Coming to the Middle Way

The sense of self is much like the milk in a cup of tea. Even a small amount of milk affects the tea so thoroughly that you can no longer make out the tea underneath. We don't separately notice each part of our body — we simply feel "I exist." But if you develop mindfulness in the direction of contemplating the body, you begin to perceive the body itself. What needs to cool and settle, then, is precisely this concept called the sense of self. Once that sense of self cools, what remains is simply a set of natural processes, flowing like a river.

Mindfulness is a factor of awakening (bojjhanga). It arises within the mind itself, but it is a facet of wisdom — an aspect of Buddha. So mindfulness is not something founded primarily on the mind.

How Mindfulness Differs from Desire

From another angle: mindfulness, too, is a form of citta — of heart. That is what we feel. Without becoming a heart-experience, nothing at all can be felt by someone who still has a sense of self. Mindfulness, wrong view, and reflection — all three are present together. All of these surface in the form of a thought. Desire, too, surfaces within you as a thought. But the manner in which mindfulness arises within you, and the manner in which desire arises, are different — the mechanisms differ. Yet both are felt in the same way: as a heart-experience. A thought is simply the result.

Buddha can touch someone as a nature; at other times, it becomes a wisdom. But how is that nature felt? Through the mind. Yet the mechanism there is different. When Buddha operates as a nature or as wisdom, none of the mind's ordinary data is involved at all. The mind is merely a medium of transmission.

Arriving at the Middle

Once all of this is understood, where should you arrive? That is the middle way. You now know that all of this is operating. To some extent, these things become caught by mindfulness as natural processes. But if you take all of this as concepts or as views, and become fixed in those views, the middle way slips away from you. At that point you fix a certain notion in the mind, relative to all other notions — that is called becoming un-mindful (asañña). Once that happens, that notion within you keeps being nourished and grows increasingly powerful. Centring on that nature, samsara continues to build itself further on that basis.

If someone fixes any single notion within themselves — existence, non-existence, emptiness, illusion — whatever it may be, all other notions weaken relative to it. The result is that you become unknowingly locked into one dominant notion; now your mind has only that one notion capable of moving it. Becoming imprisoned in such a state, viewed from the perspective of samsara, is like falling into a place from which one must begin, all over again, a long process of evolving forward across a great span of time.

But if there is room within your mind for any notion at all, there remains the opportunity to see the underlying science within it. Arriving at the middle, everything becomes visible. "It exists" becomes visible; "it does not exist" becomes visible too.

"Sabba loke anabhirata sañña" — everything is seen. It is a place where all fixed notions are seen through.

In arriving here, one begins by fixing something called "the middle" as a starting point. But in the end, one arrives at a place freed from all such fixed notions.