To Know the Unconditioned

Which comes first, matter or consciousness? Materialists will say that matter comes first, and consciousness is its byproduct. But if that’s the case, there’s no way there can be any knowledge of unbinding, any knowledge of anything unconditioned, because knowledge is, by definition, conditioned by matter, and matter itself is conditioned.

That’s not the Buddha’s approach. You can ask yourself, “Have you ever experienced matter without there being consciousness at the same time? Has anybody experienced matter without consciousness being there at the same time?” Consciousness is actually what we know at first, at the first level. Matter is something we know at second remove. This is the approach the Buddha took. That’s why the very first verse in the Dhammapada says, “The mind is the forerunner of all things. *Mano-pubbaṅgamā **dhammā. Mano-seṭṭhā *mano-mayā. All phenomena are excelled by the mind. They’re made by the mind.”

The problem is, our ordinary consciousness is something that’s fabricated, something we fabricate, and everything fabricated has to be stressful. That’s the nature of fabrications. It requires energy to keep them going, because their nature is to arise, stay for a while, and pass away. If you want to keep something going, you have to do it again and again and again.

So, what can you do to find genuine rest? Become unconscious? Well, no. The Buddha says it’s possible to understand the processes of consciousness and to peel them away until all the passion for everything that is fabricated in this way gets uprooted or ended. Then something remarkable is revealed: a consciousness without fabrications, a consciousness without suffering, without limits. That’s the unconditioned.

To find that, you have to understand what you’re doing to fabricate things. We think that sights, sounds, smells, tastes, tactile sensations, and ideas come in at us willy-nilly while we’re passively receiving them. But the Buddha’s basically saying that we go out looking for these things, and we fabricate our experience of them. Just think about sights, the extent to which you have to fabricate a three-dimensional world out of the patchy raw material that comes in from the eyes. But the Buddha’s saying more than that. It’s because of your passion for sights, sounds, smells, etc., that you actually experience them. Without that passion, without your going out toward them, there wouldn’t be any experience of them at all.

He calls consciousness based on these things, “established consciousness.”

There are two different images for it. One is of a seed planted in earth that’s been watered. The seed stands for consciousness with its nutriments, the nutriments being physical food, contact, intentions, and consciousness itself. The earth is the four other aggregates—form, feeling, perception, fabrication. The water is the water of passion and delight. When a seed lands on the earth and there’s water, then it grows. All of our experience of the senses comes out of that.

The other image the Buddha gives us is of light. There’s a house with a window on the east wall and a solid wall on the west. When the sun rises in the east, the sunbeams go through the window and land on the west wall. That’s established consciousness, consciousness that has landed. What we want to do is get rid of the passion for all the places where it could land. In the case of the house, the wall stands for the different nutrients of consciousness. So the images are not quite identical, but you get the idea. There’s a lot of fabrication going on, on a lot of levels. There’s a lot to peel away.

This is why we get the mind into concentration: to get the mind as still as we can and then to see that there are layers of stillness. Each layer is a layer of fabrication. You start by directing your thoughts to the breath, evaluating the breath, using perceptions about the breath—like the perception that the breath is a whole-body process, along with perceptions about where it begins in the body.

In the beginning, for concentration to last, you have to keep fabricating it on many levels. But as you begin to settle in, you start to see that some of those levels can be peeled away and the mind can still stay focused. The first thing to go is the directed thought and evaluation, because their purpose is to fit the mind with the body, fit your consciousness with the breath, so that they stay together comfortably, with a sense of interest. Once they’ve been adjusted to a snug fit, you can drop the layer of directed thought and evaluation, and then just hold on to the perception that allows you to stay with a sense of energy in and around your body.

Then, as the texts say, when you go into deeper stages of concentration, more levels of fabrication fall away. The breathing falls away. You’re just left with the form of the body, in which the breath is very still. Then the perception of form begins to dissolve as the image you have of where the body’s boundary lies disappears. You’re left with space. The perception of space dissolves. You’re left with consciousness as an object of your awareness. The perception of the oneness of consciousness falls away, leaving a perception of nothingness.

As you can see, things keep getting peeled and peeled and peeled away, layer by layer, as you begin to experience dispassion for the layers that aren’t necessary for staying still.

Now, different people will experience these layers in different ways. This is why there are so many different maps describing this process in the Canon. In some cases, they talk about peeling away the different properties of the body: earth, water, fire, wind. You notice them in the body. You get dispassionate toward them, one by one, as you contemplate them in a way that gives rise to dispassion. They fall away. Then there’s finally space. Dropping the perception of space, there’s consciousness. You drop the perception of consciousness, and there’s equanimity. In equanimity, you realize that it, too, is fabricated. You have to drop your passion for that.

In other cases, they simply describe the layers or levels of jhana and then the formless of states.

The whole purpose, however you conceive the layers, is to get the mind more and more still, peel away whatever layers of fabrication you can detect that disturb the stillness, develop dispassion for them, drop them, see what’s left. This is how the Buddha talks about alighting on emptiness: seeing what’s there, seeing what disturbances used to be there that are not there anymore, seeing that the mind is empty of those disturbances, and then looking for where there is still disturbance on a more subtle level right now, so that you can drop whatever is causing that, too.

When Ajaan Fuang was teaching concentration, he wouldn’t talk about the layers of jhana. He would simply say, “Look for where there’s a disturbance. See if you can drop your interest in what’s causing that disturbance.” However many layers it took to peel away, he didn’t try to force any map on his students.

But finally, you get to the very, very subtle layers of disturbance in the mind. You realize that if you stay with that level of concentration, there’s going to be stress. If you go anywhere else, there’s going to be stress. The question then arises: Is there any place where there’s no stress at all? Up to now, you’ve been maintaining the concentration because you enjoy it and you’ve developed passion for it, which has enabled you to drop a lot of your passion for other things. But now you see that this, too, is still not quite the total rest—the total peace—you’re looking for. That’s when things open up, through that sense of dispassion, to a dimension that’s either here or there, coming or going. What’s left is a different kind of consciousness, which the Buddha says has no surface. In other words, it’s not focused on anything. It doesn’t even take consciousness as its object. It has no object at all.

This relates to that image of the light beam going through the window. You take away the wall. Where does the light beam land? It lands on the ground. Take away the ground. Where does it land? It lands on the water. Take away the water. Well, it doesn’t land. The image of a light beam doesn’t land: That’s one of the images for this awakened consciousness, unestablished consciousness.

The other image is the seed. If it’s deprived of water, then it doesn’t grow, it doesn’t proliferate. Even though the aggregates are there, and all the things that would give nutriment to consciousness are there, still, when there’s no water, it just doesn’t grow. When it doesn’t grow, then there’s no landing. And here the Buddha says, when consciousness doesn’t land, it’s released. When it’s released, it’s not agitated. It’s content. And then you’re unbound.

Consciousness is not destroyed at that point. It’s just that fabricated consciousness ends, and then consciousness outside of space and time appears. That’s the unconditioned, totally without suffering, luminous without bounds—luminous in the sense that it’s totally clear inside. Like the light beam that doesn’t reflect on anything: It’s there, the light is luminous in and of itself, but because it doesn’t reflect off anything, there’s no way of knowing that it’s there—aside from the person who’s experiencing it. This is why Mara can’t find people who’ve attained this unestablished consciousness, why there’s no describing them as existing, non-existing, both, or neither.

This is how you approach it: not by totally understanding it, but by developing the path. There’s a lot about this unestablished consciousness that’s hard to understand. Is it the same inside as your sensory consciousness? Yes, but no—because it has no connection with the six senses. Is it totally unrelated? No, but yes: It doesn’t come under the consciousness aggregate. But it doesn’t have to be explained. What has to be explained is how you get there: through this process of peeling away your attachments, however you can get the mind as quiet as possible. Peel away the attachments you can see through having something quiet and good to compare them to.

This is why we do concentration and then look at our other attachments. We see that they’re nowhere near as peaceful or satisfying as a state of concentration. Then we see that even the different states of concentration have their drawbacks. So we pursue stillness even more, to the point where there’s nothing the mind will hold on to. That’s when consciousness is released. That’s when you can be unbound.

So work on developing the path. As for getting your mind around the unconditioned, it’s not the kind of thing you can get your mind around. But you can get your mind around what you’re doing by doing it. It’s by following the path that you get to the goal. It’s the doing that matters, not so much your preconceived notions. The important thing is that you have an openness in your mind that this is possible. That’s all you really need to be convinced of.