Awareness seems to operate a kind of gestalt, but in addition to foreground and background, there is an underground. Bear with me. Think about meditating on the breath. You breathe away and pay attention to the sensations, maybe you count breaths, and then, suddenly, you find you are thinking about what to have for dinner and you don't remember when you changed tack.
"Not to worry," most meditation teachers will say, "just notice that you lost concentration and go back to the sensations of breathing. The important thing is to notice what is happening." This is good advice, if you are training your mind to concentrate. But consider this: what happened to breathing when you stopped paying attention to it? Your awareness of breathing disappeared and was replaced by dinner. It's not that you stopped breathing, right? Or you'd be dead. But you lost track of breathing. It faded into the underground.
In the Prajñāpāramitā you are seeking to leverage just this ability of the mind to lose track. Except you want to lose track of your self. For your sense of self to just disappear and leave you without a self. You do that by deliberately focussing on something else.
You start by losing track of the gross senses. Focussing allows you to push most things in your awareness into the background and underground. You lose track of the world outside, the room you are seated in, and so on. The initial goal is lose track of sense experience; for sense experience to move to the background and then fade into the underground. The world is there but it does not register because your attention is entirely elsewhere. When this happens it's difficult to orient yourself in space and time. Space feels infinite. There may be a sense of internal unification and it may be blissful This counts as a mystical experience in modern inventories of religious experiences. And it is a milestone in Buddhism, just not a very important one. It is relatively easy to lose track of sense experience.
Then you have to lose track of the remaining cognitive activity. This is more difficult and requires considerable persistence. When cognition itself fades into the underground, it becomes difficult to orient yourself to awareness. Without a sense of self, awareness is no longer self-referential, in any case. Without the usual cognitive activity your mind feels infinite, though you're not really aware of anything in particular. It is difficult to find words for awareness when sense experience and cognition are in the underground.
But you then have to lose track of losing track. At this point you are well and truly lost and cannot orient to any sense of self or world. You are nothing, nowhere, out of time. There's a kind of luminous awareness, but it doesn't have any features - like an infinite blue sky stretching off in all directions.
And beyond this is emptiness. No one is doing or thinking or feeling or experiencing anything anywhere within the sphere of emptiness. Nothing arises, nothing passes away. The experience of emptiness is not tainted with desire or aversion. There is no sense of it growing or shrinking or changing in any way. Emptiness just is. There is no one who experiences emptiness, because in emptiness it never occurs to anyone that they are experiencing anything. Indeed, if something did occur to someone, that would not be emptiness.
This kind of language will be familiar to anyone who has tried to read a Prajñāpāramitā text. Without the context it seems paradoxical, doesn't it? But notice how, when you lead into it and put it in context, that it flows more naturally. Words and concepts are stretched to the limit, but they are not broken. There may, in fact, be no words for being in that (non)experience, but it is not that we cannot understand it or talk about it in retrospect.
By the way, the dissolution of the sense of self can be terrifying. One should not treat it lightly or casually. It ought to be approached in a supportive and emotionally positive atmosphere and under the tutelage of someone who has experience of it. As Michel Foucault reminded us, the Delphic Oracle did not just say "Know thyself" it also said "Take care of thyself". (Technologies of the Self)
"Not to worry," most meditation teachers will say, "just notice that you lost concentration and go back to the sensations of breathing. The important thing is to notice what is happening." This is good advice, if you are training your mind to concentrate. But consider this: what happened to breathing when you stopped paying attention to it? Your awareness of breathing disappeared and was replaced by dinner. It's not that you stopped breathing, right? Or you'd be dead. But you lost track of breathing. It faded into the underground.
In the Prajñāpāramitā you are seeking to leverage just this ability of the mind to lose track. Except you want to lose track of your self. For your sense of self to just disappear and leave you without a self. You do that by deliberately focussing on something else.
You start by losing track of the gross senses. Focussing allows you to push most things in your awareness into the background and underground. You lose track of the world outside, the room you are seated in, and so on. The initial goal is lose track of sense experience; for sense experience to move to the background and then fade into the underground. The world is there but it does not register because your attention is entirely elsewhere. When this happens it's difficult to orient yourself in space and time. Space feels infinite. There may be a sense of internal unification and it may be blissful This counts as a mystical experience in modern inventories of religious experiences. And it is a milestone in Buddhism, just not a very important one. It is relatively easy to lose track of sense experience.
Then you have to lose track of the remaining cognitive activity. This is more difficult and requires considerable persistence. When cognition itself fades into the underground, it becomes difficult to orient yourself to awareness. Without a sense of self, awareness is no longer self-referential, in any case. Without the usual cognitive activity your mind feels infinite, though you're not really aware of anything in particular. It is difficult to find words for awareness when sense experience and cognition are in the underground.
But you then have to lose track of losing track. At this point you are well and truly lost and cannot orient to any sense of self or world. You are nothing, nowhere, out of time. There's a kind of luminous awareness, but it doesn't have any features - like an infinite blue sky stretching off in all directions.
And beyond this is emptiness. No one is doing or thinking or feeling or experiencing anything anywhere within the sphere of emptiness. Nothing arises, nothing passes away. The experience of emptiness is not tainted with desire or aversion. There is no sense of it growing or shrinking or changing in any way. Emptiness just is. There is no one who experiences emptiness, because in emptiness it never occurs to anyone that they are experiencing anything. Indeed, if something did occur to someone, that would not be emptiness.
This kind of language will be familiar to anyone who has tried to read a Prajñāpāramitā text. Without the context it seems paradoxical, doesn't it? But notice how, when you lead into it and put it in context, that it flows more naturally. Words and concepts are stretched to the limit, but they are not broken. There may, in fact, be no words for being in that (non)experience, but it is not that we cannot understand it or talk about it in retrospect.
By the way, the dissolution of the sense of self can be terrifying. One should not treat it lightly or casually. It ought to be approached in a supportive and emotionally positive atmosphere and under the tutelage of someone who has experience of it. As Michel Foucault reminded us, the Delphic Oracle did not just say "Know thyself" it also said "Take care of thyself". (Technologies of the Self)
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