Fabricated Path, Unfabricated Goal

One of the paradoxes of the path is that we’re aiming for an unfabricated goal, something that’s not put together, but the path leading there is fabricated.

Some people are impatient with the paradox. They want to go straight to the goal without putting together the path. They say because the path is a matter of right and wrong, it’s just conditional reality, whereas they want to go straight for the unconditioned. Well, even the intention to go straight for the unconditioned is a condition. And without right and wrong, you’re not going to know what the right path is and what the wrong path is, because right and wrong make a definite difference as to whether the path succeeds or not.

The trick is to learn how you’re fabricating things here in the present moment. Then gradually peel away the fabrications when you see that they’re a disturbance to the mind.

This is one of the reasons why we focus on the sense of the body here in the present moment, especially the breath. As you’re sitting here, what’s the most striking thing about the sensation of the body? The movement. The breath comes in, the breath goes out, and it’s your anchor in the present moment. When you’re with the breath, you know you’re in the present moment. There’s no future breath you can watch, no past breath you can watch. And as the Buddha says, right here where you experience the body: That’s where you touch the deathless. So you’re looking at the right spot.

And you’re fabricating this spot. The breath comes in, the breath goes out, you’re there with it. That’s called bodily fabrication, the sensation of the breathing.

Then there are mental fabrications: the feelings of pleasure or pain that go with the breath, along with the perceptions, your images in the mind as to where the breath comes in, where it goes out.

You can play with those things. This is where you do your directed thought and evaluation. That, too, is fabrication—verbal fabrication. In the beginning, it’ll play a large role because you’re trying to adjust all these things and become more and more sensitive to the fact that the present moment is something you are fabricating.

Start out with a way of breathing that feels energizing, because eventually you’re going to be calming the mind down. If you can start out by calming it down, you often just put yourself to sleep. So think of the breath, each time it comes in, as coursing through the body, nourishing all the different organs.

Ajaan Lee gives you a couple of maps for how the breath can come in and flow through the body. Again, these are perceptions. He has you start at the back of the neck, right at the base of the skull. Think of the breath coming into the body right there, from behind, and going down the spine, out the legs. You can also think of the breath coming in right at the heart, going down through the stomach and the intestines. Think of the breath going down the shoulders, and of the breath in the head.

In other words, the perception here is of breath energy as something you’re allowing to come in from outside, because you want to recharge your breath energy and breathe in ways that feel really good. And you get to judge which ways feel good.

Notice, as things begin to get adjusted, that less and less conversation has to go on. The main topic of the conversation is, one, how to get the breath to feel comfortable; two, how to maintain that sense of comfort; and three, how to let it spread through the body.

When the Buddha gives his similes for the jhānas, the simile for the first jhāna—which has directed thought and evaluation—is the only one with a conscious agent doing something: the bathman mixing water with bath powder so that the water and powder are thoroughly mixed.

When things get adjusted to your liking, then you can drop the discussion inside. At that point, you have just the perception of the breath, the feeling of the breath, and the breath itself. You can ride with those three things for the next stage of the practice of going through the jhānas. It’s simply a matter of changing the perceptions.

At first, the sense of the breath energy coming in and nourishing things, energizing things, still feels really good. The image here is of a spring, a cool spring of water that sends its water through a lake. There’s no conscious thinking that has to go into this, because the breath channels have been opened. You just allow the energy to flow. That’s the perception you hold on to: This energy is coming in, coming in, coming in.

Then, after a while, you feel you’ve had enough of that. Things are sufficient. You want something subtler. Here you’re guided simply by the perception and the feeling. When the perception of energy coming in from outside feels good, your feeling tone tells you, “Okay, keep it up.” But when it begins to become tiresome, the feeling tone will tell you to switch the perception to find a level of energy that’s subtler inside. You realize that there’s a subtle energy that’s already there in the body that you don’t have to pull in, pull out. You’ve nourished it already. The sense of energy that’s already there becomes sufficient.

This allows the feeling of rapture coursing through the mind, coursing through the body, to grow calm. Then you’re just there with that sense of the breath energy already there. As the breath energies get more and more connected, and the perceptions of the different parts of the body get more and more connected, the in-and-out breath can actually go still.

Here the question always comes up, “If there’s no in-and-out breathing, aren’t you going to die? Aren’t you going to be starved of oxygen?” No. You’re not suppressing the breath. If you feel the need to breathe, go ahead and breathe. Simply that when you don’t feel the need, you don’t have to force it in. Just hold that perception of “full body.” Every cell in the body is filled with breath energy, and everything is sufficient. If the body breathes, that’s okay; if it doesn’t breathe, that’s okay, too. You’re holding on to that perception and that feeling. The feeling of ease gets more and more subtle.

Then the bodily fabrication stops, and all you have left are perceptions and feelings. You ride those for the rest of the concentration practice. The perception of the shape of the body begins to dissolve. The boundary line around the body begins to dissolve, and you’re with a mist of sensation drops: That’s the perception you hold in mind. Then you think of the space between those drops, again changing the perception slightly. It feels much more spacious because there’s no boundary at all to that space.

A similar process takes you through all the formless states. It’s just a matter of feeling and perception at that point. You see that these are the things that put together your sense of the present moment.

This is where you apply appropriate attention, noticing what you’re doing and the results of what you’re doing. You realize this sensation of the body you’ve got here is not just a given. There are the raw materials coming in from the past, the results of past intentions, and there are your intentions for putting that raw material together right now into an experience of right now. And you’re doing it in a very subtle way.

You can keep this up as long as you find it fascinating, until the day comes when you’ve decided, “It’s really nice, but the fact that it has to be maintained like this is a burden on the mind.” You don’t want to go back to your old ways of engaging in the world, but what you’ve got here isn’t good enough, either.

That’s when the mind genuinely inclines to the deathless. There’s an opening that’s unfabricated. It comes when there’s no intention at all shaping the present moment.

That requires a lot of poise and balance. You develop that poise and balance by learning how to fabricate the present moment really, really well.

So you don’t just jump to the unfabricated or jump to the unconditioned. You first have to learn how you’re conditioning things now, and how to do it with more and more finesse. This makes you more sensitive and discerning about what you’re doing. That’s how the unconditioned is found.

In the meantime, condition things well, fabricate things well, as best you can. Try to do it with as much focus here on the present moment as you can, as well. There are fabrications of the past, fabrications of the future. Those fabrications are happening right here, but because they point in other directions, they’re not allowing you to see the process of fabrication clearly. It’s when you point your acts of fabrication into the present moment that you can clearly see yourself doing them, watching yourself in action.

That’s how you learn. That’s how the Buddha found awakening. He watched his mind in action. He just got more and more discerning in what he was doing and in his sense of what was worth doing and how to do it well.

So you’re at the right spot. And to whatever extent you still have to fabricate this right spot, keep it up. That’s the path. Don’t look down on the path. Even though it’s fabricated, even though it’s conditioned, it’s the only thing that’ll get you to what’s unconditioned.

So do it with attention. Do it with care. Do it right here.