Post #114: The Deathless

30 May 2024

“Bhikkhus, dwell with your minds well-established in mindfulness: do not let the Deathless be lost on you.” (Amata Sutta, SN 47.41)

     It may tell you something about my life on the Path these past twenty years (or on-and-off, arguably, though I doubt I ever really stepped away, see #90) that “the Deathless” never registered with me—not, that is, before an especially close friend and fellow meditator brought it to my attention a few days ago in response to something I had said about my sittings lately.

     It’s been a matter of some importance to me, especially in recent years (after a more gung-ho initial period, see Posts #1-3), that I was not practicing for any very lofty spiritual goals (Nibbana, Liberation, the Deathless), but simply to keep things together in my life. What drew me to the practice from day one—easy for me to identify because S.N. Goenka happened to come to town on the same day as the Pope, and gave a talk in the afternoon not far from where I’d gone to see the Papal mass in the morning—was the promise of equanimity, not enlightenment (though I would now say that the two may be closer than I would have imagined before). Over the years, especially during a period of fairly intense engagement with the Pali Canon and sundry commentaries, I must have come across references to “the Deathless” many times. But there was little recognition and no impression made. I might as well not have heard it at all until the other day, when my friend mentioned it to me, in passing, and my ears pricked up for the first time.

     What led me to make the remarks to which my friend responded was a curious turn in some of my sittings lately (see #86, #103)—two in particular: the first following an evening of harrowing thoughts, a few weeks ago, about becoming increasingly irrelevant; the second more recently, on the heels of a spell of fears around a health scare and a birthday, before the flashing red lights of mortality, as it were. (How much warrant the facts of my life really gave for these fears is debatable, but not what I am concerned with here.)

     What I thought I could make out in those two or three sittings, for the first time with such clarity, were the outlines of a different dimension of experience, for lack of a better term, that seemed somehow to reach beyond the self and its mortal, disunited perspective on things. There was no great discovery in this, doctrinally speaking, and my meditation must surely have put me in touch with it before without my remembering anything remarkable. But the selfless, deathless quality has somehow become more salient and noticeable recently, and the way I explained it to myself, and to my friend, was that it was probably the very frustration of the self and the dread of ageing, sickness, and death that had somehow opened up a refuge. Again, no great secret in that—just something that I had not experienced before, at least not so consciously.

     As I mentioned briefly a few weeks ago, I have come to believe (see my first note to #109) that we in fact inhabit two parallel dimensions of experience all the time, though we are not usually aware of it: on the left, the survivor’s and procreator’s perspective, honed by aeons of evolution and continually strengthening at the expense of the other; on the right, a sense not merely abstract but accessible to immediate experience that we are not separate entities at all, but radically interdependent processes, embedded in bottomless causal webs on all sides and in a sense indestructible, not as individuals, but as parts of the whole. It is not mythology or voodoo, after all, but physics itself that insists on energy never getting destroyed, only transformed—and intimating that all may come down to such energy in the end, though it garbs itself in all manner of confusing material forms that suggest radical separateness. Under a microscope, the boundaries we take so much for granted would be hard to trace, never mind that there are much subtler levels of analysis still. This duality of perspective now looks to me, pace Mr. McGilchrist and Ms. Bolte Taylor (as per the note mentioned above) as if it were reflected in the structure of our brains themselves. In truth we are experiencing the world at both levels all the time, but we do not often become conscious of it because the corpus callosum inhibits the flow of information between the two spheres, and does so to a unique extent with us humans. So we find our radios set to the narrow wavelengths of survival and procreation, as it were, even though we are also able to receive all kinds of fascinating broadband messages if we turn the dial by various means, as I’ve mused along with Aldous Huxley in Post #56.

     Such theoretical reflections may be intriguing, but they don’t look very decisive to me until they become experiential. And so they have done for me too before, to some extent; only never in the form I witnessed lately, which was not spectacular, exactly, but still highly suggestive, indeed all the more so because it did not involve any of the fireworks that one can set off with various other methods of accessing alternate dimensions, during retreats or in the course of turbo-charged spiritual encounters of the third kind. What I got to see was, like my practice in general these days, rather low-octane. I was not propelled across the heavens with jet engines roaring, only lifted for a bit, as if by an observation balloon, until the vastness of the sky became peculiarly visible in a way that was both unspectacular and truly remarkable at the same time. Might it be possible, I could not help wondering, to connect oneself more consciously and lastingly to this? Or rather, could one grow into a reliable awareness of being always at home in this unexpected dimension, whether one realized it before or not?

     Ho-hum, a scoffer might say: could anything be more obvious? After all, what spiritual tradition does not tell its version of a story about the deathless? Quite so, except that I am not sure we are talking about the same thing, even if the limitations of language may force us to use similar terms. I remember being very struck when a high-profile Western convert to Islam (Berkeley and all) recalled in ecstatic cadences how he was brought to the one true faith by nothing so much as its supposedly unmatched account of what would follow upon death. I do not wish to engage him or anyone else in a dispute at that level. What we expect from death is for each of us to resolve with ourselves and the powers that be.

     What I would like to stress, however, in contrast to the theistic accounts of possible afterlives, is that the Buddhist account as I understand sounds so convincing to me not because I take such delight in its promises, but because of its stark realism in insisting that nothing will be preserved of the individual self as we think we know it (which turns out, upon closer examination, to be a chimera in the first place). The point is not any prospect of eternity for what we take ourselves to be, either in body or in soul, but the simple (yet hard-to-grasp) recognition, always within reach yet ever-elusive, that even as we are right now, unpurified and untransformed, the deathless is but the other side of the coin, so to speak. I do not pretend to understand fully what this means or all that it implies, so I cannot hope to explain it to anyone’s satisfaction. I can only report, for what it’s worth (not much, perhaps), that something of this nature became visible to me, quite unexpectedly and undramatically, and that what it signaled (so far as I could make out) felt eminently reassuring, incomplete and fleeting as it also was.

     I am reminded of Jesus’s dictum about winning life by losing it (Matt. 16:25). Christians have their own ways of understanding the pronouncement, but to me it looks as if our very vitality might stand in the way of seeing what is going on behind the agitated scenes of day-to-day existence in a perilous world that puts such an endless succession of challenges to us. Maybe the fires of our youthful vitality work a little like the Sun for us, lightening and brightening our days, but blocking the stars from view, though they never disappear in fact and theirs is the much vaster domain. Perhaps some degree of night needs to fall upon our animal spirits (#112) before our eyes can adjust and the starry heavens be revealed to us in all their glory and boundlessness. It seems no coincidence to me that the Buddha’s search, like the guardians’ training in dialectics in the Republic, and even the ministry of Jesus (approximately), began as thirty and ended at thirty-five (meaning well into middle-age by ancient standards). Even if we may be dealing with stylized numbers not to be taken too literally, the message is clear: to become an enlightened being, one need not be fully old, but one must no longer be young.

     As Ajarn Amaro puts it in his reflections on “Attending to the Deathless” (Lionsroar.com, as against my own cat’s meows), it is as if going through life were like looking at a painting: we get engrossed in the objects that are depicted and the stories that get told. Our survival-shaped senses prompt us to focus on the shapes and the events, which include our own bodies and life-stories, but beyond all such details, important as they are, the painting is also a single canvas on which the bits of paint blend together a lot more than what is apparent to the eye focused on the unfolding scenes. Change the lighting, or maybe just dim it down sufficiently (“All colors will agree in the dark,” Francis Bacon quipped), and you may find it much easier to take in the picture as a whole, or discern the frame that holds it together.

     This distinction of angles may also help to explain why the awakened perspective as the Buddhists describe it does not imply inactivity, as non-Buddhists have often objected. The more comprehensive, big-picture outlook does not simply negate or invalidate the ordinary day-to-day survivor’s view of the world: in an awakened mind, the two are simply set side-by-side, to be adopted as appropriate to the given situation. When the left hemisphere of Jill Bolte Taylor’s brain was incapacitated by her stroke, she reportedly entered a blissful state of nirvanic detachment, in which even her own impending demise was no longer any cause for great concern or alarm (though she was not kept from taking life-saving measures eventually). This shift in perspective from the worries of a lifetime brought her much relief, she recalled, and perhaps this is something we all have to look forward to when we die (as near-death experiences also seem to suggest). For practical purposes, however, her newfound state of unconditional bliss left much to be desired, and so she spent years nursing her left side back to reasonable health with great determination.

     We need our individual survivor’s perspective, in other words, with all the discomforts and pains and miseries that are part of the signaling system we have evolved for keeping us higher apes vigilant before dangers and threats; but this outlook is as inextricably bound up with death as it is with life, and agonizingly narrow if we do not find ways of tapping into the right side, which gives us a very different frame of reference. Merely understanding that there are two such rival (and complementary!) points of view, and that both are equally native to us, won’t help much; the urgent clamors of the left will almost always crowd out the more soothing messages of the right. Nonetheless, it appears that we can deliberately cultivate more awareness and a better balance between the two, even if it may take some of us laggards a few decades of humdrum practice before we can even see it in outline.

     It is one of the vexations of the spiritual journey, at least for me, to be told by advanced travelers that such shifts in perspective (or other signal turns on the Path) are supposed to be “very simple and natural.” They have a point, of course, these guiding beacons of teacherly light, inasmuch as what there is to be seen has been there all along, and that we’ve never lacked the necessary apparatus for perceiving it. But as we cannot hear silence when we try to listen for it, or see space when we look for it, so also in this case: the deathless is not readily visible to us when we are busy with staying alive, nor when we deign to make a little room for it in whatever “free time” we can spare. Here we may discover, perhaps, the great consolation that ageing, sickness, and death hold out for us: for the very waning of our vital powers, terrible as it seems at first, may allow us, at last, to look through and behind all the sound and the fury. And in that unforced glance beyond the passing show, perhaps we may hope to find, by relaxing into our deteriorating state, that relief and release, that ease and joy which kept eluding us so long as we were looking more energetically for answers and remedies. This process of easing into our decline and decay cannot be called easy, surely; but perhaps things can be simple and natural, and yet difficult at the same time. (Even as I make the argument that senescence may bring welcome surprises, I am not looking forward to it. Not at all.)

     I must urge the reader, in conclusion, to heed the qualifiers without which what I have said here would sound ridiculous to my own ears: we way hope and perhaps. The liberating turn of perspective that I have been trying to get at in my own limited way is intimated so persistently in the Buddhist teachings, and in the exhortations of the spiritual masters, that one may feel inclined, as a member of the flock, to take it on unquestioning faith. I do not object to such pious remedies, but for my part I cannot help feeling (and for this angle too there is plenty of Buddhist warrant) that such truths must be personally witnessed before they can become real to us. Once again, I am not speaking, in what I said above, of any great epiphany or revelation, merely of something I believe I glimpsed, for a few moments and very incompletely, out of the corner of my eye. That scanty intimation was enough, however, to make the possibility of something more sustained seem quite real to me—a new and unexpected development for a relatively skeptical practitioner who thought, before, that his business was with life, gladly; with death, under duress and protest; and with the deathless, not at all. Everything changes. How lastingly and meaningfully, in this case, remains to be seen.

PS: I add for the record that the unusual element that showed up a few times in my meditations over the past couple of weeks has disappeared again without a trace. Currently my sittings are so dull, superficial, mechanical, and unfruitful that I might be tempted to roll up the mat and be done with it—if I hadn’t learned that the mat reflects the law of impermanence above all else, and that the Path, once one has become established on it, is a Hotel California that one can check out from any time, but never leave (#70, #86, #90).