Essay #39:  The Ultimate Inquiry

At last I lean upon my knees
And stare into the water.
I hear a stir and then a breeze.
The rocks begin to totter.

What first I thought I saw as me
Is wrinkled and unclear.
But then a new discovery breaks free–
That it was only fear.

I turn and see the sky above,
If only for a second,
Reflecting from its emptiness
What in the pond had beckoned.

At some point in life we come to our knees not from a worshipful attitude toward a Supreme Being nor in supplication seeking deliverance from a hostile present or an ominous future.  Rather, we sink down upon our knees under the sheer weight of conditioning itself.  We have been lifted up.  We have been tossed.  We have been laid low and risen again.  But this time we sink down, brought closer to the inquiry itself into what got us here by the cumulative toll life itself has taken.  Where did I come from? What has gotten me here?  Who am I?  And where am I going?  Moreover, what is the essence of all this?  What is the meaning of it?  Is there any meaning at all?

Plato recounts that Socrates famously said: “The unexamined life is not worth living.”  It is the weight of this truth that eventually buckles us at the knees, those of us who have been living to any extent with eyes open and watchful for clues about the purpose of their own journeys.  In the midst of much seeking and much avoiding, the watchful mind little by little grows keener to know what its own nature is and what role that plays in its entanglements in the human condition.

Our buckling expresses both a desire to stop and a desire to confront.  We want to stop being tossed about, stop running about, and sink down into a direct confrontation with ourselves in order to know—to know at last.  We want to do what the mythological character, Narcissus, did at the bank of the stream, that is, lean over, find our image in the water, and fall so in love with ourselves that neither eating, drinking, nor anything else matters.  However, this is not in our case blind and pointless love as it was for Narcissus.  It is the love and fascination a scientist or investigator feels having at last discovered the ultimate object of inquiry.  The gene that causes a particular disease, the piece of forensic evidence that unveils a mysterious crime, the mathematical equation that ties together diverse astrophysical phenomena—such things as these can become objects of intense fascination, white-hot focus, even a kind of love.  And so it is with that which we describe variously as I, my self, my consciousness, my soul, and the seat of all my experiences.  That thing itself—whatever it is—which seems to have been subject to the human condition at some point emerges from the fray itself as the focal point of all questioning.  For what we have been unable to accomplish in relationship to the human condition, we may still accomplish in relationship to that which has been its captive.  That is, although we have finally buckled under the sheer weight of conditioning from which we have been unable to break free, perhaps we may yet find freedom through a knowing confrontation with the subject itself.  Through such a confrontation, perhaps we may come to solve the riddle of what binds us to the human condition, what gives rise to our desires and aversions, even to our ignorance, and having solved that, experience at least the satisfaction of knowing the mechanisms of our enmeshment.  While such knowledge may indeed not free us phenomenologically from the bondage of conditioning, perhaps it may afford access to a kind of inner refuge or peace roughly analogous to the eye of a hurricane.  The eye is not outside the storm.  It is not detached from it.  It is contained within it.  Without the storm there could be no eye.  And yet, in another sense, the eye does not exist.  It is not turbulence; it is not the storm.  It is, to borrow terminology from the previous essay, like a non-substantial referent pointed to by the storm itself.  Actually, in the case of the eye, it is a concept which defines a place or location in space and time given in relationship to the turbulence described as the actual hurricane.  In that sense, the eye is still thought to be something physical or substantial, even if derived from the far more tangible phenomenon of the turbulence.

In the case of the I or self, however, inquiry has come to the point where the sum total of physicality or conditioning is being set to one side.  The question is not, “What is the nature of some kind of conditioning in relationship to some other kind of conditioning (for example, the eye of a hurricane in relationship to its turbulence)?” but rather, “What is the nature of all conditioning in relationship to the self who experiences it?”  And this position or perspective immediately also occasions the questions:  “What is the nature of all conditioning in relationship to itself?” and “What is the nature of the self in relationship to itself?”  Here we have been buckled over and ourselves are buckling down upon the most fundamental questions that can be asked.  Here the apex of questioning almost by definition becomes a non-substantial referent because the self is given to be that which experiences all of the conditioning in the human condition.  Whatever conditioning occurs is thought to indeed be substantial whether it consists of gross material forms or various and sundry more subtle emotional energies.  Against all this, the inquiry at some point insists on confronting whatever may not be this but yet may lend insight into how it all arises and hangs together—including and especially with respect to how it arises and creates individual personalities, characters, and lives.  In other words, the inquiry—perhaps driven by a kind of weariness and by a curiosity accumulated from decades of interaction with a changing and unstable world—insists on looking through the phenomenal self to see if it can discover a non-substantial or noumenal self lurking behind.

This is where we finally begin to hear a stir and feel a breeze that both beckons and alarms us.  As we stare in fascination at the reflected image of our phenomenal self, the very force of our inquiry begins to have an effect on the scene.  The rocks in the stream begin to totter. What we thought was stable and took for granted begins to shift and give way.  Our very notion of who we are starts to break up.  The conditioning of the phenomenal self is affected by the inquiry.  The image before us of who we thought we were becomes dismantled by the inquiry into a collection of conditioned concepts.  Are these me, or are they a conglomerate of effects resulting from circumstances and forces reaching back through history into dark shadows that I am only dimly aware of?  Now the question, “Who am I?” takes on newly dramatic force reframed as the question, “Who am I among all this?”  In other words, “Who am I in the midst of all that comprises my history, my choices, my desires, my character, even my personality?”  The image of my personal self wrinkles and threatens to dissolve under the relentless force of this inquiry.  It becomes unclear who and what I am—if anything—and what it was that wrapped all this conditioning like so much turbulence around the eye that is I.

We have come to a point where we are both buckled and shaken.  We seem to be seeing even our most cherished sense of self dissolving and vanishing as we press forward in our search for truth. What will we be left with, if anything?  What is there if not the very tossing and turning, clinging and pushing away that landed on this shore anyway?  But there is one more thing we have almost overlooked among the conditioned forces that gave rise to us.  The discomfort that we are now feeling, the deep sense of unease as we observe our personal and phenomenal self dissolving—this emotional energy is a kind of fear, both a fear of relinquishing that which we know or feel accustomed to and a fear of that which we do not know as the ultimate answer to the question, “Who am I?”  The last emotional energy to persist even after we have seen through the ultimate dissatisfaction of attachment and aversion is fear.  We may know that as phenomenal selves we can never be fully satisfied.  We may even know that the ultimate outcome of every search for satisfaction is suffering.  Nevertheless, because of final fear we may be unwilling to step out into the abyss.  What is this abyss?  It is the abyss of not knowing what comes next.  It is the null space entered when conditioning is extinguished not phenomenally but noumenally as the self passes through its phenomenal manifestation into noumenal awareness.  What is noumenal awareness?

It is that awareness which fully knows conditioning as conditioning.  That is, it knows what its phenomenal self is, and also knows that awareness ultimately is not that, although it is of course impossible to say what it is in phenomenal terms.  This is why we say that awareness is ultimately a non-substantial referent pointed to by all that is physical and phenomenal.  Can the eye of a hurricane exist independent of its turbulence?  The answer is “no.”  Likewise, it makes no sense to speak of awareness that is separate and independent from the phenomenal world.  Yet it is ultimately and in its purest form not conditioned by it.  To borrow words from Jesus, pure awareness is “in the world but not of it.”  Lesser forms of awareness may indeed be conditioned by phenomena.  Every thought is per se conditioned by the circumstances and forces that occasioned it.  Pure awareness, by contrast, beholds all physical, energetic, mental, and emotional phenomena as suchness.  This begins to finally get at the question of what the relationship is between awareness and conditioning.  Lower forms of awareness—including all thinking—are conditioned.  Pure awareness, however, is altogether only a beholding.  It does not judge what it beholds in the phenomenal world not because it is not capable of doing so.  In fact, its phenomenal manifestation is constantly engaged in judging the world.  No, pure awareness does not judge because the activity of its beholding is an otherworldly activity.  This of course contradicts our earlier statement that even pure awareness is squarely in the world.  However, this in unavoidable insofar as language is involved   Language has evolved primarily to describe and define things within the phenomenal world.  It is very difficult to use a tool that was designed to describe things within the conditioned world to point to—let alone describe—a reference point that is itself not conditioned.  Such is pure awareness.

All of the warfare that takes place between good and evil is what it is.  Goodness is still goodness and evil is still evil.  By not judging, pure awareness is not obliterating the distinction between good and evil.  Awareness of the two within the phenomenal world continues to operate, and those striving for good, continue to do their best to combat evil.  Of course, all the ambiguity, variability, impermanence, change, and confusion that obtain in a conditioned world also continue to obtain.  This often blurs the lines between good and evil, not to say reverses polarities so that the most ardent defenders of the “good” sometimes completely alter their opinions and take up positions opposite to the ones they started from.

All the while, however, pure awareness remains content with beholding.  Its position is not “aloof,” because being inseparable from awareness of all kinds, all observed phenomena, and every actual action and response, it is fully cognizant of the world.  At the same time, however, it is not conditioned by the world.  This frees it from needing to pass any judgement.  Instead it may calmly observe what is, seeing it as it is, which is to say in its suchness and therefore free from all the classifications and judgements of the phenomenal mind.

Moreover, at the level of pure awareness, the question of the self’s relationship to the self may finally be addressed.  On the phenomenal level, it is impossible to break free of the self seeing itself as this or that, for example, in terms of its character traits, preferences, accomplishments, family associations, reputation, and so forth. Here the self and its awareness are conditioned by the same circumstances and forces it uses to describe itself.  Therefore, the phenomenal self’s relationship to itself is one of self-reinforcement and self-aggrandizement.  The phenomenal self wants to be more of what it already perceives itself to be:  richer, sexier, more famous, smarter, tougher, kinder, and—ultimately—happier.

However, the noumenal self’s encounter with itself is quite different.  Not being conditioned, it cannot refer to itself in terms of conditioned qualities.  It has nothing to say about itself unless perhaps, “I am that I am.”  Yet even for it to confer existence upon itself is problematical, but language almost forces it to do so.  The categories of existence and non-existence pertain most transparently to conditions that arise and disappear within the phenomenal world.  What are we to say of the pure awareness that simply beholds the rising and falling of conditions in the world?  Does the eye of a hurricane exist?  What about after the turbulence of the hurricane has vanished—does the eye continue to exist then or not?  Did it ever exist or could we perhaps view it as a kind of epi-phenomenon arising in the mind in conjunction with a hurricane, which neither exists nor does not exist?  It is hard to make this case when we are speaking about physical phenomena, which are normally thought either to exist or not to exist.  However, in the case of the noumenal self or pure awareness, its nature is not to be conditioned at all by the phenomenal world.  When phenomena are present and the phenomenal self is aware of them, we can say that the noumenal self is also present “in the background,” so to speak.  But it does not exist in the way that thinking does or feelings do as reflections of and in many cases responses to the circumstances and conditions that elicit them.  We cannot say that pure awareness has its own qualities of cleverness or imagination or joy or anger, for example, which thoughts and feelings do as forms of phenomenal awareness.  If we had to label it or assign it some quality, about the best we could do would be to call it “benign.”  This obviously does not confer upon it any particular quality or condition that could be strictly said to exist.  What if we attempt to say here, too, that like the eye of the storm the noumenal self may be viewed as a kind of epi-phenomenon arising in the mind?  In this case, such an assertion makes no sense since pure awareness is the mind in its fullest manifestation.  The noumenal self is the mind in wide-awakeness.  It is not an epi-phenomenon arising within the mind, but the broadest and most encompassing manifestation of mind or mindfulness itself. In fact, it is so spacious that its spaciousness occurs, as it were, in a dimension that stretches through and beyond the phenomenal world.  This is why we describe the noumenal self as otherworldly while simultaneously in the world.  And it helps to explain why the noumenal self does not exist in the same way that the phenomenal self and world exist.

We may also consider that when the turbulence of worldly conditioning subsides and awareness passes into a dreamless sleep it makes little sense to insist that pure awareness continues to exist any more than the eye of the hurricane.  The phenomenal self by its conditioned nature seeks to perpetuate itself, so it is wont to claim a kind of substantial existence for itself throughout nights of even dreamless sleep.  This is the ego’s doing.  The noumenal self, by contrast, is not conditioned even by the concept of existence, so it has no innate interest in fashioning a double of itself which continues to exist when all the phenomena of which it is a witness disappear for a time, as in sleep.  Not conditioned by existence in the first place, we could say that the noumenal self remains dispassionate altogether about life and death.  At the same time, we are free to surmise that the noumenal self can become aware of phenomena in worlds other than our own.  It would seem to be its nature to be able to behold other types and levels of reality outside of the compass of our accustomed experiences.  These would include worlds where things, thoughts, and feelings exist and behave in very different ways from what we are used to calling “existence” here.  Parallel universes where objects do not obey the so-called “laws of physics” and where thoughts and feelings float independently in space like neon signs are easily conceivable, for example.

As interesting as these speculations are, something further of still greater interest emerges from the noumenal self becoming aware of itself.  What emerges in addition to profound insight into the nature of the self is deep insight into the nature of the world of phenomena.  How this happens is, once again, difficult to describe.  In brief, it occurs when the phenomenal self encounters and is informed by its noumenal counterpart.  Short of that, we know that when the phenomenal self becomes self-aware, it typically just wants more of those conditions it uses to define itself, as we noted above.  Hence, the self-awareness of the phenomenal self does not normally lead to profound insight into the nature of the phenomenal world as a whole.  It is only when occurrences of phenomenal self-awareness repeatedly fail to deliver the duration, depth, or quality of satisfaction the self is looking for that an inquiry is at last propelled into the deeper nature of the world and the self.

In the case of noumenal self-awareness, however, profound insight becomes available not only into the nature of the self, but also into the nature of the world of phenomena.  This is partly because the goal of self-aggrandizement is entirely absent from noumenal awareness.  That distraction does not occlude the eye of pure awareness.  Nor does judgement.  Hence, it is able to behold the world simply in its suchness.  Its awareness—its mindfulness—of the world remains totally benign.  However neutral it may be, this benign awareness does indeed have a meaningful impact upon the phenomenal world under observation.  This occurs through the contact the noumenal self has with the phenomenal self because it is the phenomenal self that is aware of, interacts with, and is itself affected by the conditions, forces, and circumstances of the phenomenal world.  The phenomenal self suffers, as it were, the pain and pleasure of the world.  It is the seat of all the perceptions, attachments, aversions, delusions, and judgements that pertain to the world.  The noumenal self does not have contact with the phenomenal world abstractly, but through the phenomenal, experiential self.  Similarly, noumenal awareness does not occur abstractly either but in relationship to what has arisen in phenomenal awareness.  The phenomenal and noumenal selves are not separate but rather interactive parts or aspects of the same awareness.  Hence, noumenal awareness informs phenomenal awareness (and vice versa).  It changes how the world is perceived; it changes our attitude toward the world; it alters the quality of our judgements about the world; and it even affects what we think and believe about the nature of phenomena themselves.

When the phenomenal self meets its noumenal partner, it responds like one who has met a gaze which at least momentarily extinguishes in it all longing, all attachment, all travail, all suffering. The gaze of a lover can do this, but unlike a lover, the noumenal self does not replace one set of longings with another.  It brings to extinguishment all longings. Likewise, all aversions and all worries are extinguished.  The mind—the pure awareness—is here both in its highest self-knowledge and extinguished and freed from all the conditions of suffering.  Buddhists call this nirvana.  While the noumenal self rests in nirvana, the phenomenal self of course is tossed about by conditioning.  Nevertheless, to the extent that its self-inquiry has penetrated the veils of its own conditioning,—to the extent that it has, so to speak, passed through itself and found its noumenal counterpart “on the other side,”—it returns to the phenomenal world with a much deeper understanding of the world.  The benign nature of noumenal awareness is not something confined to another realm.  Nor is it limited in this world to ashrams, religious retreats, and the domains of hermits and religious ascetics.  Rather it reaches into the world and into phenomena themselves through phenomenal awareness.  The nature of things is not separate from how it is perceived.  (Quantum Physics teaches the same lesson.)  Instead the very act of observation profoundly affects the nature of what is being observed.  So, too, does the quality of observation.  An awareness which is highly conditioned is likely to describe what it observes in terms of its own conditioning.  For example, a consciousness conditioned by pleasure is likely to find and describe all kinds of beautiful and superlative characteristics in what it is observing.  One that is conditioned by dislike will find ugliness and deformity there.  Hence, phenomenal awareness—while still affected by conditioning—can have its perceptions and judgments of the world profoundly altered by the quality of the noumenal awareness with which it comes in contact.  Specifically, the benign emptiness of noumenal awareness does not leave the phenomenal self untouched.  While still in the grip of the human condition with all its impermanence, dissatisfaction, and travail, the phenomenal self or ego is enabled to perceive the world as benign.  This may only occur in fleeting moments, and it does not discount the suffering of the world nor its joy, but it is nevertheless a real and penetrating insight into the nature of things.

This is the moment when the bowl of the sky catches and reflects back the phenomenal self together with its inquiry into itself just at the point when the phenomenal self dissolves and the final residue of fear binding it together is also transcended.  From the viewpoint of the phenomenal self, it has found itself in its counterpart, the noumenal self, represented by the sky.  Reflected in that emptiness, its desires and aversions are extinguished, and its suffering ends. From the viewpoint of the noumenal self, all is beheld simply in its suchness.

This is not really the sky above or an otherworldly manifestation.  It is just the self exploring itself and attaining the vantage point we described in the previous essay as “the top of the pendulum.”  This is the flowering of bodhicitta.  And it is just the phenomenal world exposing itself under intense observation and scrutiny—despite its conditioning, impermanence, and strife—to be essentially benign.  In Buddhist parlance, “the world is such as it is.”  This is not the skeptical and pessimistic statement it is often taken to be, but rather a deeply insightful and broadly accepting attitude toward the world.  It is neither pacifist nor activist but rather trusting of a mindful viewpoint from which wise action may proceed and patient tolerance may be understood.  On a very practical level, the noumenal self ventilates and expands the phenomenal ego.  It refreshes it when it becomes stale from taking itself too seriously.  And it opens it to other possibilities and points of view when it has overlooked the impermanence of things and become entrenched in a limited position.

There is something inherently simplifying, pacifying, and stabilizing just in benignly being seen.  We observe this, for example, in the child who is caught by a parent looking benignly upon even its mischievous behavior.  Such a child—even if punished—is more likely to come to a spontaneous and lasting awareness of its wrongdoing than the child whose parents show only hostility and criticism.  For the benign and empty gaze of its parents is received like an openness inviting in the child’s own better nature and innate awareness and wisdom.  The most effective parents offer this benign seeing as a silent background at all times to their children, when they overtly love them and show them affection, and also when they are profoundly disappointed in them, frustrated by them, and even hate them for a time.  It is a silent but telling communication that “there is something more.”  What this “more” is may take a lifetime to discover, but the hints a parent gives may surely assist the child as they make their way into the ultimate inquiry.