My fifth retreat, February-March 2006, was four-weeks long with Ayya Khema teaching (on video), “assisted” by Leigh who did the interviews and answered questions. This retreat was where things took a turn into the unexpected.
Leigh’s method, following his teacher Ayya Khema, is that when he deems someone ready for it, he guides the student through the stages of transcendental dependent origination5, which are a series of ten classic stages to follow when moving toward awakening. Partway through the retreat Leigh started to guide me through them. In order they are: joy, rapture (piti), tranquility, happiness (sukha), concentration, knowledge and vision of things as they really are, disenchantment, (sometimes) path moment or awakening called dispassion, emancipation, and finally the knowledge of destruction. Looking closely at arising and passing away of phenomena in a focused way for several days, from the time I woke up to the time I fell asleep, induced a state of crisis at a nonconceptual level. (This is why it is safer to be guided through it by an experienced and trained teacher. Things can go wrong at this stage and you can end up in states of depression or even psychosis if you are susceptible to them.)
Going through the exercise produced in me deep sadness at the meaninglessness of everything and the staggering amount of suffering in the world. All actions by everyone seemed pointless since they were so clearly impermanent. This insight crystalized around a wooden bridge near the meditation centre (Cloud Mountain in southern Washington). There is a bronze plaque on the bridge dedicating its building decades earlier to the builders’ children. From the date inscribed in it, I guessed that the builders, and maybe even their children, might all be dead, and the bridge itself was rotting away. How poignant! The next day I reached a point of equanimity, while presumably some processing was still going on at the subconscious level.
An interesting aspect of Ayya Khema teaching is that at some point you “ask for” liberation from dukkha6. Ayya Khema calls it “sending the crow”, in analogy to a practice from ancient mariners who kept crows (in the crow’s nest presumably) aboard their ship. Once in a while they would release one of them and watch it fly higher and higher. Most of the time the crow did not see land and would just come back down to the ship. However, if it caught sight of land it would take off for it, indicating the direction of land to the mariners.
Ayya Khema taught to once in a while review the main aspects in one’s life where there is still dukkha, then intensely ask for liberation from it. You might undergo a breakthrough in consciousness and get some degree of permanent relief from dukkha. There is no guarantee, of course. As the saying goes: “awakening is an accident; spiritual practice makes us accident-prone”.
One night while listening to Ayya Khema’s instructions I intensely asked for liberation from suffering and pain, and felt something stir in my heart, something I had never felt before, together with the feeling that something important was happening.
At first the main effects were mostly temporary senses of euphoria and immense relief. After a couple of days, once I managed to calm down enough to sleep and meditate again, I met a new state of consciousness. At the bottom of the deepest jhanas I could reach, I broke into a state of void, of stillness, of clarity never experienced before. I thought: “This is it! This is what I have been looking for all this time without knowing it. This is home”. From then on for the next two months my practice was to go through the jhanas to reach that place of incredible inner peace. The void, as I refer to it, is not an ordinary state of blank mind. It is accompanied by intense awareness, but an awareness of nothing at all. The void has no property whatsoever, which is why it can only be spoken of in negative terms: the stillness (absence of motion); the silence (absence of sound); the void (absence of anything), the signless (absence of characteristic). However awareness of the senses is still operating.
After I got home from the retreat, I found myself spontaneously going through another round of transcendental dependent origination. Everything took again a taint of uselessness, meaninglessness. I remember talking with a friend who was complaining of the time and mental energy people were spending watching such useless entertainments such as professional sports. I agreed, and added: “that’s true, and moreover, it’s true of everything! It is all meaningless!” “Oh my, Pierre” he replied, “this is not like you at all!” My main respite from the doom and gloom was into meditation, especially into the void that I could find at the bottom of the jhanas. I also found that mindfulness during the day had gotten to an almost ridiculous level. I watched carefully every little gesture, and mundane tasks like washing the dishes became engrossing.
After six weeks of ever-deepening doom and mindfulness, something extraordinary happened on May 6th 2006 at about 2AM. I had a dream that I was falling into a black hole, that I was being annihilated. It was an absolutely terrifying experience. I screamed at the top of my lungs and my wife Jennifer shook me hard to try to wake me up, which took a while. I was relieved once I realized it was “just a dream” and was concerned that I must have woken up the whole neighbourhood. I went back to sleep, uneventfully for the rest of the night.
In the morning, after my usual routine, I laid down to meditate. (I mostly meditated lying down at the time because of a bad back.) What a surprise I had when I discovered that the void, that I had been able to reach only after at least half an hour of deepening concentration, was fully present as soon as I closed my eyes! It has been present ever since. Maybe the void can be thought of as the lack of something that used to be there, a restlessness of the mind. I have never got habituated to it, contrary to all the other states reached through jhanas. The void is fascinating, fills me with awe. I can see that someone with theistic beliefs could think of it as God. It is that amazing.
Of course, if the void is present as soon as I close my eyes, it must also be present behind everything when my eyes are open. It is just harder to see, like the moon in daylight, but if you know where to look you can see it even when the sun is shining. I soon managed to sense it with my eyes open. For the next several months, dwelling in the void became my only “practice”.
My next retreat, in September 2006, was at Birken Forest Monastery in British Columbia. I had an interview with Ajahn Sona where I described to him my practice and how it had led to the breakthrough into the void. His first comment was: “why did you go through so much of a crisis getting there? Why didn’t you follow the path of serenity instead?” I thought “What? Is there an easier path to it?” It would be nice if it were so. Then he asked me what my plans for that retreat were. I was in the middle of reading Ajahn Bram’s book on deep jhanas called Bliss Upon Bliss. I said that I would like to experience one of those deep jhanas. His answer floored me: “Why would you want to do jhanas if you have access to the void? Getting access to the void is what you do jhanas for!” I got it. Doing any other practice would be like, after crossing a stream, you carried on your back the raft that brought you there. Moreover, if I was honest and listened to how I felt I did not want to do anything else. Doing any other practice would be like spray-painting graffiti on the frescos of the Sistine Chapel. You could do it if you wanted, but it would feel like a sacrilege. Why desecrate perfection?
An interesting comment that Ajahn Sona made was regarding my description of rapture in the first jhana through metta. I expressed that having a wide grin over several hours a day was leading to sore jaws. He said that it was a typical experience at the early stage, like teenagers getting drunk – any cheap plunk will do. Later, as we develop more refined tastes, we become connoisseurs and get to enjoy more subtle or refined experiences. What a funny simile coming from a monk who had undertaken the precept of refraining from drinking alcohol! He was perfectly right of course. Eventually I did abandon these strong raptures as too coarse.
When I spent hours blissing out back then, it felt self-indulgent. Now that I interpret the same joyous sensations as love, it feels wholesome.
I thought then that having access to something as awesome as the void must be the end goal of the practice. I devoured every book I could lay my hands on that hinted at what it was but was never certain that they meant the same thing as I was experiencing. I thought for a while that it was what is called rigpa in Dzogchen Tibetan Buddhism, and according to that interpretation having access to rigpa is indeed the end goal of the practice. It was disappointing though that I was not experiencing a noticeable decrease in dukkha in my life. Something was still missing, but what?