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.

Gendlin’s ‘Focusing’ may be characterised as a ‘self-discovery’ practice. As a meditative practice, it may therefore appear unstructured – as open-ended; as ‘aimless’ even. It is guided not by the question ‘What do I want to happen?’, but by the question ‘ What wants to happen?’. So as a practice, it is in some respects, somewhat like the Zen ‘Just Sitting’ practice, in that it deliberately aims to avoid being guided by the egoic mind’s agendas – instead cultivating an attitude of ‘self-surrender’ to that suprapersonal force in the mind that ‘loves to be Mindful’, or ‘loves to be Present’. Focusing does however, involve holding clear intentions. Like other Mindfulness practices, it involves finding and maintaining a quality that both Buddhists and Focusing practitioners call Presence.

It is my contention, from a Buddhist point of view, that our best way of finding and maintaining this relational Presence, is by cultivating the brahmavihāras. In the previous articles in this series, I have been attempting to outline what the brahmavihāras are, and why they are so important. In this article, I shall be reflecting further, and engaging with this purposeful task of ‘cultivating’ the brahmavihāras, but approaching it in a way that is informed by a ‘self-surrender’, or Other Power, frame of reference.

As previously, I shall be drawing heavily on Dharmachari Subhuti’s ‘Thee Myths’ framework (based on his 2004 paper), and using his conceptual terminology of ‘self-development’, ‘self-surrender’, and ‘self-discovery’ – seeking to recognise the limitations of the ‘self-development’ (i.e. ‘self-power’) perspective, and to embrace the three-fold synthesis on the these perspectives – a three-fold synthesis which I have been, for brevity, simply calling ‘self-discovery’. I need to emphasise, once again that I am quite specifically not presenting any sort of canonical interpretation of Subhuti’s ‘model’. Rather, I am merely making use of these conceptualisations in way that makes sense to me – in the hope that my reflections will contribute to that Dharmic conversation.

I need to include a similar proviso in regard to Sangharakshita’s ‘System of Practice’, which I also draw on heavily in this article – and seeking to set within the frame of three-fold ‘self-discovery’ approach. I have been calling this three-fold synthesis, Vajrayāna, because it is best expressed in the Tibetan Vajrayāna Buddhism. It should be noted however that the key elements of this three-fold approach to Buddhist practice, do not have to be culturally Tibetan. Indeed, what we need to be working to create, in my view, is a three-fold synthesis – a Western Buddhism, that draws upon the example of Tibetan Buddhism, but universalises the core truths of the ‘self-discovery’ path that give that tradition it characteristic depth and transformative power.

I use Sangharakshita’s ‘System of Practice’ model of the process of the Dharma life (Integration; Positive Emotion; Spiritual Death; and Spiritual Rebirth) in the original four-fold form in which he presented it in the 1970s. While I agree with the need to emphasise a fifth element – Receptivity – I prefer to do this without breaking the logic and symmetry of the original four-fold model. Indeed, I regard Receptivity and foundational principle that informs every stage of the process. Once again, this is my own interpretation, arising from my own contemplation, and I offer them in the hope that they will encourage others to engage in their own enquiry, and their own process of meaning-making.

 

Part 4 – The Brahmavihāras as Spiritual Receptivity and Relational Presence

 

Practicing the Brahmavihāras – All Eight of Them

When, as Buddhists, we ask ourselves how the characteristics of the clear space and the Dharmadhātu Wisdom might be described, we sometimes speak of the coming together of the other four Wisdoms. It is as if the qualities of the four quadrants are like the light rays of a rainbow coming together to make a single white light. The Wisdoms are deep and subtle however, and I find it more experiential and useful, and more accessible, to recognise that the clear space of embodied Consciousness (the Dharmadhātu Wisdom), while is ultimately indefinable, appears to have the character of the four mahabrahmavihāras – the archetypal sources of the brahmavihāras – Great Equanimity; Great Loving Kindness; Great Appreciative Joy; and Great Compassion. By practicing the brahmavihāras as a cycle or contemplative series, we systematically approach the experience of Consciousness, or Mindfulness.

My experience of practicing the brahmavihāras daily for a good few years, tells me that this meditative familiarisation ultimately needs to be approached as a process of meditative enquiry; as an exploration; and in a spirit of ‘self-discovery’. Many Buddhist teachers recommend that Buddhist students should cultivate both the ‘self-regarding’ and ‘other-regarding’ aspects of each of the brahmavihāras in a single meditation, but should separate out these four Positive Emotion practices into four entirely separate practices – to be practiced in separate meditation sessions, or even on separate days. This leads to a situation where it is relatively rare for even highly-committed Buddhists to practice all of the brahmavihāras regularly, and mettā/maitri (Loving Kindness) is the only brahmavihāra being practiced regularly. This unfortunately means that there is no widespread familiarity within Buddhist communities of practice, of how the eight brahmavihāras have the potential to act together to precipitate a comprehensive transformation of our emotional life – and to take us into the territory of Buddhist wisdom.

So the practice of separating the brahmavihāras out, and cultivating them in separate meditation sessions, means that most meditators only ever practice mettā/maitri. Clearly this is limiting, but I believe this approach also has the potential to limit the depth of transformation that is possible from practicing mettā/maitri. If we try to develop mettā/maitri without also cultivating upekshā (Equanimity), we are probably not going very deep in our Loving Kindness practice. If we do not practice all of the brahmavihāras regularly, we can fail to get a sense of the comprehensive model of Positive Emotion that they provide. I have seen, for example, practitioners who appeared cheerful and superficially ’emotionally positive’ from practicing mettā/maitri, but who were nevertheless reactive, unempathetic, and manipulative – and importantly, were failing to develop a broad Mindfulness in their relationships; or a depth of connection with themselves and others such as comes from practicing all of the brahmavihāras.

So for various reasons, I have come to a different view in regard to brahmavihāras practice, which is that the most natural way of grouping the brahmavihāras, for those that want to engage with them deeply (and possibly also as a way of maximising their accessibility for new students), is to see the four ‘self-regarding’ brahmavihāras as a natural group for introductory practice, to be followed by the four ‘other-regarding’ brahmavihāras, once the ‘self-regarding’ brahmavihāras have been established. This approach has worked very powerfully for me in my own practice, and has taken me to what I would judge to be a very much deeper place – a place of deeper emotional healing and psycho-spiritual integration; and to a place where the Buddhist tradition’s wisdom teachings have begun to make sense.

The order in which we practice these two groups of four, also needs to be approached with a degree of flexibility – I shall be offering some suggestions in regard to this below. The most important thing, in my experience, is that we connect with the felt experience of all eight of the brahmavihāras on regular basis – at least daily if possible – and that we undertake to begin to recognise them as inherent in Consciousness. In my view, it is less important that we personalise these archetypal principles by relating them to visualisations of relationships in our current lives. It could even be argued that the personalising process that is presented by most Buddhist meditation teachers, holds the danger of reducing these profound spiritual practises to positive affirmations and social psychology – because it locates them predominantly within a merely personal psychological frame. Buddhist teachers may not intend to be denying or excluding the archetypal and eternal dimensions from the frame of reference of their teaching, but through their impulse to maximise accessibility, this may be what is happening.

While the brahmavihāras are indeed, in my view, the most profound practices we can undertake for positively transforming our relationship with everyone in our lives, the most important relationship that they cultivate is our relationship with ourselves – our relationship with the source and ground of our own Being; and with the source of our capacity for Mindfulness. When we recognise the truth of this, we naturally give great importance to the so-called ‘self-regarding’ brahmavihāras – the four receptive brahmavihāras in which we make ourselves receptive to the mahabrahmavihāras, feeling their somatic resonance, however faint, in the field of our body. I shall provide more detailed guidance on this in the next article in this series.

My own choice, in regard to the best sequence for practicing the brahmavihāras, is to acknowledge that each of the sets of four is presented to us in the mandala as two pairs – since the vertical and horizontal axes of the mandala each show us a polarity within the body-mind that we must endeavour to reconcile, integrate, or combine. So, in regard to the ‘self-regarding’ brahmavihāras, I endeavour to first connect with the east-west axis (first Loving Kindness, then Equanimity), and then connect with the south-north axis (first Appreciative Joy then Compassion). I use a similar ordering with the four ‘other-regarding’ brahmavihāras, but generally reverse the order within each of the pairs – so first ‘other-regarding’ Equanimity then Loving Kindness, followed by ‘other-regarding’ Compassion then Appreciative Joy. I usually do the four ‘self-regarding’ brahmavihāras as a first stage of meditation and then the four ‘other-regarding’ brahmavihāras as a second stage, straight after, so that I connect with all eight of the brahmavihāras in the single session of meditation. The series of eight brahmavihāras are felt to be accumulative and comprehensive if practiced in this way.

 

 

So for me, the practice of Mindfulness, and the process of becoming familiar with the clear space, and of developing the ability to access it easily, has become strongly associated with the brahmavihāras. As with the five skandhas and the five Wisdoms, the brahmaviharas have ‘internal’ (self-regarding) and ‘external’ (other-regarding) aspects. I have found it extremely valuable to acknowledge that the brahmavihāras model of meditation practice is actually an eight-fold one. It is very similar in this regard (with its ‘self-regarding’ and ‘other-regarding’, or ‘internal’ and ‘external’ modes of practice) to the model we find in the skandhas and Foundations of Mindfulness. I also find, in relation to the brahmavihāras, that the meditative work of ‘cultivating the brahmavihāras‘ can usefully be conceptualised as a process of familiarising ourselves with, and resting as embodied Consciousness, using these eight ‘attitudes’ as a guide, since each of the brahmavihāras is actually a quality of embodied Consciousness, and of Gendlin’s clear space.

Although my ‘Meditation Guidance’ articles (listed here and in the ‘Meditation’ menu above) where not particularly systematic, I gave time in them to an initial exploration of the challenge of more adequately conceptualising the difference between the ‘self-regarding’ and ‘other-regarding’ brahmavihāras. While the other-regarding brahmavihāras are distinguished by the fact that they are concretely relational, and by the fact that they are experienced in meditation as ‘expansive’, the ‘self-regarding’ brahmavihāras are more complex and more difficult to talk about – especially if we are also trying to reconcile the notion of ‘self-regarding’ with the Buddha’s invitation to recognise that the self is an illusion. While the dimensions of meditative experience that are described by the ‘self-regarding’ brahmavihāras are clearly foundational and absolutely necessary in the initial Integration stage of meditation practice, the conceptual terms we use for the ‘self-regarding’ brahmavihāras (self-Loving Kindness, self-Equanimity, self-Sympathetic Joy, and self-Compassion) are clearly somewhat incongruous in the context of the ultimate aims of Buddhist spiritual philosophy, which is the achievement of complete ‘self-surrender’, and the ‘spiritual death’ of the self-illusion.

The ‘other-regarding’ brahmavihāras also need deeper reflection. Since they together provide a comprehensive description of what we mean by the term ‘Positive Emotion’, our contemplation of them can show us were our practice of Positive Emotion is failing or incomplete. For example, I believe that the wise, non-reactive, and psychologically intelligent quality that we call Equanimity is a particularly foundational component of Positive Emotion, but is often neglected – partly because we are constrained by the semantic limitation inherent in the notion of ‘cultivating Equanimity towards ourselves’, or ‘cultivating Equanimity towards others’. I have tried to address this in other articles (including here), but it needs to be said that we are not showing deep and genuine success in our practice of Loving Kindness if we have not also become more stable in our capacity for non-reactivity, for Equanimity, and for simply being empathetically and relationally present with another person as Gendlin’s Focusing dyad practice exemplifies.

Although they are difficult to adequately conceptualise, or even to find adequate conceptual labels for, it can be argued that the ‘self-regarding’ brahmavihāras all have an energetically receptive character – that they serve to gather our psycho-spiritual energies – and can therefore be seen as components of a foundational ‘Integration’ stage in meditation practice (or Focusing practice). These ‘self-regarding’, or receptive, aspects of the brahmavihāras can be regarded as providing a basis for the development of the subsequent more expansive and more externally relational ‘other-regarding’, expressions, which are the characteristics of the subsequent ‘Positive Emotion’ stage in meditation practice. A great insight that we find in both the Focusing tradition and in Buddhism, is the recognition that it is not only do our outer relationships need the ‘other-regarding’ positive attitudes that we call the brahmavihāras – we also need to embody these ‘other-regarding’ brahmavihāras in order to relate to, and therefore integrate, aspects of ourselves.

In this article, I have been making use of the extremely useful terminology of Integration and Positive Emotion that Sangharakshita introduced in the 1970s, when talking about the stages that naturally emerge within, and give structure to, the developmental process of meditation practice. He initially presented a four-stage ‘System of Practice’ model – Integration, Positive Emotion, Spiritual Death, and Spiritual Rebirth. The second pair – Spiritual Death, and Spiritual Rebirth – may be thought of as higher octaves of the first pair, Integration and Positive Emotion. The model is extremely profound, and corresponds beautifully with the process that naturally unfolds in the course of both Buddhist meditation and Focusing practice. While I cannot explore the whole model in this context, I would like to highlight the way Gendlin’s approach profoundly affirms Sangharakshita’s insight about the way spiritual development requires this dual and reciprocal foundation of Integration and Positive Emotion. The foundation of Sanghakshita’s model was that Integration, being an introverted/receptive, ‘internal’, and ‘self-regarding’ movement within the body-mind, must be reconciled with Positive Emotion, an extraverted/expansive, ‘external’, and ‘other-regarding’ movement within the body-mind.

In the context of Sangharakshita’s ‘System of Practice’, the ‘Mindfulness of Breathing’ meditation is the most common example of a practice which can be used to support Integration. Similarly, the mettā bhāvanā (Cultivation of Loving Kindness) is an example of a practice which can be used to support Positive Emotion. These are traditional introductory ‘self-development’ practices which provide a point of entry into a process that leads, via forms of Other Power practice that have the character of ‘self-surrender’; and ultimately to a completely different perspective on, and approach to, meditation practice – one that incorporates the attitude of ‘self-enquiry’ (dharma vicaya) or ‘self-discovery’.

The Three Myths – The Stages of Evolution of our Framework for Practice

As I have already been acknowledging, we are, perhaps necessarily, initially taught meditation within a narrower ‘self-development’ (‘self-power’) frame of reference. As I have explained, our practice naturally evolves however, initially through what may be called the ‘self-surrender’ (Other Power) stage, and subsequently into what may be called the ‘self-discovery’ stage. We usually have no choice about these transitions – they just happen to us. Indeed they are often experienced as times of revelation and accompanied by floods of Dharmic insights. This three-stage evolution of our frame of reference for practice has been described in Dharmachari Subhuti’s ‘Three Myths’ model. I find this model powerfully explanatory, since it provides us with the three-fold synthesis that we need to make sense of apparent incongruities within the multi-century cultural and religious phenomena that we call Buddhism. That three-fold synthesis also shows us a parallel between the natural development of the frame of reference of an individual’s practice, on one side; and the three yānas on the other – the three yānas being three historical developmental phases that we see within the Buddhist tradition as a whole. I have outlined the ‘Three Myths’ model in more detail elsewhere (here).

I have been dwelling on this ‘Three Myths’ model of Buddhist practice, because I regard it as fundamental, and highly relevant to what I am trying to communicate here. A Buddhist understanding of the value of a Focusing-style approach to meditative self-enquiry – like any comprehensive view of Buddhist practice – cannot be complete without embracing this three-fold view. It is important to acknowledge that Buddhist meditation, as it is introduced to the general public in the Western context is, necessarily, not usually framed in terms of this three-fold perspective of Buddhist wisdom. Rather, the conceptual framing is necessarily reduced, in order to maximise accessibility by setting meditation practice within a conventional and recognisably ‘Western’ frame of reference – a perspective that the modern Western mind can easily grasp and work with.

Within the ‘Three Myths’ model, we call this preliminary and provisional perspective, the ‘self-development’ approach – a view that frames personal development in terms of the capacity of the egoic mind to act as a moral agent and as an agent of personal psychological transformation. This initial stage is sometimes called ‘self-transcendence’ – a terminology that does not quite fit, in my view, since the transcendence of which the Buddhist tradition speaks is, in fact, impossible to achieve within the egoic will’s heroic ‘self-development’ perspective. I believe it is important to be honest about this limitation, and not to oversell the ‘self-development’ view of Buddhism, and we should be especially careful not to gloss over the Shadow of that approach – to use the familiar Jungian psychological metaphor. The psychology of the heroic ‘self-development’ perspective can become very incongruous and problematic when taken to extremes – and it is often assumed that going to extremes is necessary if we are to be serious and uncompromising about the spiritual life. I have tried to outline some of the problems of the ‘self-development’ perspective in previous articles, and especially in my writing on the psychology of the samskāras skandha, the egoic will, and the collective psychology of the Asura Realm. For more detail on this, consider reading my more in depth articles (here and here).

The point that I need to make here is that we should not hold practitioners back by discouraging them from opening into an Other Power perspective, or one that may be characterised in terms of ‘self-discovery’. Indeed it could be argued that we should be doing the opposite – that we should be exploring practices like Focusing that offer Western Buddhist opportunities to explore the ‘self-discovery’ perspective. In order to go deeper in meditation, we need to expand beyond the limitations of the provisional scientific materialist perspective that tends to accompany the ‘self-development’ view – and therefore beyond the idea that a personal and singular egoic will must always be at the centre of our Dharma practice.

As Western practitioners embracing the sweep of the Buddhist tradition we are introduced to archetypal forces like the mahabrahmavihāras; to the vast and complex pantheon of male and female Buddha figures that people its history; and to the notion of an eternal and transcendental bodhisattva principle that is always at work in us, and is the actual source of our aspiration. We find ourselves being invited to entertain the possibility that the notion of Enlightenment requires the existence of suprapersonal forces – transformative powers that are ‘unconditioned’, and transcendent of the egoic mind’s personalising and physicalist assumptions. We recognise that the Buddhist idea of our transcendence of the limitations and suffering of the human condition logically requires an objective and collective transcendental reality. This meditative-receptive opening to a transcendental dharmic reality, is called, within the ‘Three Myths’ framework, the incorporation of a ‘self-surrender’, or Other Power, view – which we must endeavour to integrate with our initial, more familiar and more prosaic, ‘self-development’, or ‘self-power’ view.

Some Western practitioners approach this ‘self-surrender’ stage simply as a deep emersion in, and surrender to the culture of the Buddhist East, and a complete embrace, in effect, of what might be called a non-Western world-view. This may be characterised as a surrender to the religious worldview of the Mahayana and of the bodhisattva ideal – a leap of faith, and an abandonment of our Western cultural assumptions and ego-centred psychology. In the social context of a Buddhist community we can surrender ourselves to this process of self-transcendence, guided by Eastern Buddhist cultural forms – but we may in that process find ourselves abandoning the contextualising reality of the practicalities of life in the West, and therefore losing the balance and discernment that is needed in this context.

While this impulse toward a radical surrender of the Western ‘self’ is understandable, there is great psychological danger in it, since it is not grounded in, or integrated with, the realities of our Western cultural situation and our Western collective psychology. Seeking to practice the pure Buddhism of the ancient East, with its sense of absolute spiritual hierarchy and monastic self-sacrifice and uniformity, albeit in a Western context, can bring profound confusion. We may try to embrace forms of monasticism and celibacy; we may surrender ourselves to the guidance of inexperienced teachers who appear to have the authority of the Buddhist tradition; and may surrender our real needs for personal vocation and personal material security – believing that all these forms of surrender will lead to the egolessness that we are seeking. We may look back on this sort of uncompromisingly externally surrendered approach to the social context of practice as a form of group conformity and self-delusion. We may even come to see this sort of socially surrendered approach as a Buddhist cultural fantasy, an inappropriate and artificial introduction of aspects of Buddhist monasticism from the East – and not an effective and fully conscious approach to Western Buddhist practice.

One of the great values of the Focusing model for Western Buddhist is that it so clearly articulates a path in which we surrender our egoic identifications, and surrender our egoic personalisation of our experience, without surrendering the discernment and self-responsibilty that is the foundation of our individuality. This distinction is often not well articulated in Western Buddhism. Buddhists in the West have found themselves being urged to surrender to Eastern Buddhist cultural forms and institutions. While they often have profound spiritual experiences practicing with this degree of intense commitment and faith, it can be argued that when such Eastern Buddhist cultural forms and religious institutions are imported to the West without an appropriate ‘translation’ process (of both language and culture) they will inevitably run into problems. I do not need to repeat the disappointing stories of gurus who, in the Western context, became psychological inflated, and therefore undiscerning and unethical in aspects of their relationships with their students. I am making a fine distinction here, but clearly what is required in the West is a more integrated and explicitly ‘Western-Buddhist’ approach. We need to marry the essential principles of Buddhist wisdom with Western models of personal development, without sacrificing the keen sense of the transcendental that the Buddhist tradition of the East has communicated to us.

It can be argued that Gendlin’s Focusing approach to Mindfulness and self-enquiry, is exemplary of this sort of characteristically Western synthesis. Indeed, Focusing seems to express the key features of the third ‘self-discovery’ stage in the three-fold ‘nested’ conceptualisation of the Dharma that we find in the ‘Three Myths’ model. Like the Tibetan Vajrayāna, the Focusing perspective takes the ’emptiness’ of the clear space as foundational, and presents it in a matter-of-fact phenomenological way – entirely without metaphysics and spiritual grandiosity. The Consciousness at the centre of our experience (the ’empty’ vijñāna skandha) is simply recognised as the only place in our experience that is outside of the egoic self-system – and recognised as the only place from which we can relate to ourselves self-empathetically in order to unravel the egoic mind’s patterning.

There are Buddhists, both in the East and in the West, who will tell you that self-transcendence requires a surrender of our Western-style self-responsibility, and will even advocate a process of social surrender to the guidance of the persons and institutions of the Sangha hierarchy. I regard this as a very dangerous equation to make and a very severe narrowing of what surrender means in the context of spirituality – a mis-direction away from the ‘internal’ surrender of a receptive relationship with the dharmic reality, towards an external surrender towards those in positions of spiritual authority. Our maintenance of individual personal discernment and psychological self-responsibility throughout the process, is however, one of the key ways in which the strengths of the ‘self-development’ perspective are retained as a foundation, even as we move beyond its limitations. The ‘self-surrender’ stage of the ‘Three Myths’ process represents our surrender of the egoic mind’s limited ‘self-power’ perspective, and our incorporation of an Other Power perspective into our meditative practice. I hope I am not labouring this point, but it needs to be very clearly understood that the ‘self-surrender’ stage of practice is not a surrender of individuality to the group process of the Sangha; and not a surrender of our personal judgement and self-responsibility.

Eugene Gendlin presented a wonderful clarity in this regard. Focusing highlights the understanding that meditative innerwork involves a surrender to, or resting back into that clear space that we find beyond the egoic mind, but also, perhaps paradoxically, requires (and makes possible) absolute self-responsibility. When two people pair up to do Focusing together, they decide who is going be the ‘Focuser’ and who is going to be the ‘Companion’. The person whose role it is to ‘hold space’ is simply called the Companion to make it absolutely clear that there is is no implication that they are wiser or more spiritually developed than the Focuser. It is not necessary for them to provide any sort of guidance. The Companion may on occasion provide tentative and entirely refusable suggestions – as an expression of their empathetic presence – but they are absolutely not providing any sort of amateur psychotherapy or psychoanalysis. The principle that the Focuser is absolutely responsible for their own process is regarded as sacred. There is absolutely no ‘surrender to’ the guidance of the Companion, however wise and spiritually experienced they may be.

So for me, the power of the Focusing approach lies in the way it offers this ease and familiarity with the ’empty’ clear space – a way of radically abandoning our Western assumptions about the egoic will being the supreme moral agent, without abandoning our Western-style psychological self-responsibility and personal discernment. I want to say more however, about how Focusing serves to marry the insights of the ‘Three Myths’ model, with those of Sangharakshita’s ‘System of Practice’. It is my belief that Sangharakshita’s ‘System of Practice’ only becomes revealed and fully understandable in the light of the ‘Three Myths’ model. Indeed, I would go as far as to say that our progress through all four of the ‘System of Practice’ processes (Integration, Positive Emotion, Spiritual Death and Spiritual Rebirth), require as a prerequisite that we open to the devotional-receptive, Other Power, or ‘self-surrender’ perspective, which lies beyond the West’s familiar ‘self-development’, or ‘self-power’ world-view. It is not just the later stages that require Receptivity for their fulfilment. On the contrary, we need Receptivity to initiate the four-stage process. This insight, that a depth of engagement with Integration absolutely requires the receptive attitude of mind that we call ‘self-surrender’ is particularly well-expressed and well-evidenced in the practice of Focusing.

There are powerful understandings that arise when we combine the ‘System of Practice’ with the ‘Three Myths’ model. I need to emphasise that Integration and the principle of Receptivity are inextricably linked – that Integration is a gathering of our energies and does not happen without a receptive attitude. The commonly held view that the egoic will is all that is required for Integration to take place is simply incorrect. This assumption is not only not borne out by experience – rather, the opposite is true. As I outlined previously (and in other articles) in regard to the samskāras skandha and the archetype of the asura, the egoic will is better understood as a force that brings disintegration – that brings external conflict and internal disintegration in various ways. This is because the egoic will divides the samskaras against themselves, and projects what it dissociates from – projects what to represses into the unconscious. Its whole modus operandi is division – the division of self and other, and the division of conscious and unconscious.

In the spiritual life, an emphasis on heroic idealism, and on the egoic will, and on an exclusively ‘self-power’ perspective, may create an appearance of progress in the short-term, but there will inevitably be reactions, reversals and disillusionment in the longer term. The great value of framing Buddhism as the three-fold ‘self-discovery’ synthesis, lies in the ability of of that more sophisticated model to avoid teaching partial truths that have to be un-learned further along the path. Only the suprapersonal centre, that Gendlin spoke of phenomenologically as the ‘clear space’ within, can create true Integration.

There is another dimension to the Buddha’s subtle notion of ’emptiness’, as a way of talking about the mind’s lack of ‘self-nature’. By speaking of the mind in terms of ’emptiness’ the Buddha was highlighting its indefinability – he was warning us against talking about the mind in a literalistic way. Because we need to talk about the mind, we may be drawn to make metaphysical statements about the mind, and may even make elaborate lists of its possible contents and states – as the Buddhist tradition often did. If we choose to do this however, we must be aware of the limitations of this approach. Both the Buddha and Gendlin urged us to always return to our actual experience. As we attempt to define the indefinable – to find words for what cannot be described – it is freeing to be able to talk about the mind metaphorically, and to talk about our mental experience in a way that fully acknowledges that it is subjective and only partially knowable. For the Focusing practitioner, like the Buddhist, mind is a place of metaphor and poetry, and of inner relationships that have mythic resonances – mind is structured by processes that are universal and objective – and yet it has contents that, while they are also somehow universal, are also absolutely unique.

As I mentioned in connection with the ’emptiness’ of the rūpa skandha, the notion of ’emptiness’ allows the Buddhist tradition to fully acknowledge, and talk about, sublime psychological and metaphysical realities, but without literalisation, without reification, and without concretisation – without reducing them to ‘things’. All our concepts are therefore humbled, made provisional, and reduced to ‘pointers’ – each conceptual pointer being merely ‘a finger pointing to the moon’ of Enlightenment, to use the Buddha’s metaphor. The Dharma we must always remember is a makeshift ‘raft’ – to use another of the Buddha’s images. The Buddha’s raft of the Dharma is constructed from words – the ancient Indian words of a language that is no longer spoken except by Buddhist scholars. Many of those words have multiple meanings and meanings that have been lost, or lost in translation. We do would well to think of the Dharma is a ‘raft’ that is so makeshift that it is always falling apart. It is twenty-five centuries old and was assembled in a somewhat haphazard and incremental way – so it is not surprising that it is continuously being found to be somewhat conceptually crude, inadequate for its purpose, and continuously needing repairs.

Ultimately, the raft of the Dharma cannot be held together by the ropes of literalistic, materialistic, pseudo-science – only by the phenomenological ropes of actual felt-experience, visionary experience, and bodily-felt metaphor. There is a profound wisdom and a profound humility in the tradition’s embrace of the idea that ultimate reality, and the totality of what is being ‘pointed to’ is absolutely unknowable. We are nevertheless able to tentatively ‘discover’ the resonances and reflections of that unknowable reality in our experience. Gendlin taught his students the discipline of finding the most phenomenologically accurate words for their felt-experience – even if these descriptions are non-rational from a literal and materialist point of view. Focusing practice teaches us this non-literal mode of engagement with the mind. It allows us to include in our experience, all manner of subtle body-mind experiences that we might otherwise refuse to acknowledge – or might refuse to even let into our awareness.

In my experience, we enter the ‘self-discovery’ stage via the ‘self-surrender’, or Other Power, view. The Other Power perspective serves as a bridge that the Western practitioner must cross on their way to that more complete and comprehensive view that is ‘self-discovery’. We carry aspects of the ‘self-development’ and ‘self-surrender’ stages forward into the ‘self-discovery’ stage, but we release the literalism by which both of those previous stages are constrained. We learn to tolerate the inherent paradoxes of the spiritual life, recognising that notions of Other Power and ‘self-power’ are ultimately transcended. We notice the resonance of the transcendental ‘within’, and we relate to it with deep humility and reverence, recognising that these bodily-felt resonances come to us from far beyond the egoic mind. ‘Self-discovery’ requires a spaciousness and openness – an exploratory engagement with the body-mind – and Gendlin’s Focusing can really help us to enter this mode of practice.

The ‘self-discovery’ path invites us into a radical openness to our experience – it endeavours to free our life energy from all constraints, and it calls us to let everything be as it is rather than micro-managing our minds. It’s aim is to welcome in benevolent forces from beyond the threshold of our awareness. It invites us to entertain the possibility that we are more exalted than we know – that we possess Buddha Nature, the indwelling potential for Enlightenment in this life and in this body. So its approach can feel very different from that of the ‘self-development’ stage, where the path appears to be asking us to to use the egoic mind’s resources to overcome the egoic mind. Most striking of all, ‘self-discovery’ invites us into an awareness of the immanence of the dharmic reality, inviting us repeatedly to acknowledge our exalted nature and our blessedness – and our capacity for radical transformation.

Integration and Positive Emotion

The Buddha’s profound and multidimensional notion of Mindfulness – his ‘Way to the Deathless’, or ‘Way to the Immortal’ – is a comprehensive model of awareness of both the inner and the outer worlds, and requires a lifetime of exploration and familiarisation. We need to approach meditation in a similar spirit of ‘self-discovery’. It is clearly impossible to encompass the Buddha’s practice of samādhi – or what we now call ‘meditation’ – in an introductory class, or even in a series of introductory classes. Because of this obvious limitation, it is important to remember, that when we learn, or teach, the twin practices of Mindfulness of Breathing and Mettā Bhāvana, we are also engaging with the two vast psycho-spiritual developmental themes that Sangharakshita called Integration and Positive Emotion – the first two stages of his ‘System of Practice’. Having mediated for over 40 years, it has become my conviction, that to go deeper into Integration and Positive Emotion, we need, at the very least, to expand from the ‘self-development’ (‘self-power’) perspective into the ‘self-surrender’ (Other Power) perspective. It is also my conviction, that it is by expanding and reframing our practice of meditation, firstly into the domain of ‘self-surrender’; and subsequently into the domain of ‘self-discovery’, that we enter the territory of Spiritual Death and Spiritual Rebirth.

For myself, the development of this larger understanding of what we mean by Integration and Positive Emotion has come through a deep engagement with the brahmavihāras, but Gendlin’s Focusing brings the same insights. Investigating the brahmavihāras closely, it becomes very clear that all four of the ‘self-regarding’, or ‘internal’, or ‘receptive’ brahmavihāras powerfully serve both our process of Integration and our cultivation of that embodied self-awareness that we call Mindfulness. So Integration and Positive Emotion progress hand-in-hand. It is a commonly held view that the Integration stage can be seen as a less spiritually significant stage of ‘horizontal’ integration, and that Positive Emotion practice has a more explicitly ‘vertical’ and spiritual orientation. We can improve on this conceptualisation, in my experience. As we enter the devotional-receptive ‘self-surrender’ stage of practice, the Integration stage can be better characterised as the meditative act of turning inwards with an attitude of receptivity, in order to gather our psycho-spiritual energies and cultivate Presence. When we do this, we are in fact turning inwards towards aspects of ourselves that are beyond the egoic mind – a deeply significant thing to do, and one that certainly has a ‘vertical’ or spiritual dimension.

To cycle through the paradoxically named ‘self-regarding’ brahmavihāras is an extremely profound spiritual practice, since it involves opening inwardly to the somatic resonance, within our body, of the objective dharmic reality that is symbolised in the sambhogakāya mandala – the Buddhist tradition’s graphic representation of the archetypal structure of the objective mind. So, in reality, Integration happens through an internal relational process that paradoxically is ‘other-regarding’ – in that it involves relating to forces beyond the egoic mind. This approach may certainly be characterised as spiritual, since it expresses a receptive orientation towards the dharmic or transcendent dimensions of mind. Indeed, as our practice deepens, Integration clearly become a ‘self-surrender’ process, and one in which we relate to objective and seemingly external psycho-spiritual realities that are nevertheless experienced as somatic resonances ‘within’. Indeed, the receptivity that informs the initial Integration stage is so significant that we would do better to understand it both as the foundation of the whole ‘System of Practice’, and as a foundational attitude that needs to pervade all the four stages.

The importance of Receptivity in every stage of meditation practice has led to the suggestion that the principle of Receptivity should be added to Sangharakshita’s ‘System of Practice’ model. If we add Receptivity as a stage however, there is a great danger of losing the symmetry and logical coherence of the rest of the original four-stage model. My preference therefore, is to work with Sangharakshita’s original four-fold model (Integration, Positive Emotion, Spiritual Death and Spiritual Rebirth) while emphasising the paramount importance of Receptivity throughout the process that the model describes. It should not be forgotten that the word samādhi (meditation) that is often translated as ‘concentration’ in an attempt to make it more accessible to Westerners, could also be translated as meditative receptivity. Certainly, as we move from the ‘self-development’ stage; to the ‘self-surrender’ stage; and subsequently into the ‘self-discovery’ stage, we find that samādhi is Buddhism’s word for the act of journeying inwardly beyond the egoic mind; and for attitude of meditative receptivity towards the divine. It therefore includes all those practices and states of absorption in which we open to the archetypal dimensions, and to the transcendental – and to the mysterious ways in which the dharmic dimension finds somatic embodiment within us. The practice of samādhi explicitly requires a meditative openness to that which is beyond the threshold of our habitual awareness – a subtle and difficult attitude to cultivate, and one that Gendlin’s Focusing practice can teach us.

While the cultivation of Positive Emotion at first suggests an extraverted, social and externally relational focus, this assumption is not born out as we explore Positive Emotion in the context of meditation practice. When we meditatively cycle through the four ‘other-regarding’ brahmavihāras, we are familiarising ourselves with mental qualities that are absolutely essential for our internal processes of Integration. Paradoxically, unless we have the capacity to relate to our inner experience via these ‘other-regarding’ attitudes of mind – Appreciation, Compassion, Loving Kindness and Equanimity – then Integration is not possible. This insight is integral to both meditation practice and the practice of Focusing. There is a clear reciprocity – and ultimately a reconciliation – between Integration and Positive Emotion, a synthesis that becomes more and more clear as we go deeper in our practice of samādhi.

The Buddhist practice of becoming familiar with all eight of the brahmavihāras – the four ‘self-regarding’ or ‘receptive’ ones, and the four ‘other-regarding’ or ‘expansive’ ones – has direct parallels with the Focusing practice of familiarising ourselves with the clear space at the centre of our experience. The brahmavihāras do indeed appear to be an ancient Indian description of the attitudinal qualities of that experience of Consciousness that is at the centre of the Buddhist practice of Mindfulness. In my experience, this approach to the brahmavihāras, also takes us very naturally and seamlessly into the territory of Insight (vipashanā) and bodhicitta practice – Spiritual Death and Spiritual Rebirth. It could be argued that establishing the ‘Focusing attitude’ achieves the same. It mentally prepares us for the ‘Spiritual Death’ insights – for the recognition of the ’empty’ nature of the self-illusion, and for the radical transformation of Spiritual Rebirth that naturally occurs when we begin to live from that wisdom.

 

 

Mindfulness – the Buddha’s ‘Remembering’ Practice

So, from a Buddhist point of view, Gendlin’s clear space can be thought of as that place in us that is consistently capable of responding with Appreciative Joy, Loving Kindness, Compassion and Equanimity, towards what is arising in our inner experience – and therefore also towards other people. As Gendlin pointed out, and as all experienced Focusing practitioners know, it can however be difficult to find the clear space, and Presence can be quickly lost as we fall back into identification with a psychological part that is reacting to our experience. This movement in and out of Mindfulness is very familiar to all serious Buddhist practitioners. Indeed this, it could be argued, is why the Buddha used the word ‘remembering’ (Pali: sati; Sanskrit: smrti) for the practice that we now call Mindfulness. The practice of returning to the clear space, and of building our familiarity and confidence in the clear space is quite literally a ‘remembering’ process. We need to learn to return to the clear space each time we ‘remember’ to do so – each time we realise that we have fallen into the unconsciousness of identification. The holding Presence of another, in the Focusing dyad practice, provides a very great support to that practice of remembering.

Focusing teaches us that the clear space is the only reliable place from which to relate to and transform the psychological material of our egoic selves – the only place from which we can truly heal, and the only place from which real personality change is possible. Clearly then, the reality that Gendlin was pointing to – this ‘clear space’ beyond the egoic mind – is absolutely crucial to our integration, and absolutely crucial to our development of positive emotion. As Buddhists, we can see that Gendlin is ultimately offering us an approach that is somewhat akin to way that Mindfulness is presented in the tradition – especially as it is presented to us in the dzogchen and mahamudra teachings of Vajrayāna Buddhism. In Gendlin’s Focusing we find a depth of wisdom is being presented to us in a very usable and accessible way – a path of practice and spiritual learning that somehow bridges East and West, and one that has the character of ‘self-discovery’.

I have a further personal association that I would like to share in relation to this curious use of the word ‘remembering’ (sati/smrti) by the Buddha, for his Mindfulness practice – and for this cognitive-perceptual activity of turning simultaneously inwards toward the clear space of the ’empty’ vijnāna skandha and outwards toward experience. The great Athenian spiritual teacher Socrates (c. 470 – 399 BC), another Axial Age figure, roughly contemporary with the Buddha, also used the word ‘remembering’ as a way of talking about spiritual learning and ‘self-discovery’ – in a way that was different, but not so different. In the Platonic and Neoplatonic tradition that can be traced back to the teachings of Socrates, the spiritual world-view is an archetypal one – there was a conviction, borne of deep self-enquiry, that the intangible realities of Goodness, Truth, and Beauty are woven into the collective fabric of eternity and reflected in the world soul as primordial ‘forms’ – much as the Buddhist tradition came to speak of the two levels of the dharmic reality (the eternal, unknowable dharmakāya; and the symbolic and somatic emanations of that, that we find in the sambhogakāya mandala).

The idea being expressed in the world-views of both Neoplatonism in the West, and the trikāya doctrine within Buddhism’s world-view in the East; is that, because these spiritual realities are already present in the depths (or heights) of the mind, our spiritual enquiry naturally leads us to a ‘remembering’ of them – a remembering in which we feel called to create a reflection of them in this mundane (nirmānakāya) world. As Buddhists, our deepening recognition of the ever-present nature of the dharmakāya and sambhogakāya can be taken as a form of ‘remembering’ in the Buddha’s use of that term – true Mindfulness is, quite literally a recognition of the presence of the dharmakāya. The experience of Consciousness that we call Mindfulness, is only possible because we rest in that pervasive field of proto-Consciousness that ignites our own knowing. As we practice Mindfulness in this spirit – ‘resting as Consciousness’, and recognising the qualities of the brahmavihāras and of the sambhogakāya Buddhas becoming embodied in us a Presence – we are progressively remembering our Buddha Nature. This process of familiarisation is the Vajrayāna path of self-remembering – the path of ‘self-discovery’.

So, there are deep and challenging dimensions to this connection between the Buddhist and Platonic practices of ‘remembering’. When the Buddha spoke of Mindfulness as the ‘Way to the Immortal’, or the ‘Way to the Deathless’, he was challenging us to ‘remember’ the ’empty’ clear space of the vijñāna skandha (Consciousness) in the centre of our experience – the same clear space that Gendlin spoke of. Thus, the Buddha’s ‘remembering’ practice was an invitation to recognise and familiarise ourselves with the ’empty’ transcendental core of ourselves and to live from that source of being – seeing ourselves and our world freshly from that place. ‘Remembering’ in the Platonic tradition is essentially identical to that in Buddhism, even though the conceptualisation and cultural context is so very different – and the process of Gendlin’s Focusing is essentially the same.

Socrates and his student and biographer Plato, were both passionately concerned with the idea of individuality. For them, the spiritual task of growing towards virtue and wisdom, was framed as a growth towards the maturity of becoming a truly individuated self – an authentic self that is fully ethical and relational; fully autonomous and courageous; fully self-knowing; and fully capable of standing against group pressures and bogus societal narratives. Their path towards this state of consciousness, integrity and individuality was a path of ‘remembering’ and a path of self-discovery. This Platonic remembering was a remembering of both the primordial forms (virtue, justice, truth, beauty, the good, etc.) and a remembering of what might in that context be called the ‘the self’ – a return to that inwardly receptive, self-knowing place from which we can hear the voice of wisdom from the transcendental depths of the soul. The notion of ‘remembering’ implies that the wisdom that we seek is not fundamentally beyond our experiencing – only forgotten.

So, while the language and the cultural framing is different, there is an important equivalent to this Platonic remembering in Buddhist Mindfulness practice. Through Mindfulness, especially when we frame it as the practice of ‘Resting as Consciousness’, we are both releasing the egoic mind and re-orientating ourselves to towards the mysterious suprapersonal force, or guiding principle, that the Platonic tradition speaks of. Through Mindfulness we come to ‘know ourselves’ – not just coming to know the dysfunction of the egoic mind, but coming to know the suprapersonal force or spirit that is calling us from beyond the egoic mind. It as if there is an ‘future self’ or ‘divine double’ that is more just the egoic mind’s aspirational image. Through ‘self-discovery’, we encounter and emerging self, that while it is still empty, clearly has vastly more ontological substance that the constellation of adaptations that is the egoic mind.

The notion of a difficult-to-define ’emerging self’ that we encounter on the path of self-discovery, has led practitioners within the Triratna Buddhist Community to add a fourth ‘Myth’ to Subhuti’s ‘Three Myths’ – a further distinct stage of the path called Emergence, that is nested within the three previous stages. I have written about this before in a previous article, but in this series I have been staying with the simplicity of Subhuti’s original ‘Three Myths’, while also affirming the idea that a process of ’emergence’ naturally arises out of the three-fold ‘self-discovery’ perspective. By staying with the ‘Three Myths’ conceptualisation, we affirm the idea that the three-stage collective process of Buddhism’s cultural and philosophical history (Hinayāna, Mahayāna, and Vajrayāna) has to some extent, been a recapitulation of the process that each individual practitioner undergoes in their own practice.

In the early centuries of Platonism, when the language of philosophical enquiry was ancient Greek, this suprapersonal guiding spirit was called a ‘daimon’, and the word ‘daimon’ was later translated into Latin by the word ‘genius’. So a person like a Leonardo da Vinci, a Goethe, a William Blake, a Dostoyevsky, a Carl Jung, or a Padmasambhava, becomes the sort of person that we might, in the modern idiom, call a ‘genius’, because they learned to renounce the limitations of the egoic mind and to allow themselves to be animated by a suprapersonal spiritual force. This suprapersonal spirit, or ‘daimon’, is a spiritual force from beyond the egoic mind, which provides the guiding and animating energy for a life that feels authentic and meaningful; and for a personality that naturally expresses its highest and most unique potential.

This theme is not easy to talk about in a Buddhist context. For Western practitioners of Buddhism however – for people who are serious about the anatman (no-self) doctrine – this Platonic perspective provides a healthy and grounding counterpoint to the erroneous spirit of nihilism, self-sacrifice, and self-denial that often gets woven into presentations of Buddhism. Practitioners feel much more comfortable about working systematically towards the Spritual Death of the egoic mind, once they gain a sense that the Spiritual Rebirth that follows has the sublimely positive character of the brahmavihāras. There is less resistance to really ‘looking’ – becoming really focused on recognising the ’emptiness’ of the self-illusion – if we realise that we are only removing the obstacles to a much more authentic way of being that is waiting to be born.

As Western Buddhists it is very important for us to get more sophisticated and semantically rigorous in the way we talk both about the egoic self-illusion and about what remains after that self-illusion is seen through. The egoic self is a process that get reified into a thing. In reality it is not even single. The understanding that arises from practicing Gendlin’s Focusing is that while the ‘clear space’ of Mindful Presence in the depth of mind is indeed single (as in the Neoplatonic ‘One’) the egoic self is clearly multiple. The egoic self is a series of identifications that we move in and out of in response to different social environments and triggering challenges. Each of these identifications it is a constellation of cognitive-perceptual processes (skandhas). Focusing practice shows very clearly that each identification has its own very specific style of somatic embodiment – its own ‘felt-sense’. Each of these patterns of cognitive-perceptual and somatic embodiment has an energetic momentum that the Buddhist tradition speaks of as the kleshas – the ‘obscurations’ or adventitious ‘defilements’ that obscure the process nature of the body-mind and serve to concretise our identifications.

The use of the noun ‘ego’ is especially unhelpful and confusing, and should, in my view, never be used by Buddhists. That sort of literalism and reification runs completely counter to the main thrust of Buddhist wisdom and can lead very easily to the adoption of crude and brutal psychological practices that aim to ‘break the ego’. The adjective ‘egoic’ is very useful however, because it invites us to identify the various cognitive-perceptual and somatic characteristics of the un-Enlightened mind. It is foundational in both Buddhist practice, and in Focusing practice, that we learn to recognise immediately whenever we are in an egoic identification – whenever we have fallen out of Mindfulness, or are no longer resting in Presence, or in Gendlin’s ‘clear space’.

While it is not term that I particular like, the personalising style of cognitive-perceptual activities, can also usefully be spoken of using the curious word selfing that has come into usage in the last ten years of so – since it is through the ‘selfing’ activities of the egoic mind, which I have been describing, that it is created and maintained. Gendlin taught us that whatever words we choose, there must be a phenomenological ‘fit’ with our actual experience. The Focusing method resonates strongly with that of the Buddhist tradition. It focuses on the release of egoic identification and on the release of the obscuring kleshas – the unravelling of the processes the English Buddhist translations render as ‘attachment’ or ‘clinging’.

When, in the process that Sangharakshita called Spiritual Death, identification with the skandhas drops away and the obscuring kleshas are emptied out of the body-mind, what remains is not nothing. Indeed the mandala structure of the skandhas system remains, but manifests in the mind as the ten components of the Five Wisdoms, and the eight components of the four brahmavihāras. When “the doors of perception are cleansed”, to use William Blake’s wonderful words, it is this underlying archetypal structure and this constellation of suprapersonal forces that provide the basis of a new non-egoic identity. It was this sublime non-egoic state of surrender to the suprapersonal forces of the dharmic reality, that Sangharakshita was pointing to in his notion of Spiritual Rebirth.

So, the terms Spiritual Death and Spiritual Rebirth provide useful pointers, provided that we are clear that it is the egoic self that dies, and that the rebirth that follows is essentially beyond comprehension – and certainly not a rebirth of the egoic mind. I believe that Gendlin’s Focusing can help to gain some sense of what Sangharakshita meant by Spiritual Rebirth. He points us to a place where we are resting receptively as the ‘clear space’ – resting as Consciousness – while simultaneously relating to all aspects of our experience with the attitudes of mind that a Buddhist would speak of in terms of the ‘other-regarding’ brahmavihāras. There is no egoic ‘self’ in that Spiritual Rebirth experience – no identification – but there is profound mental and emotional stability and profound wisdom. The Wisdoms and the brahmavihāras take the place of the egoic mind.

The word ‘suprapersonal’ was often used by Sangharakshita, especially in his autobiographical reflections, where he spoke of his intuition that suprapersonal forces were at work in him at crucial times in his life. It would seem that this use of the word ‘suprapersonal’ can provide an extremely useful Middle Way when we are trying to navigate a path that avoids both the individualism and self-obsession that infects some communities of spiritual practice, and the brutal psychological nihilism that we find within some strands of the Buddhist tradition – where the Buddha’s assertion that the self is an illusion is taken too far, or applied in way that is harsh, unreflective, or even unkind.

Buddhism is not alone in its pursuit of this Middle Way. The Neoplatonist view, that the source of the self is in the anima mundi (World Soul) and not separate from the eternal One, or Good, was adapted by Carl Jung into his Analytical Psychology (although he also drew on ancient Gnosticism, which is somewhat different) and subsequently into the Archetypal Psychology of James Hillman. In the new schools of thought that are exploring the philosophical and psychological implications of the key role played by Consciousness in Quantum Physics, we find a similar view – that the experience of a self is not personal but suprapersonal, and that it arises from a field of proto-Consciousness that has an objective reality that transcends the cognitive-perceptual self-system of the egoic body-mind. Wherever it appears, the suprapersonal perspective offers a nuance and a clarity that is more phenomenologically true than that of either scientific materialism or of the commonly-held literalistic interpretations of the Buddha’s teachings.

I feel some trepidation as I try to address this area. Buddhists can get very attached to various un-thought-through, and historically inaccurate versions of the idea that there is no self. Clearly however, what the Buddha was communicating in his anatman doctrine (anattā in Pali) was very subtle indeed. Those who find themselves in positions of authority within the Sangha cannot afford to approach the ultra-sophisticated notion of anatman with the brutal analytical literalism that often characterises the modern Western mind, or they will find themselves crushing the fragile growing shoots of emerging individuality in their students.

One of the paradoxes of this situation is that those who are advocates of a narrow and more ascetic interpretation of the anatman doctrine are not the ones who are engaged in serious contemplation of the Buddha’s teaching on the ’emptiness’ of the five skandhas – of the sort that I have engaged in in this series of articles. An opposite form of avoidance is also prevalent. This is the position that I have touched on in my critique of the heroic ‘self-development’ perspective, which appears to see a strong egoic will as an absolute necessity on the path of spiritual development – and as something that is only extinguished at the moment of Enlightenment.

This sort of confusion strongly highlights the need for the three-fold synthesis that has been spoken of in terms of the ‘Three Myths’ – the three archetypal perspectives that we find in Buddhist philosophy and practice. What Buddhism seeks is not a crude renunciation of anything that resembles a self, but a much more balanced and integrated path – a path that sees through the conditioning of the egoic mind, while fostering the emergence of a true self that has the character of the brahmavihāras and of the transcendental bodhisattva principle. In the modern Western context, the Middle Way does not require monasticism and self-denial – rather, the lifestyle possibilities for the serious practitioner are endless. We can live a life of radical surrender to the transcendental dharmic reality that the Buddhist tradition called the dharmakāya, and the Neoplatonists called the One, or the Good, while also living a full modern life of individual self-expression, personal vocation, individuality and deep personal authenticity.

While my reflections on Platonism, may seem like a digression from our theme of the connections between Buddhism and Focusing, I hope they have served to illuminate what we mean, in the context of the ‘Three Myths’, by ‘self-discovery’. It is of such great importance, in my view, that we aspire to a Vajrayāna (or ‘self-discovery’) level of Mindfulness practice – a level that is achieved and expressed well, in my view, in Eugene Gendlin’s Focusing dyad practice, and in the Focusing mode of self-enquiry. The point that I am ultimately trying to make here, or to reinforce, is that Gendlin’s Focusing, which enters the practice of self-enquiry through humanistic psychology and the philosophy of phenomenology, paradoxically ends up beautifully expressing the key elements of the ‘self-discovery’, or Vajrayāna, perspective – attitudes that we also find in the Platonic tradition within Western philosophy.

If I was to list these key elements: the first is the idea that the unknowable ’emptiness’ of the dharmakāya, (Gendlin’s ‘clear space’), is a primary and unconditioned reality that is ever-present within the mind; the second is that spiritual practice is an embodiment process, in which we open to the bodily-felt resonance of archetypal and suprapersonal forces – dimensions of intelligence, emotional positivity, and wisdom from beyond the egoic mind; and third is that wisdom requires a ‘self-discovery’ process, in which we are supported to ‘know ourselves’ – a process that includes ordinary psychological self-knowledge of the workings of our egoic mind, but ultimately goes far beyond it.

Ultimately, what we are seeking to discover on the ‘self-discovery’ path is the bodhicitta – our deepest and most authentic spiritual vocation; the contribution that we are being inwardly called to make, and through which we shall be most deeply fulfilled. To engage in ‘self-discovery’ is to seek to remove what is obscuring what is most authentic, most true, most real, most noble, and most beautiful in us. It can be characterised as a ‘direct path’ because it takes the view that it is by turning our attention directly toward that in us that is most unconditioned and most sublime, that we precipitate a systematic release of all the egoic patterns and processes that obscure the dharmic level of our being.

The ‘self-discovery’ stage of practice, does not deny the value of, or leave behind, the ‘self-development’ (‘self-power’), and ‘self-surrender’ (Other Power) stages – rather it is nested within those previous frames of reference. It goes deeper however in the way it challenges literalism; completely embraces the notions of ’emptiness’ and of the dharmakāya; and takes the phenomenology of the body-mind as its context for an investigation of the immanence of the transcendental dharmic reality. Once it is seen clearly, ‘self-discovery’ is felt to be a natural continuation of, and refinement of, the ‘self-power’ and Other Power forms of practice that we initially encounter, and is generally recognised to be an even more rapid and even more deeply transformative approach.

While the transition from ‘self-power’ to Other Power (‘self-development’ to ‘self-surrender’) brings us into contact with archetypal forces like the mahabrahmavihāras, the transition from Other Power to ‘self-discovery’ brings us into contact with our ‘daimon’, or ‘genius’ – the suprapersonal source of our particular, and perhaps unique, creative contribution. Each of these three stages of practice is more effective at eroding the kleshas of the egoic mind than the last. Our receptive relationship with the mahabrahmavihāras brings the stability of Integration and Positive Emotion, and may be regarded as a profound accelerant of our transformation. When we begin to enter that stage of the Dharma life that Sangharakshita’s ‘System of Practice’ calls ‘Spiritual Death’, and start to find that, in our experience of samādhi, we cannot locate a self (only Consciousness and processes of cognition and perception), we should take this as a very good sign. What appears in place of that egoic identification with the surface of ourselves, during the Spiritual Rebirth, will be impossible to describe. Once again, we should celebrate this unknowability and indefinability. It is exactly what the Buddhist tradition tells us to expect, and Gendlin’s advice was that we should continue to try to find words, even for the un-describable and inexpressible.

Like Gendlin, we may recognise the ’empty’ ‘clear space’ of Consciousness, and of Presence, as the source of a new non-egoic form of self-hood – or at least as a non-self centre that is associated with this body in a non-personal way. Finding ourselves in a realm that is beyond conceptualisation, Gendlin’s phenomenological approach – simply accurately describing our experience metaphorically, or bearing witness to the images that are arising from our bodily-felt experience – is usually found to be our best way forward. In the Spiritual Rebirth that follows Spiritual Death, we discover a deeper identity, a self-less identity that has the character of the brahmavihāras – and we recognise the brahmavihāras as the dimensions of an objective and collective bodhicitta that is at work in us. We find ourselves participating in, and giving expression to a love and an intelligence that, while it is entirely beyond us, is progressively finding embodiment within us.

There is much that could be said on all this, but I find myself particularly deeply engaged by Gendlin’s suggestion that radical transformation is more easily achieved by our recognition that ultimately all of the energies of the body-mind can be viewed as life serving, or as having a ‘life forward’ dimension. Rather than trying to divide the samskāras into ‘good’ and ‘bad’ energies, we need to dis-identify from them and relate to them from a place of wise Compassion (karunā), so that we can come to recognise that each one has a life-serving purpose. As I outlined above, in regard to the volitional samskāras skandha, this expresses an understanding that the Buddhist tradition came to speak of in terms of the All-Accomplishing Wisdom. Gendlin, like the Buddha, invites us to rest ‘as’ the non-personal ‘clear space’ of Consciousness, and to familiarise ourselves with the impersonal volitional forces within – with the suprapersonal dimensions of our being as they are experienced somatically in the field of the body. He invites us to embrace the egoic dis-identification process, and to recognise the process of healing and spiritual renewal that is always trying to happen.

In Summary

I took as my starting point, the idea that the four brahmavihāras provide us with a way of describing the qualities of the spacious non-personal place within, that Gendlin called the ‘clear space’ – a very fruitful area of enquiry that I have not seen explored elsewhere. This area of practical and philosophical connection between Buddhism and Focusing is one that I have been fascinated by for many years – and I would very much like to provide more reflections on this cross-over in future articles in this series. While all eight aspects of the brahmavihāras can be recognised as aspects of what has been called the Focusing ‘attitude’, I believe that the ‘self-regarding’ or ‘receptive’ brahmavihāras are particularly foundational in the process of establishing a familiarity with the ‘clear space’. It is on practicing the ‘self-regarding’ brahmavihāras, even more than the ‘other-regarding’ brahmavihāras, that we recognise that our personal and relative experience of the brahmavihāras is actually only a reflection and a resonance of the mahabrahmavihāras – the ‘great’, universal, or ‘absolute’, brahmavihāras, which are inherent in the dharmic reality, and therefore in Consciousness. When we recognise the mahabrahmavihāras, and then begin to integrate them in this ‘self-regarding’ or devotional-receptive way, our cultivation of their ‘other-regarding’ aspects comes very much more easily.

From a Buddhist point of view, we can recognise that when Gendlin was teaching Focusing, he was teaching what Buddhists know as Mindfulness. He was inviting us to become conscious of the way we move in and out of egoic identification, and giving us pointers as to the difference between, on one side, the clear, Mindful, ‘resting as Consciousness’ state, which leads to Integration and Positive Emotion; and, on the other side, the personalised and identified states, which lead to various states of dis-integration, and to what we may call ‘negative’ emotional states. In the Buddhist tradition, this dichotomy was very comprehensively described by Padmasambhava in the Bardo Thodol (Tibetan Book of the Dead), where the paths of dis-integration and emotional negativity are spoken of in terms of the five egoic kleshas and the five corresponding Realms from Buddhism’s ‘Six Realms’ archetypal cosmology.

Also in the Bardo Thodol, Padmasambhava describes the Dharmadhātu Mandala, which sets out this dichotomy in a five-fold graphical and symbolic form. At the heart of the whole ‘model’ is the five skandhas – the five cognitive-perceptual components of the body-mind. The skandhas are presented as having the potential to manifest either extremely positively or extremely negatively, depending on our ability or inability to sustain Mindfulness – and on our ability or inability to recognise and ‘rest as’ the clear space of Consciousness symbolised by the white centre of the mandala.

 

 

I find it extremely useful to take on board Padmasambhava’s suggestion that each of the skandhas, to the extent that we are identified with them, lead us to a particular style of egoic dysfunction and spiritual stuckness – in a word, to dukkha, or suffering. Our experience of the skandhas always goes one of two ways. The dysfunction arising from identification with the skandhas is symbolised by the corresponding kleshas and Realms. If, on the other hand, we are Mindful enough, and are able to recognise that the skandhas are ’empty’, that they can unfold into the brahmavihāras and the Five Wisdoms. The emptiness of the five skandhas is a subtle and complex Buddhist teaching, and it is best understood, in my experience, by working simultaneously ‘forwards’ from the corresponding kleshas and Realms, and ‘backwards’ from the corresponding brahmavihāras and Wisdoms. The brahmavihāras are not mentioned in the Bardo Thodol, but the correspondences, shown in the diagram above, between the ’empty’ skandhas and the brahmavihāras are extremely useful for our understanding of the nature of the clear space of the Dharmadhātu Wisdom and the other four Wisdoms.

These are themes that I have written about previously on this website, as they are central and profoundly necessary to our understanding. I shall be returning to explore them further, with particular reference to the connections between Eugene Gendlin’s Focusing and Buddhism, in future articles in this mini-series.

 

William Parker 2025

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