Stephen Batchelor on enlightenment and listening

Following up on my previous post about a charming little book by Stephen Batchelor and his wife Martine, which consists of talks they gave at a 2016 retreat in England based on the Korean Buddhist tradition (Son), here's some passages from What is this? that I resonated with in my pre-meditation reading this morning. 

I liked this take on enlightenment, which is very much in line with Zen teachings. Son, which means "meditation," is the Korean equivalent of the Japanese "Chan" and Japanese "Zen."

So once we let go of the idea that to be enlightened means to understand the nature of reality as it really is, or to gain some privileged mystical insight into truth with a capital "T" -- the way of thinking Deshan and other Son masters are trying to shake us free from -- then we shift into a practice that that is inextricably tied up with how we respond to life in each moment, which is the foundation for engaging with the world in an ethical way.

And I also liked this description of how listening can be a better way of describing what meditation, and life, is all about, than seeing is.

When you are asked to watch something carefully, what do you do?

You tend to narrow the focus of your attention onto the object, thereby letting it stand out in the wider field of vision, in order that you can look at it more precisely. What you're looking at is invariably something outside of yourself, 'over there' somewhere.

What often happens in meditation is that we fail to acknowledge the metaphoric nature of the visual language being used. Quite unconsciously, we adopt an inner stance or posture that mimics the act of seeing.

You might feel, for example, that when you're meditating there's a bit of you, in the back of your head somewhere, that's peering in on your body and breath and mental states. You've created a distance between an observer looking in and an object being observed.

But if you think about listening or hearing it's often completely the other way round. Rather than narrowing your attention on a particular sound 'out there', you open yourself up to allow the sound to enter you. 

When you listen to a piece of music in your living room, for example, what do you tend to do? Very often you dim the lights or close your eyes, then raise the sound so that it envelopes you. Then you relax and let yourself be completely receptive to the sounds that enter you from all around.

So the internal posture you assume is not that of a detached observer looking out onto something, but rather a completely vulnerable and open attention that allows sounds to stream into you from every direction.

Now that's a very different inner stance. Your physical posture might be the same, but your mental posture is the opposite to that of looking at something. 

...To think of listening in this way can help us better understand how to attend to what arises in response to the question 'What is this?'. In posing that question, allow yourself to be completely open to whatever you 'hear' in the pregnant silence that follows, without any hopes or expectations.

Metaphorically, you're waiting to hear a response rather than expecting to find an answer. The point of Son practice is not to look for an answer, or to see the nature of reality. Again, pay attention to the metaphors we use unthinkingly. 

You might find it helpful on our last full day together just to explore what it feels like in your body to be open to this question in the same way that you would open yourself to a piece of music or listen with total attention to the polyphony of the birds and wind outside, the occasional plane that flies overhead, the patter of rain on the windows.

Listen more carefully, and at the same time notice how that listening is not just an opening of the mind but an opening of the heart, a vital concern or care for the world, the source of what we call compassion or love, which brings us back into the world of relationships that we will be returning to tomorrow.

Comments

[Todd Chambers]

Interesting! Brian, my first Spiritual Master, Dr. Il Bung Seo Kyong Bo, was from the same Korean Son lineage tradition, and he taught me the same koan, "What is This?" Years later, I was in India, and ended up at Radha Soami Satsang Beas.......

[Jason Youngman]

Nice selection of quotes. You have captured the gist of the book rather gracefully it seems. To complement the first quote, here is something that Stephen mentioned in a talk titled The Ethical Life on 17th of Nov, 2015:

"Dharma practice is not about gaining some kind of private enlightenment but it's about re-configuring or re-construing one’s life in its totality and in this respect it includes virtue (sila), contemplation (Samadhi) and philosophy (panna) together. In other words if we take that to be the core of the dharma practice, then its primary frame in which we need to contextualize it is ethical."

If we take that to be case that is. Noble Batchelor, never affirming or denying anything, even when it happens to be the core of his teaching.

[Spence Tepper]

We like to believe that meditation practice somehow makes us enlightened, and the practitioner morally or ethically superior. But even to suggest such a thing, although free of Metaphysical notions, doesn't seem right.

To say we can't know reality as it is, isn't true. We already witness it as it is, including our filters, from this one point. Simply reflecting on what we see helps. But that is also mental regurgitation. We may only understand mentally, from conceptual thinking, by filtering experience through the same set of biases in retrospect. It can help our objectivity a little, I guess, but it's limited and can also self - justify our biases. We see what we have been conditioned to see. And then we allow ourselves simply to accept that, we are just accepting our own tinted view that on its own replicates the same perspective in processing all experience.

Where I agree with Batchelor is that in calm and gentle focus, we can receive in real time a broader milieu and our vision and understanding expands. We can consciously choose to attend to some things we hadn't noticed before. Things our mind isn't conditioned to highlight.

But any practice that helps us calm down and gently focus, internally or externally, will accomplish this.

Where that leads is internal experience.

You are calmly listening to the stunning inner music, the divine orchestra, and then, you find yourself slipping up, being pulled up.

This is a natural, physiological process.

To claim ethical or humane benefits is problematic.

When we give up our attachments, yes, we tend to be open to understanding others, to seeing intuitively from a broader place.

But to claim some moral high ground turns a beautiful neutral experience into a religion, and practitioner ego.

I guess that's understandable too, but it's not seeing more. It's just another blind spot.

[Jesse]

I don't get the association of vision as being narrow, and listening being more broad. I often look up at the whole sky as if I'm part of it, or focus in to listen to one specific nuance of a single instrument in a recording and observe it like a physical object.

Humans are weird, and we all talk too much.. It's just filling in space to hide the anxiety caused by the horrendous anti-life world we've created. None of this makes any sense. Reality as we know it is breaking down. Good luck.

[Michael]

I’ve read this four times and still don’t understand what they are on about.

The people who wrote this ChopraBollox style garbage make too many assumptions to labour some bizarre point which makes no sense at all.

Thinking back, there is more truth in the RSSB slash Santmat stuff than you will ever find in these new age Buddhists.

We perceive the world about 80% through the eyes and 15% through the ears.

[Meditator]

I do listen sounds, may be always inside me but I do not say I am enlightened.

Enlightenment to me is the free run from outside to inside and out into Universe in astral form etc , back and forth spontaneously - effortlessly.