When we come to spiritual practice, the forms and specific techniques we hear about and take up can have a lot of mystique about them. It is common for a new aspirant on the Buddhist path, for example, to become obsessed with certain ways of behaving, and to hold to them in all situations. One gets an idea of what it means to be spiritual and then begins to worship that, on the basis of what it looks like, or means that ‘I am’, rather than out of a direct sensing of the cause and effect process in the present moment, and what qualities of heart are being activated. So it is common that this kind of disposition can often be accompanied by states of heart that are actually quite tight, or rigid, underneath the sheen of the exterior activity, technique, or pattern of behaviour.
This is most obviously seen in the fundamentalist mindset, which is a total rigidification around ‘my way’ as absolutely right, and therefore involves a souring, looking down upon and fearing of everything that is at odds with it. In the most extreme cases this can lead to aggression and violence, even though the ideal at its root may have been quite lofty, as an ideal. In subtle ways we can also become quite fundamentalist about our spiritual practice, scorning and belittling a ‘them’ who practice in different ways, and use different appraches to our own.
I had a thing about neatly folded bedsheets in my early years of practice. I couldn’t leave my room unless the bedsheets were folded so neatly that they looked like a photograph from a home decor magazine. Sometimes I would get up to leave my living quarters and upon turning around notice that the bedsheets weren’t impeccably folded. I would feel a pinching in my heart. A current of energy would run through my body, with the message ‘you’re not spiritual’. This wasn’t overt, but rather a subtle tone, or mood of self. The ‘me’ just got less spiritual. Marks off for slack behaviour. So I would rush back in and make the sheets perfect again. ‘Ahhh – spiritual ‘me’ has returned. Excellent’. It took a while to begin to feel the inherent limitation of this mindset. And it wasn’t just my bedsheets! Views about ‘right practice’ would permeate my conscious mind, formulating black and white projections of how ‘I should be’, as well as the hope that I was being seen as ‘the spiritual guy’.
Around that time, when this obsessiveness around spiritual practice reached its zenith, (or perhaps it’s nadir) I began to hear about one of the first three fetters[1] the Buddha taught. The pali phrase is silabatta paramasa which is most commonly translated as ‘clinging to rights and rituals’. That’s an OK translation, but I prefer a more literal take: paramasa can be translated as ‘fondling’, while sila and batta refer to behaviour and duties respectively. So it’s an activity of fondling. That sounded familiar at the time… From the perspective of self view the mind tends to fondle images and ideas of ‘myself’ projected into the future, ‘their eyes’, or most subtly into abstracted takes on the present moment. And it refers to certain activities or ways of doing things that we use to prop that up. That’s the basic activity of silabatta paramasa, and it always generates an underlying sense of disconnection to the present moment and a loss of freshness and vitality in our practice and in our lives.
The basic assumption within this ‘fetter’ is that forms, views and behaviours in themselves are liberating. If I just do this thing, or be this person, at some point in time there will be this wonderful thing that’s happening to ‘me’… It’s not that these are wrong in themselves, it’s just that there’s an inherent limitation and out-of-touchness that comes through seeking identity in them, and identifiying with them as absolutely real in themselves.
Of course there are certain principles and qualities of heart that are indispensible to authentic practice. But one can begin to notice that these qualities, such as humility, generosity, and harmlessness aren’t dependent upon particular forms to be activated. They are independent of a view of ‘myself’. In fact, the activity of clinging to views, even the most noble ones, even the purest ideals of how we should be, inhibit freedom and release of awareness and therefore inhibit the arising of the very qualities we love themselves. So instead of love and harmony we get the opposite – the ‘me’ that has to defend my view of what is ‘right’.
This doesn’t mean that forms and systems can’t potentize our minds, hearts and bodies for beautiful qualities and for awakening – they can, and do, of course. But the reflection on sila batta paramasa points to the reality that all they can do is channel specific energies, and in themselves they are not absolutely true. They can be very good, but not absolutely true. They can be highly beautiful, but if the resonance of beauty in our own hearts is dependent upon them to arise, and withers in their absence, then there is a place of clinging that we haven’t unhooked in the heart.
So as one begins to see that freeing oneself from hardening around practices and fixed ways of behaving (while not being averse to them either) is necessary for unhooking the mind from the pain of self-contraction, one begins to sense that human life will always have the flavour of diversity to it. People have different characters. We have different proficiencies, proclivities and talents, and from a Dharma perspective, we need different skilful means to free our hearts. This is not wrong. This is life on earth. One can get a sense from the early Buddhist suttas that the Buddha was not at odds with this. He taught a variety of different, and sometimes seemingly conflicting skilful means to a whole range of people, dependent upon where they were at, how they were conditioned, and what would be useful for them at that time.
The path to freedom is based on a direct sensing of what is wholesome and what is obstructive in the heart, in this moment – and that is our guage for practice. This may not look particularly impressive in terms of ‘me’. We may look very ordinary – even boring from the outside. Or we could look wonderful. Or we could look wonderful, but actually be subtly getting off on the sense of ‘myself’ that our activity is generating. In the end it’s not how we look, but how we are that makes the difference.
So the practice, then, is experiential and direct, rather than abstract and idealistic. The mind that is obsessed with ideas of myself as ‘spiritual’ only hurts. Beginning to unhook from its hypnotic stare can initially feel disorienting and even confusing. If I’m not doing my spiritual stuff so that I can prop up the idea of ‘me’ as spiritual, then what am I in this? If we stay with that question we can also begin to attend to another question: ‘Is this suffering?’ Then we find that more and more, a tight contracted heart is just not worth it – even if it’s fondling and feeding off the most tantalizing spiritual view, there’s something we have missed. This is an edge I am very interested in exploring in my own practice. When I tighten up around a take on ‘Buddhism’ – what’s happened there? Sometimes it takes a while, but usually the deluded mind has to concede, sometimes after putting up a valiant fight, that ‘I don’t know… Ah, yes… I don’t know. That feels so much better.’ And that opens the door to that place in the heart, in our being, where not knowing feels absolutely right.
[1] The three fetters are said to be the obstructions to the the first taste of the Unconditioned, in the early Buddhist teachings. They are: Self View, Skeptical Doubt, and Clinging to Practices and Precepts.