The experience of "Anatta"

The Watercooler
105

-“And what are the things to be realized by direct knowledge? True knowledge and liberation. These are called the things to be realized by direct knowledge”. (AN4.253)

Direct knowledge is not perse some universal or absolute truth it just refers to a direct knowledge of something, for example, how it is to abide in 4th jhana, having a direct taste of it, or, having realised the end of kilesa and therefor directly know what this means.

It is very different from conceptual, intellectual knowledge and the kind of understanding one can get by logic and reasoning, evaluating, putting all things together, investigating, contemplating, reading, conceiving, figuring things out, imaginating.

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I completely disagree with this.

It is dangerous irrationalism.

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There is nothing irrational about it, for me.

If you have never tasted a strawberry, someone might explain in words that it is ‘sweet’. Then you have a certain intellectual understanding of its taste. But you still do not really know how it tastes. Untill you eat a strawberry. Then you have direct knowledge of its taste.

The same with jhana, with stream entrance, with vimutti etc.

Maybe using the word ‘the opposite’ was alarming to you. But i believe it is not that bad.
Very often we have only an intellectual understanding of this and that in Dhamma. That means that we have a lack of direct knowledge of it. In this sense intellectual understanding is often the opposite of direct knowledge.

If this is not understood i feel that is concerning, alarming. Because then understanding Dhamma is confused with having great scriptural knowledge and having intellectually figured out everything and being able to talk about everything in a consistent way. For me, that is not a proof or sign one understand Dhamma.

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I also, somehow intuitively, imagined Nibbana being something of that kind. But, @josephzizys states that, if i’m not mistaken, Nibbana is not a state as such - non empirical.
This reminds me of Kant’s division to apriori and aposteriori knowledge. He gives a mathematical example for apriori synthetic knowledge, which is able to expand known and not simply analyze things by division. The problem with something empirical (experiential) is that it should be interpreted (almost always inadequately) through language. But if to suppose that Nibbana is some sort of direct knowledge (in apriori sense, like mathematics) and then, surely, it cannot be called state or experience.

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Hi Farid,

For me, AN3.55, AN9.47, Dhp114,MN98, some sutta’s in Sutta Nipata say that Nibbana can be seen directly.

There are also texts like this (MN11); 17. “Bhikkhus, when ignorance is abandoned and true knowledge
has arisen in a bhikkhu, then with the fading away of ignorance and the arising of true knowledge he no longer clings to sensual pleasures, no longer clings to views, no longer clings to rules and observances, no longer clings to a doctrine of self. When he does not cling, he is not agitated. When he is not agitated, he personally attains Nibbana. He understands: ‘Birth is destroyed, the holy life has been lived, what had to be done has been done, there is no more coming to any state of being.’”

He personally attains Nibbana…if this is not empirical how would one know for oneself that birth is ended or that finally is done what had to be done etc?

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MN11 is a paraphrase od DN2 which, because it is earlier and the Buddha was more philosophically sophisticated than the sholastic monks who developed the canon, makes no mention of a person “attaining” nibanna;

“In the same way, great king, when his mind is thus concentrated, pure and bright …. the bhikkhu directs and inclines it to the knowledge of the destruction of the cankers. He understands as it really is: ‘This is suffering’ … He understands: ‘Destroyed is birth, the holy life has been lived, what had to be done has been done, there is nothing further beyond this.’

What the person “knows directly” is the destruction of suffering.

Later this becomes reified into “attaining nibanna” and thats fine if we remeber that it is a paraphrase for the ending of suffering, and not some positive experience of a new phenomena, which of course, would be conditioned.

Otherwise the buddhist would be in all sorts of philosophical difficultiy how one could “personally” attain something while anatta is true and how one could “personally” attain something that cannot be said to be an “experience” of something, as that would be a condition and we are “talking” about something to which conditionallity does not apply.

@Farid I have some more thoughts:

We are all prisoners of our properries, objects, relations and identities.

There is true knowlege that we can have of freedom from our identities, activities, properties, objects and relations.

The certain knowlege of freedom from identities etc entails, and therfore in some sense co-arises with the experience of the ceasing of “desires” for “senual” (sensible, phenomenal) “experiences” as all such entail (possible, phenomenal) “suffering”.

“Certainty” describes one who has both:

  1. Intellectually convinced themselves of the “intellectual” argument above and

  2. is witnessing the complete lack of any “desire” in them at the same time as witnessing the truth of the proof, in an ongoing fashion.

(I myself am still prone to a fondness for sex, and food, and sleep, and bowel and bladder movements, and all sorts of other things, while I concede I may have convinced myself of point 1. above and also that so far I have never recalled the proof and experienced anything other than a lessening of suffering, nevertheless I am not experiencing the complete absense of identification with or fondness for the phenomenal. Thats problematic on a philosophical level, but its not that troubling to me religiously, on the pragmatic ground that before God I was just trying to do my best to lessen the suffering in the world:)

The destruction of greed (the phenomena)
Hatred (the absense of phenomena)
And delusion (the “state” before true knowledge)

Is the goal of the life of the peron seeking to understand theogyny (the problem of evil).

It also as far as I can tell from a philosophical standpoint in no way excludes the possibility that we are immortal souls and that there is a god, it just couldnt posibbly make a difference to “one gone that way” (tathagata).

Ultimately, i find myself to be a being, in a world, with hopes and dreams like everyone else, but in what I take to be the genuine early philosophical material DN1 DN2 DN9 in the EBTs I find what I have so far seemed to find a coherent argument “from.within” how all this stuff could be for real and yet there can still be "freedom from evil " or however you would like to put it.

“Destroyed is birth” as well as an allusion to conditionality also resonates with the epistemological “why was I born?”

Answer (for buddhists): To experience the complete freedom from all things.

Want to do it again?

No!

:slight_smile:

I really do find, when I turn my mind to it, that I can convince myeslf that the pythagorean theorem is true, i have most often recently foind that the gotomaean theorem appears true in the same way.

I think its worth really really really actually spending a few days proving to yourself that the pythagorean theorem hold, step by step, and then asking yourself all sorts of questions about if you “really” believe it or “directly see” its truth or “directly experience the knowledge of” it, after that you will have real experience at knowing the difference between remembering from school that “a squared plus b squared equals c squared” blah blah blah, and actually knowing something for yourself that no monk or king or god or demon or whatever could convince you you didnt know, and only then turn ones attention to the buddhas theorem.

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111

Maybe you can consider this, just take some time if it makes any sense to you, and comment on it. I tend to see it this way:

The result of the combined workings of mind and a unique body (unique senses, brain, nerves) is a unique or individual stream of cognition. It’s locally produced because senses, brain, nerves are local.
It is a unique individual stream of feelings, emotions, tendencies, sounds, smells, bodily feelings etc.

I do call this ‘personal’. Personal because it is unique for any living being. It is also private. It can be called personal because mind and body create together a unique private perspective on oneself, others and the world.

This is also why i believe a sense of constant self is no delusion but it arises together with this unique individual personal perspective on the world. It does not depend on content.

Some teachers, like Maha Boowa (and also others) teach that even this personal perspective can dissolve and leads at that moment to a direct taste of the deathless.

Texts show that a Buddha still feels the burden of an old body, he still experiences pain in a personal way, i.e. it arises in his mindstream and not in mine. It is personal, private. I believe it is not personal because of a view of atta, a doctrine of atta, of because of attachment, but where there is a perspective there is personal way of experiencing things.

I feel, that is also way Nibbana can be said to be personally attained, because now that personal and private stream of experiences is without clinging. Without clinging, does not mean, i believe, that this stream of experiences is not personal, unique and private anymore. It stays something personal. One does not become a machine, unpersonal, an object.

I feel, life will alway be felt as personal, also without self-view and doctrine of self, just because the combined workings of body and mind create a personal, private, unique mindstream. A unique and personal perspective on the world.

About direct knowledge. In general i feel it makes no sense to say that one directly knows New York while one has not been there. The same way, one does not directly know the end of suffering if this is not really attained yet.

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112

But unlike new york, nibanna is not a place you can go.

Also, it is entirely impossible for me to check an infinite number of right triangles to confirm the pythagorean theorem, but I dont need to “visit” the triangles, I DIRECTLY KNOW that the square of the hypotenuse equals the sum of the squares on the other 2 sides, because I can PROVE to myself that it cannot possibly be otherwise.

I agree that you cannot simply say “I have convinced myself of the ontological argument and therfore by proving gods existence have directly seen god” as you point out an intellectual proof is not the same as seeing f9r yourself.

That said, I do think that while a person might be able to apply the pythagorean theorem, and even mechanically prove it from first principles without REALLY understanding or “knowing it for themselves”, neverthelss I think that it is a prerequisite of the direct knowing that there is an intellectual understanding that grants us “conviction” and therefore I do not think that any amount of “jhana” or “meditation” or “numinous experiences” will ever awaken anyone to anything if they fail to be able to make coherent arguments about it all and have an “intellectual” understanding in line with thier “experential” understanding.

The tendency to confuse subtle points about the scope of thought and language with a kind of willful irrationalism and hero worship of authority figures imputed to have “experienced” certain “unspeakable” “attainments” is a recipie for disaster IMO.

As to your points about continuity I think they fail. Firstly everything you say is compatible with a materialist reading of “personhood” that implies that when your “local” senses and body and brain all die and turn to mud then your “personal” mind is destroyed along with it. If this where true then Buddhism would be false.

Again, this is a FOUNDATIONAL concern of the Buddha with DN2 giving an excellent description of the rejected positions, including what amounts to an “anatta-view” of materialism.

A person cannot be thier body and achieve liberation because if we are all just soon to be dead bodies there is no escape for any of us (or the same escape for all of us)

A person cannot be an “immortal soul” either as then there is no escape for us, trapped in a phenomnal situation eternally.

A person cannot be a combination of dying parts and eternal parts.

A person cannot be described without appealing to some or all of the above list.

This problem is identical to the problem of rocks, or thoughts, or anything at all, our conceptual apperatus, to make any entities at all, must make of them things with temporal, spatial, and or reltional parts.

The EBT do a great job of describing what cant possible be your identity, i.e the impermanent, changing, unreliable thoughts, feelings, experiences that you are subject to.

But absent those subjections there is no subject to discuss, and therefore no self, no absence of self, no both, no niether.

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Hi,

What does this mean for you?

MN26.19. “I considered: 'This Dhamma that I have attained is profound, hard to see and hard to understand, peaceful and sublime, unattainable by mere reasoning, subtle, to be experienced by the
wise…”

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I agree with it.

Especially the “mere reasoning” bit.

However I would caution against reading it as meaning “without reasoning”.

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115

I do not know. I have had experiences i cannot really rationally explain. I find this normal too. Do you see this as avijja?

Ofcourse i can rely on a certain model to explain things, like physicist do to explain the expierence that objects fall to Earth, but that does not mean that this model i rely on, is really a right understanding of how things work. Even while the model functions and seems accurate, makes even good predications, such as of Newton, that does not mean that this fall of objects is correctly understood by Newton and the model is really how things work. When do you decide you understand things correctly?

Do you think evolution is right and how do you see this in the light of Buddha-Dhamma?

I do not imply this. I have some feeling for the idea that knowing can be felt, experienced as local, but that this base of knowing is not local. It is everywhere around. This knowing is not caused by the body and brain.

I also feel it is rationel, justified, to say that there is a kind of knowing that is unlike a conscious experience.

I also think is not rational to say that mind is the same as consciousness. How can one say that someone unconscious is mindless?

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Thousands of years ago, before “science”, primitive people observed phenomena like birth, death, sickness, night and day, fire, thunder and lightning, floods, famines, emotions like love, anger, pleasure, pain, jealousy. They had no clue to what they were, so clans and tribes would make up stories about the forces that were behind these things, to explain the unexplainable, to make some sense of the world and themselves. It was an easy leap to create creator gods and gods that created, defined and controlled natural phenomena and human nature. These gods were anthropomorphic projections which are found all around human history. These myths have become the world’s largest religions. It makes perfect sense that atman concept falls within that very same primitive process. The Buddha was able to see this and the concomitant hinderance it had upon awakening.

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Yes, i also believe this. This inner self is assumed to exist, like the external gods, as an instigating entity, instigating activity, like volition, tendencies, emotions, cravings. It is always imagined like there can be no bodily, verbal and mental activity without an inner instigating, ruling and wanting self.

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Yes indeed. The Buddha had to communicate his message. That means using language. Language has a logic to it, otherwise it wouldn’t make sense and so you are going to use reason. In my experience people always pull out this passage in response to another person’s argument, just as a way of shutting it down.

“Ah, you’ve used logic and reason there I’m afraid. That’s not Dhamma, so I’m right” :upside_down_face:

Nibbāna is beyond reason and logic, but to actually get there you need some reason and logic. Its just Rationalism you don’t need at all.

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119

This is very true, but I would point out that nibanna cannot have a taste, or a touch, or a smell, or anything else to connect it to the phenomenal.

I would also point out that this argument does not apply to the pythagorean theorem at all, you do not need to taste or touch anything to know directly that the pythagorean theorem is true.

It is also a logical consequence of this fact that you can never see or touch a right triangle that violates this truth, except in as much as it fails to be a “true” right triangle.

“To touch the undying” with “this very body” is either metaphorical or Buddhism is simply false.

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@josephzizys

Agree with that part. I imagine it with a simile of a veil (mind?) that through its phenomenality blocks what lies underneath. This I see as a continuous and spontaneous process of thought-making and else.

This part for me is crucial from an epistemological perspective. Again, who “is witnessing”. That witness is still there, whatever we do. This point is actually present from the time of Upanishads - the notion of “Atman”, or Sankhya’s “Purusha” (a witness) as opposed to “Prakrti” (phenomenality).

I see your point here. Sure, it can be that type of “something”, but this is only realizable through coherent practice that lead to some sort of “modus”, which makes possible that “direct knowledge”. Otherwise, we are stuck with phenomenality.

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Do you believe that when greed and hate and delusion, when defilments weaken and disappear from mind you will not notice this at all?

It is said that Nibbana has the taste of peace, the signless, emptiness, the uninclined, desirelessness.
It has the taste of an unburdened abiding

This can be tasted in jhana in a provisional sense and when the defilements are not only suppressed but uprooted than in a non-provisional sense. (AN3.55, AN9.47)

I do not understand what these mathematical laws have to do with direct knowledge.

You feel that there can be an intellectual understanding that grants us conviction. Oke, maybe with such things as those mathematical laws but i personally feel that intellectual understanding cannot grant any conviction abou spiritual matters. It always seems not convincing to me. There is always another way of reasoning, another side-way one can take.

I feel that the intellect cannot find any convictions, there are only stand-points.

There is always some points supportive and others not supporting the standpoint.

I also think that all forum debates proof that intellectual understanding cannot convince us.

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The conditional processes of consciousness are “witnessing”.
The illusion of a self, sometimes experienced with the sense of a permanent witness, is what the Buddha taught was — an illusion. Like the sense of being an individuated on-going self, something only fully relinquished by arahants.

In MN43 the Buddha states that consciousness, perceptions, and feelings are intertwined and cannot be separated.
He does not go on to state that there is another kind of “witnessing consciousness”, a consciousness outside of time and space, or any other consciousness.

In MN28 Sariputta, quoting the Buddha, says, “One who sees the Dependent Arising of things sees the Dhamma, one who sees the Dhamma sees the Dependent Arising of things.”
No mention of seeing the Dhamma with an ineffable, unchanging, unconditional, witness or consciousness.

In SN22.82 the Buddha teaches: “Any kind of consciousness at all—past, future, or present; internal or external; coarse or fine; inferior or superior; far or near: this is called the aggregate of consciousness.”
No mention of a consciousness outside of the aggregates.

We know that consciousness is tightly linked to perception, feelings, and memory. The rapid “linking” by the mind of past moments of consciousness with present-moment consciousness and its contents creates the illusion of a “knower” or “witness” that is always present – similar to how we perceive a movie as a continuous story even though the reality is one of separate frames passing quickly.

While practicing “witnessing” can have many benefits on the Path, assuming it is a permanent sort of consciousness does not receive clear or explicit support in the suttas.

Just offered for consideration…

Santi

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I feel these things are somehow crucial.

Knowing is not limited to vinnana. Oke, vinnana cognises sour, pain, yellow, sweet, greed etc. but that kind of knowing is not really intelligence, not wisdom. There is more to knowing than only vinnana.
Vinnana just cognises, it senses, but one cannot say that vinnana is intelligence.

When you say:

Do you believe that if there is no vinnana is there also no mind? If not, what is mind and how is mind different from vinnana?

What in your line of reasoning is not seen arising and not subject to cessation? In other words what is the unconditioned?

I feel your reading means that in fact there is no real base for peace and stability of mind because there is nothing stable and nothing peaceful about us. So those people who are the most peaceful and stable of mind are the most deluded persons. In this way peace of mind, inner stability, is the ultimate deception in stead of the ultimate wisdom.

-What does it mean that it is possible to be not involved in the khandha’s, also not in vinnana, when your interpretation would be true that we are the khandha’s? How does this non-involvement work?

-What does infinite vinnna mean?

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When you say “who witnesses?”, do you mean which person complete with personality and intellect along with a sense of being in the world witnesses? If so, I would say that bare knowledge/awareness has none of those things.