clearly this is a challenging idea, and a dark one, but it describes the modern world very well, and it certainly fits very well with the social psychology that we find in Buddhism’s archetypal cosmology of the ‘Six Realms’.

It is easy to fall into the idea that a Sangha – a Buddhist spiritual community – is automatically immune from these egoic dynamics and from the corresponding dynamics of ‘the group’. Some teachers will even say that competition between members of a spiritual community is good and should be encouraged. While deep practice of the brahmavihāras by a critical mass of the members of a particular Sangha will indeed change the culture so that it better reflects the Sangha ideal, the dysfunctional mimetic psychodynamics of ‘the group’ should be regarded as inherent – as an ever-present social reflection of the un-Enlightened mind. While the ideal of Sangha is a collaboration of true individuals in the service of the Enlightenment of all beings, it is important to acknowledge that, in reality, Buddhist communities of practice are always mimetic – that, perhaps necessarily, they are cultures characterised by imitation and mimetic rivalry, and by that same unconscious intuitive attention to what is motivating other Sangha members, that is characteristic of non-spiritual groups.

Clearly, we cannot condemn all mimetic behaviour within communities of practice. We just need to be giving an ever higher expression to that impulse. This is the purpose of the ‘hermetic’ psychology of the Vajrayāna – it shows us the brahmavihāras and Wisdoms that correspond to the egoic or group tendencies that we are caught up in. Because the power-dynamics of the samskāras skandha and irshya (envy) are so dark – and because the psychology of the Asura Realm is woven so deeply into our world – it is of great importance that we recognise the signs of this sort of Shadow behaviour, when they appear in our spiritual communities. The pressure to conform – or rather a culture of willing conformity – while it may appear as an aspiration towards communal solidarity and intellectual cohesion, is a clear danger sign.

An even clearer warning sign, is shadow-projection onto particular external groups. It is very easy for our Dharmic enthusiasm and drive for clarity to become framed as a sort of cultural battle – a cultural battle in which various groups are condemned in a belligerent style that is unbecoming for Buddhists, and remarkably lacking in Compassion. This is why the brahmavihāra of karunā (Compassion) is the healing principle for this dimension of mind. Compassion is the application of an intuitive style of psychological intelligence that empathises and recognises the real needs that are at play. It does not condemn, and it does not fight, and it does not turn people into scapegoats and adversaries. The dynamic compassionate intelligence of the Buddhist tradition empathetically recognises the psychology that is at play, and then responds with a non-adversarial intervention. This is the All-Accomplishing Wisdom.

A non-adversarial intervention is one that avoids fighting with people, while also avoiding the tendency to invite people to engage in a fight with themselves. A Western Buddhism that is framed as a spiritual heroism (the ‘self-development’, or ‘self-transcendence’ perspective) so easily becomes an invitation to fight with ourselves. The dynamism and vitality of the Buddhist tradition is not an expression merely of the heroic however – rather, it is a compassionate responsiveness that arises from the deep, intuitive, psychological intelligence that we call Empathy. This is the All-Accomplishing Wisdom. When we enter into the three-fold ‘self-discovery’ perspective, we truly enter into the intuitive compassionate intelligence of the bodhisattva – and recognise the innumerable subtle ways in which the bodhicitta is at work in this world.

To recognise the bodhisattva archetype, is to learn what it is not – to learn to distinguish it from its various Shadow reflections in Western culture. We need to avoid regressing to the pagan level. We are not aspiring to become the merciless mythic heroes of the pagan world, the founders of the imperialistic, slave-owning states that were the origins of Western civilisation. We need also to avoid the belligerent posture of compassion that is the crusading spirit of Christianity – which slaughtered millions and destroyed civilisations under the banner of Jesus Christ. We need to avoid the Nietzschean spirit, that would live heroically in a world without a benevolent transcendental – an idea that the Nazis tested to destruction. We need to avoid the grand narratives of modernism and its delusional faith in ‘science’ and ‘progress’. And we need to avoid the hubris and cultural imperialism of our post-modern Western liberalism, that loots the world and wreaks havoc in the name of free markets, while posturing about freedom and democracy.

The other skandhas and kleshas also play a part in the unconscious group dynamics of the provisional Sangha – especially the Hell Realm psychology of the narrative-creating rūpa skandha and its corresponding klesha category of dvesha (judgement, condemnation, hatred, etc.), that I have briefly outlined above – but the Asura Realm dynamics of the samskāras skandha and the klesha category of irshya (envy, jealousy, competition, fear and control) are just as important, and more easily overlooked. The egoic mind being what it is, we want what others want, and the personal will always functions within a social context. We think we are finding our own motivation by attending intuitively to the motivations of others – whether those motivations be base or refined. In reality we are often merely copying the motivations of others – imitating those whose attributes we admire or envy. Buddhism challenges us bring Mindfulness to these habits of mind – so that we are not just expressing a more spiritually refined form of irshya (envy), but finding authentic motivation and true individuality.

There is a view, held by many in leadership roles in Buddhist communities, that a Sangha primarily serves as a cultural venue in which we imitate and emulate those who are more spiritually developed. Paradoxically this perspective, which may be called a ‘self-power’, or ‘self-development’ perspective, advocates an approach in which we develop ‘self-power’ by harnessing this mimetic group-membership instinct and our impulse to intuitively attune to, and copy what is motivating others, so that we are animated, inspired, and motivated, by our energetic emersion in the Sangha group. This perspective, which may be called the ‘self-development’ approach, may serve us in the early stages of our engagement, but beyond a certain point in our process it can no longer serve us. Ultimately, the Buddhist path requires that we transcend the egoic mind’s mimetic mode of functioning – by allowing non-egoic, or dharmic motivations to take over our lives.

What I am calling dharmic motivations here, turns out to be essentially identical to what I spoke of as ‘real needs’ above. Curiously, ‘real needs’ are ultimately not personal but universal – the samskāras are ’empty’ of self-nature. The distinction that I am trying to make here is an extremely subtle one, but it takes us to the illusive and paradoxical heart of Buddhist wisdom. There are echoes of this wisdom everywhere. It was particularly evident and well-articulated in Neoplatonism. William Blake provides another important example. In his great poem The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, he wrestled with this idea that the true desire that leads to true satisfaction is not the problem. The problem is false desire – envious, or memetic, desire. Mimetic desire is that envious desire does not express the deeper needs of our universal humanity. It is a group desire that takes us away from our individuality and ethical sensitivity.

It is the Tibetan Buddhist view, that the Buddha translated his ’emptiness of the five skandhas‘ teaching into a teaching on the areas of Mindfulness practice. He spoke of the Four Foundations of Mindfulness, each (like the skandhas) having an ‘internal’ and an ‘external’ dimension – so there are eight areas of Mindfulness practice in all. The areas of attention that Focusing practice demands, and trains us into, appear to exactly correspond to these areas that the Buddha describes in his Four Foundations of Mindfulness teaching. The areas of Mindfulness that correspond to the samskāras skandha are the ‘internal’ and ‘external’ aspects of Mindfulness of dharmas. The term dharmas, as it is used here, is difficult to translate, and has been a source of controversy. When we set the Four Foundations of Mindfulness teaching within the mandala framework of Padmasabhava’s elegant and comprehensive spiritual psychology however, the meaning of dharmas, in this instance, becomes very clear. Mindfulness of dharmas – the fourth and most refined of the series of practices – is attention to the archetypal reality and inherent energy of the dharmic principles.

While it is generally acknowledge that Mindfulness of dharmas refers to our engagement with the most subtle and intangible dimension of mind, their is often a failure to recognise this domain of Mindfulness as the realm of those contents of mind and world of that are perceived through a recognition of patterns, dynamics, processes and archetypal principles. While the Buddha was urging his students to disengage from the prevailing social world of mimetic desire within ancient Indian society, he was also inviting then to engage with a framework of archetypal Dharmic principles that they could rely upon as a map on the journey to Enlightenment. The dharmas are the points in the spiritual landscape, by which we can find our bearings. By becoming orientated by these Dharmic landmarks, we find authentic motivation – we contact those energies which will lead to our real and ultimate fulfilment.

I would suggest however that there is a natural progression through the ‘internal’ and ‘external’ aspects of the Four Foundations of Mindfulness – kāya (body); vedanā (sensation); citta (heart-mind); and finally dharmas – where Mindfulness of dharmas represents our intuitive awareness that the mind is given form by archetypal structures and processes. Most importantly, as we deepen our Mindfulness in this domain of awareness, we recognise the impact on our energy, or our volitional functioning, of that dharmic dimension of mind that is beyond the egoic. For me it is this awareness of the dharmic, or transcendental dimension of mind, that is the key feature of Mindfulness of dharmas.

We only have to look at the equivalent domain within Western philosophy, within Neoplatonic thought, to recognise how important this intuitive mode of awareness is to our practice of ethics, meditation and wisdom. For Socrates, Plato and the Neoplatonists, the task of the spiritual life is to become orientated by the pure forms of goodness and virtue that exist beyond this world, in a good, indivisible, and perfect realm of which this world is only an imperfect reflection. There is a similar idea in Marshall Rosenberg’s Nonviolent Communication (NVC) model, where we are invited to recognise that our virtues, compassionate motivations and authentic desires are always a reflection of what he called ‘universal human needs’ – life-serving energies that appear as personal ‘needs’ when we are identified with them, but are actually impersonal energetic principles which animate our lives and move us towards fulfilment.

Viewed through the lens of this broader perspective – a perspective which includes the great philosophers of the Western tradition and one of the great psychotherapeutic innovators of Humanistic Psychology – we can see Mindfulness of dharmas more clearly. To find the spirit of Compassion that is the dharmic reflection of the volitional samskāras skandha and the dark, envious psychology of the Asura Realm, we need to become attuned to the animating volitional energies that Marshall Rosenberg called the life energy of the universal human needs, since it is by our Mindful awareness without identification of the volitional dimension of mind that we recognise the dharmic motivations that are at work in us. Our practice of Mindfulness of dharmas, must include, it would seem, a form of compassionate ‘needs-awareness’ of the sort that Rosenberg advocated.

In my experience this transition to a non-personal view of volition, and therefore to a non-heroic view of personal practice and Sangha culture, is not easy, and may even be resisted by those of our spiritual companions who prefer the more hierarchical and heroic form of collegiality that characterises the ‘self-development’ approach – and who refuse to see the extent to which this approach tends to lead to conformity; to a subtle restraint of individuality and independent thinking; and to a diffusion of responsibility that profoundly undermines individual ethical discernment. The transition that we need to undergo comes in two profound stages – firstly a receptive opening to the dharmic reality as Other Power; and secondly a resolution of the dichotomy of ‘self-power’ and Other Power, in the ‘self-discovery’ perspective that we find expressed in Tibetan Vajrayāna.

We need to get serious about confronting the Shadow aspect of the prevailing ‘self-development’ approach within Buddhism (the phenomena that Dharmachari Subhuti referred to as the ‘back’ of this perspective), because the social cohesion of the Sangha is unfortunately often achieved by polarising against the world outside the Sangha. At worst, we have a Shadow projection onto the world, and an ungrounded spiritual quietism – a withdrawal from our world, rather than a compassionate engagement with it, and a solidarity with it. I believe Gendlin’s Focusing practice can serve us in our transition out of the limitations of the default ‘self-development’ view. It teaches us to open beyond a narrow, singular, and personalising view of the egoic will, and to entertain the possibility that even Consciousness is not personal.

Even more profoundly, Focusing teaches us to recognise the roots of violence in ourselves. It trains us to notice the way that, in the egoic mind, volitional processes (samskāras) always arise as polarities – polarities that we are called to bring into reconciliation, resolution and harmony in the Focusing process. While all the polarities within the mind, and especially the basic polarities that give the mind its archetypal mandala structure, are unconscious; we will always tend to identify with one pole of each polarity and against the other. An awareness of this tendency of the mind to polarise into conscious and unconscious opposites, naturally arises through the practice of Mindfulness of dharmas, and of the corresponding samskāras skandha. By teaching us to recognise and reconcile polarities, this mode of awareness brings us to that state of flow and compassionate effectiveness that Buddhist tradition calls the All-Accomplishing Wisdom.

From the egoic mind’s personalising and polarising perspective, the only resolution to the samskāra polarities appears to be through some form of violence – through some form of domination, control, or destruction of the opposite polarity. Clearly this way of thinking can lead to extremely dysfunctional social dynamics – even in a Sangha. When violence is unconstrained by an ethic of non-violence that is rooted in a bodily-felt experience of the dharmic reality of karunā (Empathy and Compassion) there is fear; and where there is fear there is mimetic conformity and a crushing of creativity and individuality. While we might expect that a Sangha that is embracing mimesis as a path, will be a powerhouse of spiritual idealism – a dynamic behaviourally-focused spiritual group where everyone is always comparing themselves with each other, idealising those in authority, and aspiring to develop the behavioural characteristics, understandings, motivations and values of those that are above them in the spiritual hierarchy.

This sort of culture can certainly generate a lot of motivation for a while, as everyone is spurred on, so that the group makes rapid progress together. The logic is that the individual spiritual will, and the individual practitioner’s adherence to the spiritual ideal, is heightened by the intuitively-felt sense of group membership and solidarity. In reality what occurs can be very different. While this sort of culture may indeed generate a lot of heroic energy and egoic drama, there is no guarantee that each person in the group will be gaining self-awareness and achieving Integration and Positive Emotion. Indeed, we are likely to see subtle forms of psychological dis-integration and subtle forms of violence towards self and other – forms of trauma that are repressed, but come to consciousness later. A culture of mimesis always undermines individuality. A ‘positive group’ is still a group.

So Buddhism depicts the collective psychology of the samskāras skandha and the klesha category of irshya (envy) in the mythological imagery of the Asura Realm – the realm of the violent, acquisitive and manipulative archetypal war gods of ancient India. Clearly, the volitional energies (the samskāras) are integral to spiritual transformation, but to free these life energies from the matrix of the egoic mind, and make them available to us spiritually, we need first to gather them by coming into relationship with them, rather than merely identifying with some of them while repressing others into the unconscious. This involves acknowledging: firstly, that the samskaras are multiple; and secondly that they are not personal but universal – that they are ’empty’ of self-nature. Indeed, one of the best ways to release our habitual personalisation of the samskāras is to see them as the universal human needs – as universal life-energies and universal human motivations. The non-personal nature of these energies, is only fully revealed however, when we renounce the egoic habit of personalising everything, and start to live for the greater good of the whole, and with a radical openness to what the dharmic reality – the benign and beneficial transcendental dimension – wants to bring into our life.

The Tibetan Vajrayāna tradition speaks of the spiritual psychology of the bodhisattva‘s engagement with the intuitive-volitional samskāras skandha, and of the skilful application of the will in Buddhist practice, in terms of the All-Accomplishing Wisdom, and the corresponding brahmavihāra of Compassion (karunā). The All-Accomplishing Wisdom is personified by the green Buddhas Amoghasiddhi and Samāya Tārā (Green Tara). These figures are of enormous importance in Buddhist tradition, since they function together to embody not just the active volitional impulse that we call Compassion, but also the willingness to intuitively sense the real needs, fears, and sufferings of self and other. This conscious willingness to open to the needs, fears and sufferings of self and world is called Empathy in the English language – a very important word, and a foundational principle for all who would claim to be seeking Enlightenment or living an ethical life.

Empathy is an essential and inseparable dimension of karunā (Compassion), but is a principle that can easily be overlooked in Buddhist practice because it appears to lack an exact equivalent in the ancient Indian languages of Pali and Sanskrit. I would argue that, in fact, it does not lack an equivalent – that karunā ‘is’ its equivalent. Karunā needs to be regarded as having the dual connotation of Compassion and Empathy. I might go further and say that, in regard to the duality of Compassion and Empathy that the word karunā points to, Empathy should probably be regarded as the more important and the more fundamental of the two, since the activity of Compassion springs from the emotional and imaginative response that we call Empathy. The failure of some Buddhist communities to give value to Empathy highlights our tendency to fall into semantic rigidities through poor translation and narrow textual interpretation – something that I talked about in relation to the descriptive, ‘form-creating’ rūpa skandha, which is the skandha that uses words and conceptualisations to create our apparently objective, but often delusional, sense of the reality of self and world.

This recognition that karunā involves both an external behavioural response that we can call Compassion, and an internal emotional openness and imaginative identification with the other that we can call Empathy, is essential. If either one of these two components is not present then what we have is not karunā. Because Compassion is associated with volition, some Buddhists are tempted to think of Compassion exclusively in terms of action, in such a way that the ‘internal’, or intuitional, or Empathy aspects are neglected or devalued. At worst, Buddhists may adopt a position which sees Empathy as an obstacle – and as bringing an unnecessary psychological sophistication and complexity into their approach to embodying the bodhisattva principle. The symbolism of Amoghasiddhi and Tara however, is of a perfect integration of inner and outer aspects of Compassion – and the message of the All-Accomplishing Wisdom is that the mind is multi-dimensional and multi-faceted, and that the energetic complexity of the mind’s polarities and paradoxes is something that we must be willing to investigate if we are to become truly compassionate.

In the modern world there is much that masquerades as Compassion that is just virtue signalling and moral posturing – mimetic versions of Compassion that are not grounded in real Empathy. By setting out to cultivate Empathy, as we do by learning Eugene Gendlin’s Focusing, or Marshall Rosenberg’s Nonviolent Communication (NVC) we gain an awareness and a vigilance regarding such bogus narratives. Real empathy allows us to gain a recognition of how even Compassion can be mimetic and a mere cultural performance. We may find ourselves seeing, increasingly clearly, the stark inconsistencies and incongruities in the so-called ‘humanitarian interventions’ of the Western powers – who spin narratives of ‘freedom and democracy’ to justify their violent and destructive regime change operations and their collective punishment of states that they have found to be non-compliant with their agenda of hegemonic domination.

What I have touched on here is one of the most disturbing and dangerous features of the modern world – the way in which the social and psychological mechanisms of mimesis, such as we see depicted in the imagery of the Asura Realm, appear to prevent our government, media and academic institutions from being able to prevent entirely unnecessary wars. Because all social groups and institutions are subject to mimetic group dynamics – not just the general population – these institutions are also subject to manipulation by those who understand how mimetic group dynamics work. The worst organisations of all in this regard, are of course the military-industrial ones like NATO, where the livelihood of everyone involved is dependent on the maintenance of a scapegoat, or enemy-image narrative, that will provide justification for war, and for the maintenance of the massive flows of money that sustain the organisation.

Some Buddhists will be taken aback by my switch from an individual moral enquiry to a social and geopolitical one, but it is precisely this dual individual-social perspective that the Buddha was inviting us into. By saying in his anatman doctrine, that there is no individual psychology, just an expression of archetypal structural patterns (skandhas) and collective processes, he was saying that the social and political world is shaped by the same archetypal principles. The clarity of this observation appears to have been somewhat lost during early Buddhism, Padmasambhava in his remarkable hermetic, or archetypal, psychology, appears to have recovered this wisdom and highlighted it. What we are being offered in the archetypal psychology of the Asura Realm is a penetrating sociological analysis of the fundamental processes that lead human beings to violence and war. This Buddhist perspective is highly relevant to the study of Politics, Sociology, History, and Anthropology, but simply absent from the academic discourse – primarily because it is such a neglected perspective within Buddhist scholarship itself. Hence the importance I give to this sociological, or social psychological perspective. It would be a moral failure on my part to fail to try to establish this understanding of the profound relevance of the archetypal psychology of the asura in my reader’s mind.

NATO has been the most relentlessly expansionist military alliance on the planet for the last 30 years – expanding to the borders of the Russian Federation (while openly expressing the wish to break-up the Russian Federation and loot its resources) despite commitments made at the end of the Cold War not to do this; and despite repeated warning that this was presenting an existential threat to Russia. This dangerous and irrational belligerence is an example of asura culture – ‘scapegoating’; Shadow projection, manipulation, and violence borne of envy. No less dysfunctional than NATO itself, are our government bureaucracies and parliaments – and the media organisations that are supposed to hold those governments to account. All are subject to the group dynamics of mimesis; all appear to prevent the truth from being spoken; all serve to constrain the emergence of true individuality; and all serve to distract us from real human needs.

Eugene Gendlin’s Focusing is potentially the practice par excellence, for overcoming a lack of attention to the value of Empathy in Buddhist communities of practice. In the dyad practice through which we learn Focusing, two spiritual friends sit together, and enter into a Self-Empathy / Empathy based relationship. One, the ‘Focuser’, is ‘self-empathetic’ – turning their Mindful attention inwardly and self-empathetically towards their bodily-felt experience and inner world. The other, the ‘Companion’, is empathetic – holding a dual attention in which they are both monitoring their own state of Presence, while primarily turning their attention outwardly towards the Focuser’s process. The Companion undertakes to be with their friend, to find a quality of supportive Presence that, in Buddhist terms, may be characterised by the brahmavihāras, but especially by karunā, or Compassion – and ultimately also by the All-Accomplishing Wisdom and the other Wisdoms.

Once again, there is a clear correspondence between Buddhist wisdom and Gendlin’s psychological method. A foundational element of his approach was to teach his Focusing students to attune to the ‘life energy’, or purpose, or ‘life-forward direction’ in their meditative process – to learn the skill of intuitively following the direction of our healing, our freedom, and our aliveness, in order to find the resolution of psychological conflict, rather than simply following the egoic mind’s memetic desire and need for control. This, perhaps more Western, way of addressing the real nature of the will – framing volition impersonally, as the energetic flow of necessity and Compassion in the processes of life – is extremely profound. This deeper understanding of the samskāras skandha, that we find embodied in the practice of Focusing, is extremely appropriate for Buddhists who are practicing in a Western context and wanting to avoid the internal conflict that is often generated by Eastern Buddhist cultural notions of self-conquest, self-overcoming, and self-sacrifice, or of celibacy and monasticism.

The fact that the volitional samskaras are multiple, gives us an important clue as to the nature of this skandha, and the dysfunctional way in which it functions within the egoic mind. From the perspective of Mindfulness, or Consciousness, we can acknowledge several different samskaras at a time – multiple components of the will expressing different needs and pulling us in different directions. We all notice how frequently a ‘part of us’ wants to do one thing and another ‘part of us’ wants to do something else. The egoic mind generally experiences this division of the will as ‘conflict’, or ‘resistance’, and tends to understand spiritual progress as an act of control, or dominance, or self-overcoming.

Meditation practitioners do not have to be psychoanalysts to recognise this dynamic – a dynamic in which the part of the will that is identified with, achieves dominance, while another part of the will that is dis-identified from, is dissociated, split off, and repressed. If the part that is dissociated from, is merely repressed and made unconscious rather than integrated, it will return to be wrestled with once again at a later time, however strong the will of the meditator may be. At worst it will arise as the deeply incongruous Shadow behaviours that we are all familiar with in ourselves and other spiritual practitioners. It is natural for groups in which there is general unconsciousness of the samskāras and their dynamics to seek scapegoats onto which the groups repressed psychological material can be projected. This is inherent in the mimetic cultural dynamic. At worst, we may even find this pattern in spiritual communities, a situation where novices are in effect told to deny their own authentic life-serving motivations and instead to copy the motivations of the community’s leaders.

Such Shadow dynamics are clearly extremely damaging to spiritual friendships and spiritual communities. They create disillusionment and confusion and are extremely destructive of the sort of steady spiritual progress that we aspire to. In my view, one of the very best practices for Western Buddhists who want to avoid dysfunctional dynamics of this sort, is Focusing. Focusing offers an approach to meditative transformation that cultivates empathy and self-empathy, and specifically avoids repression and dissociation. It adopts the very opposite strategy – that of giving attention to that which is at the edge of, or on the threshold of, awareness – a compassionate strategy of welcoming fully into awareness, that which appears resistant to, or incongruous with, our conscious intention. This, for me, is a classic example of the sort of approach that Buddhism came to call the All-Accomplishing Wisdom.

As I mentioned earlier in this article, there are multiple perspectives within the Dharma – some of which only offer a partial perspective, and a more limited approach to Buddhist practice. In my experience, Focusing corresponds to the more comprehensive three-fold approach that may be called ‘self-discovery’. Focusing provides us with a critical perspective from which we can see the limitations of the more partial perspectives within Buddhism that are frequently expressed. As Western practitioners, we need this discernment. We need to become wary of those Buddhist teachers who appear to be claiming that the approach of establishing an identification with a strong egoic will that can overcome what appears as moral resistance, is the core of the Buddha’s teaching – that this is the essence of the Buddha’s notion of virya, and of the application of the Buddha’s Four Right Efforts.

Both the All-Accomplishing Wisdom within Buddhism, and the practice of Focusing, serve to call us to a deeper awareness and a more subtle strategy – one that is more akin to the spirit of Tai Chi or Aikido, and is directed toward growth through processes of psycho-spiritual reconciliation rather than growth through domination. Importantly, the practice of Focusing teaches us to address apparent conflicts in our spiritual motivation by becoming deeply aware of all of the currents of volitional energy that are at play within the body-mind – and especially to become deeply and compassionately present with that in us that appears to be blocking our progress, or appears ‘resistant’.

The Vijñāna Skandha and Consciousness

I could have addressed the vijñāna skandha at either the beginning or the end of the sequence – I have not been following the order in which the Buddhas appear in the Bardo Thodol. Either way, we need to understand clearly, as I explained in the first article in this series, that vijñāna (Consciousness) is a qualitatively different component in this five-fold cognitive-perceptual system – hence its placement in the centre of the mandala of the skandhas. It is because Consciousness is both the non-locatable centre of the self-illusion, and the space in which all the other four skandhas function, that Mindfulness is at the centre of Buddhist practice.

Like the Buddha, Gendlin taught us to find this spiritual centre in ourselves as the prerequisite for any deeply transformative psychological work. In a very similar way, Marshal Rosenberg, author of the Nonviolent Communication model, taught us to find that centre in ourselves as a prerequisite for conscious communication. Gendlin’s ‘clear space’ and Rosenberg’s ‘attention in the present’, both refer to the experience of Presence – the place of centredness, relatedness and Positive Emotion that Buddhist tradition speaks of in terms of Mindfulness. To ‘rest as Consciousness’ brings a difficult to define, but entirely different quality of attention – a quality of attention characterised by the four brahmavihāras.

Our personalisation of the experience of Consciousness closes us off from recognising it as an expression of the transcendent dharmic reality that Buddhist tradition came to call the dharmakāya, or dharmadhātu. The Buddha invited his students to recognise the error of personalisation – to see through it, and release it. The energetic momentum of our personalisation of Consciousness, which the Buddhist tradition calls the klesha of avidyā (i.e. non-wisdom, or spiritual ignorance). In Buddhist tradition this klesha of avidyā is said to be the characteristic quality of the Deva Realm. By saying this, the tradition is not saying that the beings in the other Realms are not subject to avidyā – far from it. What it is saying, is that even when all the other klesha categories that are the characteristic egoic predispositions of the other Realms are released, avidyā remains – a personalising identification with Consciousness (vijñāna) remains.

So, from the Buddhist perspective, the devas of Indian tradition are beings who have achieved Integration and Positive Emotion, but have not released the core pattern of personalising identification, which is personalising identification the vijñāna skandha (Consciousness). The devas do dwell in extremely blissful, emotionally positive and creative states. Indeed, they dwell in the brahmavihāras – but they personalise the brahmavihāras, failing to recognise them as aspects of an impersonal dharmic reality, in the way that Buddhist philosophy came to do in its notion of the mahabrahmavihāras. The non-Buddhist framing of these things was however forced to change under the influence of Buddhist thought. It is important to understand the Buddha as tolerant of, and even embracing of, pre-Buddhist Indian spirituality with its belief in a vast hierarchical pantheon of devas. The Buddha’s approach appears to have been somewhat similar to that of Socrates and Plato, who embraced ancient Greek religion while essentially asserting that they were seeking a wisdom that was higher – that was truly transcendental.

The educated Christians of the European Renaissance, re-incorporated the gods of the long-dead Greek and Roman religions into their cultural language. The old gods were acknowledged as archetypal principles and as psychological or astrological realities, but not as objects of religious worship. When the Buddha spoke of the brahmavihāras, he was speaking in a somewhat similar way – making a cultural reference as a means of communication, but presenting a complete reframing of the religious context. He was acknowledging the brahmavihāras to be archetypal principles that exist objectively and collectively in the depth of the mind. By speaking of the brahmavihāras, he was referencing the figure of Brahma – the great four-faced, four-armed creator god of ancient India – he was not however, attributing the brahmavihāras to Brahma.

The klesha of avidyā – the personalisation of Consciousness (vijñāna) – can be released by the correct practice of Mindfulness. Moving beyond the personalisation of Consciousness does not happen as an all-or-nothing permanent and irreversible change however. Rather, we have moments of ‘remembering’ – moments in which we allow ourselves to rest ‘as’ Consciousness. I find it useful to speak of resting ‘as’ Consciousness because it is descriptive of the depersonalising attitude that we are seeking to achieve. We may only be able to release our identification for very short moments of time, but the practice can lead to a profound reframing of our spiritual perspective. We are entertaining the possibility that Consciousness is not personal, and giving ourselves a momentary glimpse of that reality – incorporating that Dharmic principle into our practice of Mindfulness.

As Western practitioners of Mindfulness, we are also entertaining the possibility that Consciousness is not just an epiphenomenon of the brain, but something much more mysterious and beyond both neurology and the egoic mind. We may even be able to think of it as a manifestation of the unknowable dharmakāya level of mind – always there whenever we chose to recognise it, and blessing us with its beneficial presence. In the Tibetan spiritual psychology of the mandala, this recognition that the central vijñāna skandha (Consciousness) is an objective reality, is referred to in terms of the Dharmadhātu Wisdom – the wisdom that dis-identifies from the vijñāna skandha and releases the klesha of avidyā. As I have mentioned before this Wisdom is embodied (in the Bardo Thodol) by the white Buddha couple in the centre of the mandala – the male Buddha Viarocanā and female Buddha Ākāskadhāteshvari (or Ākāskadhātvishvari). Interestingly, Vairocanā is often distinguished iconographically by being depicted with four faces – an obvious mythological reference, in the Indian context, to the figure of Brahma, and to the brahmavihāras.

 

 

In my preface, I introduced the idea that Western Buddhists begin practicing within a practice framework which takes both Consciousness, and the will, to be personal. These attitudes are characteristics of what has been usually called a ‘self-development’, or ‘self-power’ approach to practice. If we are to move beyond this ultimately spiritually ignorant (avidyā) personalisation of the vijñāna skandha (Consciousness) however, we need a bigger perspective that is honest about the limitations of this preliminary approach. Essentially we need a nested three-fold model of Dharma practice that not only allows the practitioner to move easily into a ‘self-surrender’ (Other Power) approach when the time is right; but also validates a ‘self-discovery’ perspective on practice – a perspective that takes the practitioner beyond the dichotomy of ‘self-power’ and Other Power.

These terms ‘self-development’, ‘self-surrender’ and ‘self-discovery’, which come from a talk (2003) and paper (2004) called ‘The Three Myths’ by Dharmachari Subhuti, which I have also mentioned above. They provide us with an extremely useful three-fold framework by which we can keep these differing perspectives on the Dharma simultaneously in view. It is my conviction that Gendlin’s Focusing may be of great value to students of Buddhism who a seeking to transition into the second or third stages of this process, or are finding these transitions happening, and are wanting to better manage, and better understand, those transitions. I shall be returning to this theme, but I feel a need to highlight the fact that Focusing is a particularly useful practice for those who find themselves entering the ‘self-discovery’ stage, because it involves recognising that the dharmic reality (dharmakāya and sambhogakāya) is not separate from us. The dharmakāya is not separate from us because it finds a reflection in us as Consciousness – as our ever-present ability to be conscious and to know that we are conscious. And the sambhogakāya is not separate from us because it finds somatic resonance in us as the brahmavihāras.

For the practice of Mindfulness to be deeply transformative, it needs to properly understood, and Gendlin’s Focusing practice is a very good way of undertaking this deeper familiarisation. Provided that we are practicing correctly, and with a depth of understanding, we only need to take short moments of real Mindfulness to achieve significant spiritual shifts. The ‘holding’ space provided by a Focusing partner can lead to much more sustained periods of Mindfulness however. The Buddha understood how difficult his Mindfulness practice was to maintain in the midst of life. It can be argued that he called the practice ‘remembering’ (sati/smrti) precisely because he was urging his students not to be discouraged by how hard it is to maintain – urging them to return to it again and again whenever they remembered to do so.

Mindfulness is very difficult to practice correctly, or even to describe. We need all the help we can get to find the depth and subtlety that the Buddha’s notion of Mindfulness is pointing to, and Gendlin’s Focusing is a wonderful practice for Western Buddhist practitioners who are seeking that depth. To be truly Mindful, we need to find a sense of openness in our inward connection, while simultaneously engaging externally with our experience of self and world. The Buddhist tradition’s assertion that ultimately Consciousness (the ’empty’ vijñāna skandha) is not personal, is very clear, but this is a difficult idea for Western practitioners to take on board experientially. The practice of Focusing – with its practical, phenomenological approach and its avoidance of metaphysical assertions – is of great value in this regard. To simply familiarise ourselves with the actual experience of Consciousness, and the actual experience of what is arising within Consciousness, is a profound way of deepening our Mindfulness practice. Initially, we must choose to be Mindful, and adopt practises like the brahmavihāras, or Focusing, which systematically release the obscuring kleshas; but eventually the space of Consciousness in which we rest becomes more obvious to us, and our capacity to rest ‘as’ Consciousness can become more continuous – and may even eventually become effortless.

William Parker 2025

To read the next article in this series, click here, or on the ‘Next’ link below right.

If you wish to share this article you can do so by clicking the buttons below.