Seeing That Frees: Meditations on Emptiness and Dependent Arising

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During this time Rob also began sitting retreats with Thanissaro Bhikkhu (Ajahn Geoff), an American Thai Forest monk and abbot of Metta Forest Monastery in California. Thanissaro strongly influenced his development, although Rob would eventually take his Dharma in very different directions. Rob received a diagnosis of stage four pancreatic cancer in the autumn of 2015, just before he and Catherine were due to teach their first Soulmaking retreat at Gaia House. Rob left Gaia to have surgery, and never returned to his resident teacher role (although he continued to support retreatants there individually whenever he felt well enough). For the next five years Rob worked ceaselessly under the difficult conditions of his illness to refine and fill out these new teachings, recording many series of Soulmaking talks from his desk at home. He continued working in this way as long as he was able, recording his last talk, Perfection and Christ's Blessing, in March 2020. LAURA BRIDGMAN was a Buddhist nun in the Theravada tradition from 1995 to 2015. Her main teachers within this school have been Ajahn Sumedho, Ajahn Sucitto and Sayadaw U Tejaniya. She has been offering retreats since 2007, most recently mainly at Gaia House where she is also the staff support teacher. Her practice orientation is the Buddha’s teaching of the Five Spiritual Faculties (trust, balanced effort, mindfulness, composure and wisdom). Alongside her Vipassana (Insight) practice she is a student of the Diamond Approach (Ridhwan). JUHA PENTTILÄ has been practicing meditation since 2002. He has spent extended periods of time on retreats and in monasteries in Asia and Europe and is one of the founding members of Nirodha, the Finnish Insight Meditation practice community. Juha completed his Insight Meditation teacher training in 2020. In addition to exploring meditation, Juha’s teaching is influenced by the current climate crisis and engaged perspectives into the Dharma. Listen to one of Sumedha's talks given on the Rest and Renewal retreat at Gaia House January 2023: The Beauty of Renunciation, Aligning w Life (Nekkhamma Pāramī) (Duration 43:52)

So it’s taking those really basic concepts that are sort of, I would say, hard to argue with – that a human being can play with their ways of looking, and that we can see, even at a gross level, that the way of looking fabricates, to some extent, what we perceive. So I see that when I’m completely crazy, what Buddhists call papañca, and my mind is just running riot with all this storymaking and nonsense, in that experience I fabricate a whole sense of self, certainly quite a lot of suffering usually, and a kind of world involving certain very prominent objects and a whole tangled solidity of perception. When we come out of that kind of craziness, that way of looking which wasn’t an intentional way of looking, that papañca, then we see, “Oh, it was a fabrication.” So we take these two concepts, ways of looking and fabrication – which, I would say, are kind of obvious to a certain extent; a little bit of self-awareness just reveals those possibilities – and we say, “What if we don’t close them down or limit them as concepts? What if we just open them up as sort of avenues of exploration?” In other words, what ways of looking are possible, without limiting how many are legitimate, and not pre-assuming what is fabricated and what isn’t? Rob: That’s an interesting question, Michael. My immediate response is I can’t remember. [ laughter] I’m sure it’ll come to me in a minute. My other immediate response is that, so, if there’s a story, then this will be like today’s version of the story, which might be a different telling of history than on another day or in another mood or whatever. You know, past is empty, too. So, I know where I got the idea of fabrication from. I got that from Ajahn Thanissaro, who maybe many of your listeners will know him – Thanissaro Bhikkhu, Ajahn Geoff, who is an American monk with a monastery in San Diego. He was a monk in Thailand for 25 years, I think. He was a very important teacher for me for a kind of short period. I was actually thinking of becoming a monk at his monastery for a while. The idea of fabrication I got from him. I’m not sure if he would feel, if he read Seeing That Frees, if he would feel I had taken it too far and beyond the range of what he would feel comfortable with, or into territory he would not feel comfortable with. I don’t know. Katrin completed her Dharma teacher training under the guidance of Martine Batchelor and teaches in South Africa and in the UK. Rob: Yeah. As I said before, this was very strange to me when I came across this kind of talk and these kind of teachings in, for instance, Tibetan Gelug traditions. So one example would be – you mentioned the chariot earlier. It’s something that appears in the Pali Canon, the original Buddhist teachings. A nun introduces the teaching of deconstructing the self like you would deconstruct a chariot. It’s given there as a sort of philosophical argument, but in the Tibetan Gelug teachings they develop that into a meditation with certain instructions. I guess, for me, again, the instructions that I found for that were – they didn’t feel very satisfying or very powerful, and I certainly never met anyone who had any really liberative power for. So I just experimented with finding ways that they would be really satisfying for me. Rob: Yeah. I can’t remember so much what’s in the book now; I think there’s a little bit of reconstruction in the book, but yes, I think so, when it gets into the more Vajrayāna practices. One way of conceiving what we’re doing with Vajrayāna or tantric practices – one way of conceiving it – is that one has realized or become quite skilled and adept at this kind of fading of perception, and one can become so skilled at it that it’s almost like it’s a gas pedal on a car; you can press more so that everything just completely fades out, or a little less, or a lot less. So you can kind of modulate where you are on what I call the spectrum of fading, or the spectrum of the fabrication of perception. One of the things you can do is, let’s say, put the gas pedal fairly far down, but not completely far down so that everything fades; you’re retaining an almost light or insubstantial sense of the perception of the body and self and the world of phenomena. What you have there is a very insubstantial, fluid but malleable perception. Then you can actually start shaping perception this way or that.Michael: Yeah. This is fascinating. You are preaching to the choir here of meta-rationality or metaconceptuality. We talk about that on the show quite a bit, particularly with David Chapman. I’m not sure if you’re familiar with his work, but he’s a Vajrayāna practitioner with quite a large body of work describing meta-rationality, which is essentially what you just described – being able to switch conceptual frameworks based on what’s most useful, most beautiful, most helpful, most whatever right now, and do that very fluidly. Please be courteous at all times. If you’re engaged in any kind of discussion, be as prepared to listen as you are to express yourself. Remember that there’s always a real person behind a computer/device screen, and they are likely quite different from you. So in some sense, the premise of the book, or one of the premises, one of the sort of starting strands of the book turns out to be the actual delivery point where it all ends up. So that’s part of it. I think maybe another sort of weave in the story was – and again, it’s today’s story, right now, at this time, when you’re asking me – I think, perhaps, I certainly felt helped by a lot of the teachings that were out there. Certainly, as I mentioned, Ajahn Geoff, and Christopher Titmuss, and Christina Feldman – actually lots of teachings. But I also felt, somehow, nothing fully satisfied me. There were lots of questions that I couldn’t really find answers to, or people with the same degree of burning interest in them. So I had a lot of time on retreat – years, in fact. And I was, to a certain extent, it was a natural kind of move for me to just begin experimenting and seeing what happened and getting super interested in stuff, with this burning curiosity about it. In early 2013 Rob was one of the driving forces behind the creation of the Dharma Action Network for Climate Engagement. DANCE was initiated by a group of Dharma teachers, staff and friends of Gaia House as a forum for the wider sangha to explore what might be possible in bringing creative Dharma responses to the climate crisis. DANCE initiated its own actions and also joined forces with other organisations such as BP or Not BP.

Rob Burbea, who died aged 54 earlier this month, was a Dharma teacher loved and valued by many of us in the Triratna community. His clear teachings on emptiness and the imaginal may prove to be of great significance for the development of Dharma traditions in the West. Rob was steeped in the Insight meditation tradition in the USA and Europe. He was also, among other things, a classical and jazz guitarist, a climate activist and a lover of Jewish and Christian mysticism. I met Rob just once on a Buddhafield Yatra shortly before he took up residence as a teacher at Gaia House in 2004. His sensitivity, playfulness and sheer love of the Dharma was evident in the short talks he gave around the campfire after a days walking. CATHERINE McGEE has been teaching Insight Meditation at Gaia House and internationally since 1997. Her teaching emphasises working with perceptions of the body on the path of awakening and in the healing of the individual and collective crises of our times. She is an advisor to One Earth Sangha . Between 2014 and 2020 Catherine collaborated with Rob Burbea in shaping and teaching a Soulmaking Dharma. Venerable Canda Theri now has a little Vihara in the beautiful city of Oxford, close to the River Thames. Besides running the charity and monastery, she teaches extensively and spends 3-4 months a year in solitary retreat. Venerable Canda Theri loves the Dhamma and her offerings are richly informed by the compassion and pragmatism of the Early Buddhist texts. She emphasises kindness and letting go as a way to deepen stillness and wisdom - a work in progress! More than that, though, we see that if I really start practicing this – let’s take that as an example because I started with it – way of looking, ‘not me, not mine,’ it doesn’t just stop there, bringing a momentary release of suffering. I actually start to see, if I really practice it, and I get quite skilled at it, and develop it over a range of different objects of my experience, then I notice other things. The sense of self starts to change. In other words, this way of looking starts to affect not just the dukkha, the experienced suffering in the moment, but also the sense of self, the experience of self in the moment. That becomes, for example, less solid, less separate, more spacious, et cetera, lighter, through that way of looking. And if I take it even further, I find that with that same way of looking, this anattā way of looking, the very perception of the world starts to change. Certainly these objects themselves, of course they’re seen as ‘not me, not mine,’ but that perception of objects itself starts to – in the language of the book, and the other central premise – be fabricated less. They start to appear less solid – not just that they’re kind of unhooked from my identification, unhooked as belonging to me or being me, but they actually, with practice, over time, start to feel less solid, less substantial. It’s almost like they’re less intense as experiences. We say they’re fabricated less, those perceptions are fabricated less. That lessening of fabrication moves along a spectrum with the development of my skill in that way of looking, and in some instances can go all the way to those sensations, et cetera, not appearing at all – they’re not fabricated at all. This is just one example.

Practising the Jhānas

Listen to one of Bhante Bodhidhamma's Talks: Mae Chee Kaew: Awakened! (Duration 41:40. More talks are available on Rob was impressed by the appearance of Extinction Rebellion (XR) in the UK in September 2018 - a new organisation whose aim was to use non-violent civil disobedience as a lever to force the British government into action on the global climate crisis. XR provided a new focus and locus of action for large numbers of practitioners and teachers in the Insight Meditation tradition. Rob felt it as a beautiful and often courageous collective response to political inaction in the arena of climate change - one that also bought a deeper ethics and activism to meditation and practice. Rob managed to travel to a couple of XR protests before his illness made this too difficult. Over time there were aspects of XR that he questioned, but he remained largely supportive of its philosophy and actions.