Don’t Lie To Yourself

Q: OK, so, the subject I thought it would be good to speak about comes down to a type of… to call it a view might be misleading. It’s more like an axiom of thought that is really taken for granted, that can be expressed in a few different ways. It comes to down to the idea that there’s no such thing as certainty in regard to the nature of things. There’s no such thing as absolute knowledge. And it’s not usually something that people will state explicitly.

N: But it’s implied.

Q: But it’s implied in their thoughts, their ideas. And sometimes you’ll be having a conversation with somebody about, for example, right and wrong, and just when it seems like it’s starting to go somewhere, then they say ‘well, you can never really know, can you?’

N: Yeah, yeah. It’s almost like the agnosticism in the Suttas. People have what they deem to be sort of a conventional knowledge, but then if you start pushing it towards further clarity… It’s taken as valid, this kind of dismissal of ‘well, you can’t really know’. But, you obviously seem to think that you know that. You obviously seem to think that you know that you can’t really know, but OK, so if your premise is true, how do you know that? How do you know that you can’t know? And then you realise it’s a contradiction in terms.

Q: So that’s one thing, the statement in order to be true, must be false, because of if you apply it to itself. And about this, there were a few things that I wanted to bring up about it, because it’s really something that a lot of people seem to subscribe to. And you can see that if you take the notion of knowledge in the scientific sense, as in, we need to know things about the world by gathering information and data about them, then you do have to say ‘well, whatever we can find out can always be disproved by something, we never can absolutely know’.

N: Why do you think that is?

Q: Because the data that you can gather and the information that you can gather depends on the instrument through which you’re viewing it.

N: Exactly. So it’s purely observational, based on the senses. Which means, all you need to do in order to disprove it is observe something different. That’s it. And in itself, as a method of learning about the world, that’s fine. But your mind is not an object of your senses, can not be an object of your senses, yet if your only criteria for ‘learning’ and ‘understanding’ is gathering information through observation on the basis of your senses, means the entire domain of your mind and mental development is absolutely excluded from any recognition.

Q: Yep, and it occurred to me that that also is not something that’s exclusive to science in that way, the same type of basing one’s ideas, one’s views, on information that one gathers. In that Sutta, I think it’s the Brahmajāla Sutta, where he’s going through all of these views that different people can have, and they have a huge variety of views based on different types of information that they gather. You have one who’s been able to remember forty aeons of past lives or something, so that’s an unbelievable amount of information that he has, but then the problem is that he then goes on to say ‘that’s the information I have, therefore that’s how the world is, the world in itself is eternal’ and so on. And the other thing I wanted to bring up about it is that it is one way of expressing the wrong view, it seems to me. When he says ‘there are no monks and brahmins who know the world and understand the nature of the world and declare it, that certainty, direct knowledge is not a possibility’. And to me that also seems like that’s one aspect of this wrong view that the Buddha describes, but when I think about it I can see that it also implies the rest of that description of the wrong view. Because if somebody says, if I’m talking to somebody and they say ‘well, you can never really know, you never have any certainty’ then it means for them that ‘well, whatever I might do, whatever I might strive for, I’m never going to ever know for sure whether it’s right or wrong, I’m never going to know for sure what’s the result of it, so ultimately, in a fundamental sense, everything that I do is…’

N: I just hope for the best, do things to the best of my abilities. Why do you think they do that? What is the practical basis, because there is always a practical basis for every wrong view. By practical I mean, some sort of involvement that you’re not admitting to yourself. So in this particular case, what would the practical basis for that view be? Why would somebody prefer to hold the view of ‘well, you can’t really know anything, you can’t be one hundred percent sure’?

Q: Because when you start thinking that there could be the possibility of direct knowledge, certainty, knowledge of right and wrong, then you can’t really be indifferent about that. You have to do something about it.

N: Exactly. Or feel guilty for not doing it. Either way, you can’t cover up the weight of it. Yeah, that’s exactly it. That’s why it’s always wrong views and inauthenticity, hand-in-hand, always. You can not be authentic and hold the wrong views. Nor can you remain inauthentic if you’re dropping the wrong views. That’s impossible.

Q: Yep. I also found it interesting because I used to not pay that much attention to the description of the wrong view that the Buddha was giving. And I’ve heard people say that it’s just ‘some people in that time had these extreme views about the world’.

N: Oh yeah, yeah. It tends to be dumbed down, and assumed that they’re these like, almost caricature examples. Like ‘oh yeah, the eternalists and the annihilationists, we are past that point’. No, those are the two fundamental existential views for as long as you’re not a sotāpanna. So you’re going to be either an eternalist or an annihilationist. There is no third option for you there. All the variety of the views that the Brahmajāla Sutta elaborates on fall into these two categories. Ones that say yes, and ones that say no. They don’t see the middle.

Q: And at least to me, the problem as well with thinking that these views, like the wrong view and its counterpart as well, the right view, are to be found in what somebody expressly, explicitly believes and professes, ‘I think such-and-such a thing’. I think it’s a problem because then it would mean that you get the ‘mundane’ right view or something like that by just adopting a particular set of ideas.

N: Another view, yeah. Yeah, the right view is a view, but obviously it’s a view that goes in between the two polar opposites of wrong views. Yes and no, annihilationists and eternalists, mystics or scientifically-oriented, doesn’t matter. The right view is the view that puts first as first, and everything else as second. So, it’s not directly opposed to the wrong views in the sense of left and right, it’s more like left and right are both are wrong, and this is above. The right view is above both. That’s why going beyond the wrong views to the right view, and eventually for an arahant, who has bought the right view to fulfilment, he has gone even beyond that vertical view of right perspective. He has dropped everything in that sense. So yeah, I think initially people will take the right view in a wrong sense, through some sort of belief or faith, and that’s inevitable. And that in itself is not a problem. The problem is if then they think that’s it, that’s all they needed to do. Just let me assume the right things on the basis of information I’ve collected, which yes, it might be factually less wrong than other views you had before.

But the measure of the right view, it’s not the measure of your belief, faith, confidence, certainty. It’s measured by your inability to suffer. And that’s something you can’t really lie… I mean you can obviously cover it up, but fundamentally, you’re always aware of it as a problem. The fact that you’re not free from suffering, and you know it. And if that’s the case it means you shouldn’t be deluding yourself into thinking ‘but I still have a right view’. Because if you did, you wouldn’t be afraid of suffering any more. You wouldn’t be affected by the suffering any more. Maybe to some tiny degree, let’s say it like that. From the arahant’s point of view, yes you would still be affected by suffering as a sotāpanna. But from a puthujjana’s point of view, well, you’re pretty much on the level of arahantship as far as the puthujjana is concerned, because he has no knowledge of any escape from suffering. And that’s the fundamental difference.

Q: Can somebody who, without knowing it, has wrong views underlying their actions and what they’re doing, can they practise the Dhamma?

N: You meant the actual Dhamma? No, that’s impossible.

Q: So even if they try to be very virtuous…

N: Yeah, all that’s commendable and to be encouraged, but it’s the right view that makes the Dhamma visible. And if you’re not seeing what you’re supposed to be doing, then you aren’t doing it. And even if you’re going through all the right motions, that’s what Ñāṇavīra used to say, he’s doing right things for the wrong reasons. Yeah, it’s still better than doing wrong things for wrong reasons, but fundamentally, the Dhamma only arises with the right view. And again, it’s important to not lie to yourself about it. Because if you think you have access to the Dhamma, the actual Dhamma, the actual path to liberation that the Buddha was teaching, without being a sotāpanna, that’s it. You already assume you have gained the access to the result of your right view, without the right view. Which means you’re not going to recognise the severity of having wrong views and the importance of actually needing to get the right view, because there is no Dhamma below that. And people would ignore the importance and would not make the effort for the same reason we said in the beginning, ‘nothing can be known, you can’t be sure’, because that would make them feel too unpleasant about it. Because it is a serious weight, a burden, especially if you don’t know what to do about it, and now you’re even more overwhelmed by the confusion. Well, that’s at least a good starting point, now at least you know what work needs to be done.

Q: Now at least you realise the problem with the position you’re in.

N: Yeah, yeah. And in order to find a solution to a problem, you first need to stop ignoring it. And you know that in a mundane sense, in day-to-day life, when everybody’s aware that this person has a problem, but that person is refusing to admit it. And nothing you do, nothing you offer in a form of help will actually help, because they refuse to acknowledge that there is a problem. Blatantly lying about it to themselves. And that’s the same on the level of the mind. So unless you recognise that, no no no, this is a factual problem and the only way out of this problem would to be to get the right view, then you take it seriously, and then you actually have a chance of getting the right view. That’s what I was saying before, the prerequisite for the right view is right honestly, or self-honesty, or transparency, or authenticity, whatever you want to call it. Without it, it doesn’t matter how much you practise. Fifty years you could practise Dhamma, you’re not practising the Dhamma.

Q: And can you get the right view by doing something other than questioning your views, and trying to undo, seeing how the wrong view is wrong?

N: No, no. Because whatever you would be doing in that case would be on the basis of your wrong views. So you’re not really uprooting or undoing the problem, you’re just building on top of it.

Q: So, just another branch on the same topic that is related to what you just said, that I’ve come up against. It’s when people start to practise and they say ‘OK, I want to be a sotāpanna, and if I’m not a sotāpanna, then I can’t say that I know’. The problem is that people can say ‘well, there is no certainty apart from one who is a sotāpanna’, but then they don’t actually change their attitude from that basic attitude of saying ‘nothing can be certain’.

N: So they abstractly allow the possibility of being certain as a sotāpanna, but practically, they absolutely abolish it. Yeah, that’s probably the most common attitude between laypeople and monks. In a sense, they’re all striving, they’re all striving for something. But practically, if you were to develop clarity about it, or to make the effort, or to investigate the meaning and so on, to actually start doing something about the lack of clarity which is preventing you from being a sotāpanna, that’s always dismissed, as if like ‘that’s just your views and opinions’. Well everything is your view and opinion. So the question is not not having any views and opinions in that kind of non-committal sense, because you’re committing to that. The question is undoing all the wrong views by seeing how they’re wrong, why they’re wrong, finding contradictions in them, and that’s how you will be unable to hold them, and that’s how you are getting closer to the right view. Recognising where the problem is, and not covering it up any more.

Q: A version of that too is saying ‘OK, I think X, Y and Z, but I’m not a sotāpanna so I might be wrong, or I’m probably wrong in some way. So then I’ll ask somebody else who I think is a sotāpanna, and then I’ll follow what they say’.

N: Or not even that, ‘I ask somebody else who might have an opinion about it, and somehow we’re going to arrive at the right conclusion’. Yeah, I’ve heard that I don’t know how many times, exactly that. Somebody will ask a very clear question, practical question, and then the answer they would get would be quoting what somebody else might say in that instance. Again, in a mundane sense, the only time I would give you an answer in that way, like if you ask me something and I say ‘well there’s this such-and-such and he likes to do this in such cases’ is because I don’t have a clue what I’m talking about. Because if I understood what I’m talking about, I would understand your question, and I would understand the best answer for you. Even if I’m absolutely illiterate in every other way. You understand the craft, you understand the way out, you will know how to convey it. And the clear indication of not knowing the way out, is when somebody asks you a question about suffering or Dhamma, and you just keep sort of throwing in references, or referring to this or that. Not in an ‘I’ll give you a reference to help with what I’ve just told you’ way, but more like, ‘oh yes, you know, the big, senior ajahn, he always says this’. It’s like yeah, but I didn’t ask the big, senior ajahn, I’m asking you. Because you offered yourself for that purpose. So that should always be a red flag. And I remember that was always the thing as well.

Like, I personally from the start was reading the Suttas, philosophy, Ñāṇavīra, that was my thing, never really listened to any Dhamma talks and so on. And the first time I heard Dhamma talks, I felt like there was nothing being said. It was just people talking for an hour, giving these generic ideas. And I thought, well maybe that’s just the form of a Dhamma talk, you can’t really be very specific. But then the more I listened, the more it became apparent that no, you can be specific, it’s just that these people aren’t. And the only reason they’re not specific is because either they don’t want to tell you, and why would they not do that? Or, they don’t know what to tell you. So it’s just, ‘let me fill an hour with these inspirational terms and so on, and kind of resembling the Suttas, sometimes more, sometimes less’. But overall, if you were to know what you were talking about, you would have a straight answer. There’s a Sutta that directly says that. When the king, or whoever he was, asked the Buddha, do you prepare the answers beforehand? He says ‘no. You’re the king’s master chariot-maker?’ He says ‘yes I am’. ‘If somebody were to ask you anything about the workings of a chariot, would you have to prepare an answer?’ He says ‘no, if they wake me up in the middle of the night I’ll give him an answer immediately, because I’ve fully understood the workings of it.’ Same with the one who has practised the way rightly, who is enlightened or is on the way to be enlightened, he will be able to convey that way at any given time.

And then obviously, once I started talking, I realised that yeah, you can be very specific. And as a matter of fact, the Suttas were talks. The Buddha didn’t sit and write down the Suttas, premeditating what he was going to say. It was basically recorded conversations. So there is no problem with the medium of direct discourse, the problem is that there is no substance to it, generally. And again, that’s found in Suttas, probably often overlooked. When a man comes seeking heartwood, and asks a question how to find the heartwood, and he was given the answer about sapwood. And the man, not knowing any better, he takes the sapwood to be the heartwood, and he stops looking for the heartwood.

Q: Yep. And another problem I think also is when somebody needs to rely on somebody else’s views, or what somebody else says, because they themselves don’t know. Then what can happen is that they themselves stop taking responsibility, like ‘OK, so-and-so said this, I have faith in him, so that must be right’. And now it’s not me thinking this any more, it’s not what I think any more.

N: Even if that person is factually the Buddha himself, if you took the practice on that level, there is no practice for you for as long as that doesn’t change, that attitude.

Q: And so then anything that contradicts what you have decided to have faith in, you can say ‘oh, no no no, that can’t be right’ while at the same time forgetting that actually you don’t know for yourself.

N: Well that’s one of the basic logical fallacies. And all of them have the same thread, I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this in another talk, but it’s all that, cover up, avoiding taking responsibility. So you assume the authority, either some senior monk, or your teacher, or the religion, or the texts, or the scholarly study of the dictionary, ‘see, that’s how it’s factually written’. All done for the purpose of, yeah, but what does that mean for you. It’s the like the difference the Buddha often talks about in the Suttas, the phrasing and the meaning. Yeah, you won’t find the meaning in the phrasing to be self-evident. You need to actually undo your wrong views for these subtler meanings to become apparent. Because everybody reads the Suttas, but almost nobody gets the right view on account of reading the Suttas. Why is that? Either the Suttas are wrong, or the instruments that people are reading the Suttas with, the views, what they perceive, the concepts, everything else implied in it, it’s completely covered, like layers and layers and layers of the wrong views that the Buddha lists in the Brahmajāla Sutta. And that’s why there is no meaning becoming apparent.

Q: Does it maybe come down to the difference between, is my aim to genuinely go beyond doubt, or is it to ‘become a sotāpanna’ according to my idea of what somebody said what a sotāpanna is?

N: Yeah, that’s going to be the first thing, ‘I want to become a sotāpanna’. As the Suttas say, ‘oh, such-and-such become a sotāpanna, well if he can do it, I can do it’ type of thing. So yeah, it’s taken wrongly, but it does aim in the right direction in a broader sense. But then yes, you could spend the next five decades just protecting that view, and not really recognising or stepping further into understanding what it actually means to be a sotāpanna. ‘Oh, I want to become a sotāpanna and I’m doing all these things’. But why do you do what you’re doing? Why are you doing these practises? Why are you even keeping the virtue? Do you understand, or are you just doing all of that because you were told to? And that will be the difference then. If somebody’s actually getting closer to becoming a sotāpanna, they’re one who starts questioning all these things and trying to understand them. Then inevitably, you’re going to arrive at the doubt, and understanding what the actual problem of the doubt is. It’s not what you’re doubting, it’s the presence of the discomfort of the doubt. And again, that’s something you can theorise about, but it will never be right until you start enduring it.

Q: Because people can then think ‘becoming a sotāpanna will free me from doubt’, rather then it being…

N: Freeing myself from doubt will make me a sotāpanna. Yep, that’s exactly it. The horse or the cart. People put the cart in front of the horse, and think ‘oh, let me just do these practises that will result in my magical awakening of sotāpatti, and then these fetters will fall off. My self-view, doubt, virtue and duty, and so on’. But it’s the other way around. It’s you fully understanding these fetters, that’s how you become a sotāpanna. So you understanding the virtue and duty and freeing yourself from the assumption of it, freeing yourself from assuming the external sense of self outside of your experience, and freeing yourself from the pressure of the doubt. And then, when these three fetters don’t move you, it’s safe to say you’re a sotāpanna. Not the other way around.

Q: It’s interesting how even the ideas that people have about the Dhamma can be used to justify holding the wrong views. I’m thinking of an example where somebody might say ‘this is how it is, this is how it can be discerned directly in your experience’, and then the response was ‘no, that’s not a ground for being sure about it because a puthujjana sees self in his experience’. So like, the idea that there’s not supposed to be a self.

N: Right, right. Well, it’s on that arms-length level. It’s never taken on that personal level because, again, the fetters are not seen. Because people avoid seeing them, or admitting them, because they are unpleasant. The reason why everybody so easily assumes external duty, and virtue, and practice, and method, and technique, is because it’s easier than to leave it non-specific, and then feel the burden of confusion and everything else. ‘What am I doing right, what am I doing wrong, what do I do, how do I do it?’ Fundamentally, if you stay in that state, you will recognise ‘oh, my only concern here with this entire state is that it’s unpleasant, and I refuse to accept that discomfort of it’. That’s why I’m worried about what to do, not because I really need to know what to do. And more often than not, you actually know what you need to do. But when the pain pressures you, you doubt everything, because your primary concern is aversion to pain. Pain must be avoided, always, the pain must be dealt with, instantly. And that’s why you get liable to doubt and everything else, because you gave it power.

Q: Not even seeing that what you’re doing is trying to avoid the pain of it, because your mind is focussed on ‘I have to solve this question and this problem’. Related to that actually, another thing I noticed about this kind of thing that people end up coming down to, ‘oh well, I can’t be sure about that’, or ‘you can’t really be certain about this thing’ is that it can be used to justify holding… Let’s say you have an idea about right and wrong, for example. Not to go into specific ideas of right and wrong, but it usually would be on the level of a specific template of how the world should look, and how people should behave, and should act, and it should be like this, and et cetera. That this is right. But then you come to the point of realising, well, nothing I do will ever be able to create that template how I want it to be, it can’t be quite consistent…

N: It’s always out of reach, in that sense.

Q: Exactly. And instead of then realising, well my idea of what is right and wrong might be flawed, or might be wrong, it’s like ‘oh well, you can’t ever be perfect’.

N: Exactly, just try your best and that’s it. But yeah, even that then becomes just a coping mechanism. Because if you realise you are trying your best, and still nothing changes, in a way, things don’t matter. Then you either just dismiss that, or you recognise, well, maybe my best efforts are completely misdirected. And that’s the painful thing, where the honesty comes in. If you start admitting it you realise, if a tenth of these efforts that I have been making, factually, were actually directed to things that matter, such as freedom from suffering, greed, aversion, delusion, if you made effort to clarify that, and not act out of it, and everything else we talk about, you realise yeah, I would have had the results I’m hoping for. People are easily mislead because they are already misleading themselves, through not being honest enough. Why are you doing what you’re doing, and why are you holding views that you’re holding?

Q: And that is so unpleasant to accept, the possibility that everything that I’ve been doing and all the efforts I’ve been making might have been in the wrong direction. But it’s much easier then to fall back on this ‘well, it can never be quite perfect’. Again like, ‘there are no fruits and results, ultimately, of good and bad actions’.

N: Yeah, exactly. So you fail to even grasp the mundane right view. And I’ve seen senior monks saying that, after decades in the robe, giving Dhamma talks and saying ‘no no no’… And I don’t mean they were speaking poetically, they spent an hour explaining what they meant. And what they were saying was, ‘there is nothing to be attained’. Like, all these things about ‘it’s not about attaining anything, don’t worry about becoming a sotāpanna, don’t worry about this, just be here now.’ And then the whole talk revolves around that concept of ‘don’t do anything, just accept yourself the way you are’. It’s like, but you are a puthujjana. If you accept yourself as somebody who is drowning, means you are never going to save yourself. You will drown. ‘Oh yeah, I accept the fact that I’m drowning.’ OK, fine. Goodbye then. Or, ‘no, I don’t accept the fact that I’m drowning, I’m going to at least try and get out of this quicksand’, or whatever I’m in. Well, now you at least have a chance, because you are trying.

But I’m sure that none of those senior teachers started with that view. They probably had a more or less genuine view in the beginning, but having been going wrongly about it, you end up covering it up more, and more, and more, and obviously, the more you go in that direction, the further away you drift from even basic honesty on that existential level. And then it becomes easier to just blatantly cover up, or dismiss, or not even consider whether that might contradict the Suttas and so on. Because ‘well, you know, look, I’ve been doing this for fifty years and I’m fine, I’m a good person’. It’s not about being a good person, it’s about ceasing to be a person. It’s about freeing yourself from the entire saṃsāra. If you want to be a good person, fine, but that’s not what the Dhamma teaches. That’s like, somebody who can’t practise the Dhamma, OK, at least be a good person. But if you can practise the Dhamma, that is the goal. So again, people come and look to those teachers or teachings to find the heartwood, to find the source, the meaning, the core of the teaching, and all they get is irrelevant bark, and sapwood, and stuff that’s useless. Or that’s just relatively useful, for mundane matters.

So, if there was nothing to be attained, would the Buddha have talked about it so often? If it’s all about just being here now, and accepting, and not judging, and whatever else, the Buddha would have surely mentioned that. No no no, he does not tolerate, he does not welcome, he doesn’t act out, he grits his teeth and endures it, endures the elements, endures the words of others, purifies his mind from unwholesome states day and night, takes responsibility, is virtuous, sense restrained, doesn’t look for loopholes. So there’s plenty to do. Yet, your conclusion from all of that is ‘right, right, OK, be here now and just relax, calm down and that’s it, it’s all fine, there is no problem, you are the one creating problems’. Yeah, because problems are there, it can seem that you are creating them by looking at them. So, what a child does when it’s scared and doesn’t want to deal with something? It covers its eyes, thinking, ‘OK, I don’t see it, it’s not there any more’. But if it were not there, why would you have had to cover your eyes in the beginning?