Awakening to Reality: an intro

# Awakening to Reality: an intro This guide is meant to be an introduction to the work known as *Awakening to Reality* (AtR) by Soh Wei Yu and his mentor John Tan, which presents a path to awakening as understood by the Buddhist tradition(s). What makes their work unique is the way it synthesizes and contextualizes insights from other teachings. Numerous practitioners have now found this to be immensely valuable for deepening their own practice. It is our sincere aspiration that these insights become more widely available. May all beings swiftly attain supreme enlightenment. :pray: --- AtR presents the path in seven stages. Before explaining them, let's first take a look at a few of the work's core premises: 1. A key feature of Buddhist awakening is the insight of **no self** (*anatta* in Pali): there is ultimately neither an individual self, nor a Universal Self, nor *any other kind of self*. This is hardly controversial within Buddhism. The key innovation here is in demonstrating how various Buddhist (and certainly non-Buddhist) traditions may *not actually be pointing to this insight*, but to superficially-similar insights. This is not polemic. The point is not to elevate one teaching or tradition over another. It is to help practitioners become "unstuck" from various comfortable (and often extremely tempting) cul-de-sacs that they may otherwise never even notice they are stuck in. 2. An efficient route to realizing *anatta* is to first have the realization that ***I am pure ever-present consciousness, and never sullied by its contents*** (which AtR calls the "I AM" realization). This may sound contradictory to the first point, and bears some elaboration. AtR (along with countless traditional schools, both Buddhist and non-) considers this to be a precious realization. However, it is not the *ultimate* realization, and runs the risk of the practitioner getting stuck there semi-permanently through continued reification. AtR helps one investigate the features of this experience that make it so convincing, and use them to progress more rapidly beyond it. Because this stage runs counter to the Buddha's ultimate teaching, it has been overlooked or shunned by a number of traditions -- possibly to the detriment of students who find themselves inclined toward it (or in the midst of it). 3. The stages should not be understood as strictly hierarchical. For example, someone who has developed significant depth in *I AM* may sound like they are -- and in some ways actually *be* -- experiencing certain "deeper" aspects of reality than someone with a relatively superficial realization of *anatta*. It often happens that students are attracted to certain teachings that have great depth, but which are not by themselves completely liberating. By contextualizing such teachings instead of minimizing or subordinating them, AtR helps alleviate the tendency toward defensiveness. It is important to understand that AtR does not consider itself comprehensive: having realized all seven stages does not make one a Buddha. ## Why not just *vipassana*? A question that often arises is "Why not just follow the Buddha's original teachings?" By this it is usually meant *vipassana* as understood by the Theravada school of Buddhism (which prides itself on following the original words of the Buddha). There are a few issues here. The first is that the earliest scriptures (the *Pali Canon*) are not entirely clear on precisely *how* to practice. As a result, the extant schools of Theravada [may have had to reconstruct those practices from scriptures as recently as in the past 200 years](https://vividness.live/2011/07/07/theravada-reinvents-meditation/). The second issue is that these traditions do not necessarily agree on what the *result* should be. There seem to be three major living traditions of Theravada today: the Mahasi Sayadaw lineage (from Burma), the U Ba Khin / S.N. Goenka lineage (also Burma), and the Thai Forest tradition(s). In the Mahasi tradition, nibbana (nirvana) is equated with the *cessation of consciousness*[^mahasi-cessation], which is a kind of oblivion[^kenneth-cessation]. Descriptions of enlightenment from the Goenka tradition are hard to come by[^Goenka]. And most descriptions from the Thai Forest tradition sound remarkably similar to the *I AM*[^chah] stage. [^mahasi-cessation]: https://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/mahasi/progress.html > [T]he meditator's consciousness leaps forth into Nibbana, which is the cessation of all formations, taking it as its object. [^kenneth-cessation]: https://www.dharmaoverground.org/discussion/-/message_boards/message/5664311#_19_message_5666324 Meditation teacher [Kenneth Folk](https://kennethfolkdharma.com/), who spent twenty years training in the Mahasi tradition, including three years of intensive silent retreat in monasteries: > [T]he Mahasi tradition teaches us to systematically develop the ability to access nibbana, aka cessation or fruition. Many people, including myself, have trained in this way, and their reports are remarkably consistent; there is no experience in nibbana. You simply lose consciousness. ... What I am saying is that from the point of view of the person to whom it happens, nibbana and oblivion are indistinguishable, an observation that to me is so blindingly obvious that I'm surprised anyone is willing to dispute it. [^Goenka]: This is the closest I could find. http://www.buddhanet.net/bvk_study/bvk21e.htm > Goenka: Enlightenment is ... observing oneself and eliminating conditioning. And doing this is Vipassana, no matter what name you may call it. Some people have never even heard of Vipassana, and yet the process has started to work spontaneously in them. This seems to have happened in the case of a number of saintly people in India, judging from their own words. Note that most "saintly people in India" would have come from a background of Yoga or Vedanta, which do not accept the doctrine of *anatta*. [^chah]: [Ajahn Chah, father of one of the Thai Forest lineages](https://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/thai/chah/the_teachings_of_ajahn_chah_web.pdf) (emphasis mine): > We sit in meditation, staying with the ‘one who knows.’ > ... > This is what we call separating the mind from the feeling. If we are clever we don’t attach, we leave things be. **We become the ‘one who knows’**. The mind and feeling are just like oil and water; they are in the same bottle but **they don’t mix.** Even if we are sick or in pain, we still know the feeling as feeling, the mind as mind. We know the painful or comfortable states but we don’t identify with them. We stay only with peace: the peace beyond both comfort and pain. > ... > In its natural state, the mind is the same – in it, there exists no loving or hating, nor does it seek to blame other people. It is **independent, existing in a state of purity** that is truly clear, radiant and untarnished. In its pure state, the mind is peaceful, without happiness or suffering – indeed, not experiencing any vedana (feeling) at all. This is the true state of the mind. **The purpose of the practice**, then, is to seek inwardly, searching and investigating until you reach the original mind. > ... > We say that we separate mind and feeling in this way but in fact **they are by nature already separate. Our realization is simply to know this natural separateness according to reality**. When we say they are not separated it’s because we’re clinging to them through ignorance of the truth. Beloved teacher Jack Kornfield describes the situation delicately [here](https://www.inquiringmind.com/article/2701_w_kornfield-enlightenments/)[^kornfield-shift]: > So here we have different visions of enlightenment. On the one hand, we have the liberation from greed, hatred and delusion attained through powerful concentration and purification, emphasized by many masters from Mahasi and Sunlun Sayadaw to Rinzai Zen. On the other hand, we have the shift of identity reflected in the teachings of Ajahn Chah, Buddhadasa, Soto Zen and Dzogchen. [^kornfield-shift]: On the other hand, notice how he describes this "shift in identity": > This involves a simple yet profound shift of identity from the myriad, ever-changing conditioned states to the unconditioned consciousness--the awareness which knows them all. As we shall see, the aforementioned schools do not agree on this point, either. It seems, again, to be describing the *I AM*. Finally, we might heed the words of teacher (and hardcore *vipassana* practitioner and advocate) Daniel Ingram. By his account, he was stamped as "done" by a lineage-holder in the Mahasi tradition in Burma some time around 2003, and authorized to teach it. He [was asked](https://www.dharmaoverground.org/discussion/-/message_boards/message/11355316): > J.C. : Why the need to experiment with all sorts of practices? Why the need for the switch to Zen, Vajrayana, prayer, Catholic devotional practices, martial arts, magickal practices, and so on? > > Why not just continue to observe exactly what's going on in the present moment and see the Three Characteristics? > > Why isn't that enough? And gave a beautiful answer: > Well, it could be enough, sort of. The Three Characteristics are profound, very profound, staggeringly profound, and not easily grasped in their entirety. It seems perfectly reasonable to grasp them in their entirety by observing them, but there is a problem, actually, that last line contains a bunch of problems that are not obvious until you see them clearly. > > I will go by the words in that last line to illustrate the problem. > > "Continue": there is no continuing. There is nothing to continue, no past that could be continued, no future to continue into, and this moment is entirely ungraspable. No sensation could ever actually grasp or continue. Everything is fresh but perfectly ephemeral. The notion of continuing, from a high insight point of view, is a serious problem. Instead, there has to be a deep non-grasping, a perfect and flawless appreciation of non-continuing, a deep never could be a continuing, a deep nothing could ever be continuing, a deep sense of not only discontinuity, but of the utter flowing, vanishing, empty transience of anything that seemed to be able to continue. One must figure out how to go beyond continuing, beyond grasping, beyond that strange mental illusion that such a thing could ever occur or have occurred. > > "Observe": there is no observing. There can be no observing. There is nothing that can observe at all. Everything is just occurring where it is, naturally, straightforwardly. There is no observer. There can't be any observer. There never was any observer. Deeply understanding this is required. There never was any observation. Observation can't finally do it. One must figure out how to shift out of observing to just phenomena occurring. > > The qualifier "in the present moment" is a problem in some way. This almost always involves some subtle or gross pattern of sensations that we refer to mentally when we say "now", or "the present", which are not actually stable, not actually a present, not actually anything but more empty transience, yet we make them seem like a stable present. This is very subtle, deep, profound. Even "the present" doesn't withstand scrutiny, and we must be careful with this sticky concept, as it can itself become a sort of a solidified thing, part of the illusion of continuity, observation, practitioner, etc. > > So, while it is true that deeply comprehending emptiness, non-continuity, non-observation, and even non-present, can occur by just continuously observing this present moment, we must be careful, and sometimes it takes people shifting out of their trench of "good practice" to do something that is out from good practice and instead is just the unfolding empty wisdom dharma. Various people find various methods to make this subtle shift, and one size definitely does not fit all, so best wishes sorting out what will help you work out your salvation with diligence.