Author: Tracy.
Forum: Dharma Overground Discussion Forum

I almost posted this in the thread "Fruition, emptiness and primordial awareness" but then decided it was too much of a tangent because it didn't respond to the original question OR the latest comments in any meaningful way. But it is related to it. I'm asking about the relationship between emptiness and fruition, because this author I read seems to suggest that Buddhism is all about one and not the other.

I just finished reading Sam Harris's book, The End of Faith, in which he claims to describe the universal essence of contemplative and mystical experience. It's strange, because what he calls the universal contemplative experience sounds like what people on this forum are calling primordial awareness or seeing emptiness, but he doesn't mention nirvana (cessation) at all in anything I've read by him. I'm wondering why he does that, if he really experiences emptiness but not cessation, or if he declines to write about nirvana in his mainstream writing career for other reasons (although, gee, writing about empty awareness is pretty weird on the scale of things).

A passage from TEoF:
"If you will persistently look for the subject of your experience, however, its absence may become apparent, if only for a moment. Everything will remain-- this book, your hands-- and yet the illusory divide that once separated knower from known, self from world, inside from outside, will have vanished. . . . Once the selflessness of consciousness has been glimpsed, spiritual life can be viewed as a matter of freeing one's attention more and more so that this recognition can become stabilized."

[continued...]

Author: Tracy.


There's an essay similar to that chapter of the book here: http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/sam_harris/2007/01/consciousness_without_faith_1.html

In-depth analysis of his experience is probably not possible from these two paragraphs, and would be kind of rude. The question is, can a person really experience and stabilize the experience of empty awareness without ever experiencing cessation? triplethink wrote that the two are proximate, which means "next immediately preceding or following (as in a chain of causation, events, or effects)," which implies that it's highly unlikely to get one without the other, in the actual, universal contemplative experience.

Does anyone out there know how to make sense of this (Sam Harris's) representation of enlightenment? Is he propogating an idea of it (see things as no-self all the time but never experience cessation of all things) that is totally unrealistic?

Hi Tracy,

This is an interesting question, and one that only someone well-versed in Theravada theory would ask. It would be difficult to find a reference to cessation in the literature of any other tradition. And yet surely everyone is talking about the same developmental process. Other traditions tend to emphasize the awake no-self experience over the erased-self experience of cessation. If you aren't looking for cessation and/or haven't been told that it is significant, it's just another of the thousands of things that can happen during a meditator's day.

Mahasi teachers love cessation because it helps them locate students on the map. Furthermore, Mahasi taught cessation as something to be cherished and cultivated. But even within Theravada there are teachers who don't believe that cessation should even be considered Nibbana. There is no one way to interpret these phenomena. What we know for sure is that First and Second Path, as defined by the Visuddhimaga, each culminate in a moment of cessation. So for map-mongers, cessation is an important landmark.

I would not evaluate the enlightenment of people from other traditions based on whether they mention cessation, as to do so would lead to the mistaken impression that only Theravada Buddhists get enlightened. In fact, I used to read J. Krishnamurti and imagine that he was talking about cessation when he described his no-self experiences. He wasn't. I was just "shoehorning," i.e. trying to force other people's experience into the narrow framework of my own limited belief system.

Kenneth

Author: Tracy.

Thanks Ken, that makes sense. I guess the significance and meaning of different experiences is subject to interpretation, and therefore ends up being different for different people and in different traditions.