Thanks for the various discussions here. Very interesting.
pegembara wrote: ↑Mon Jan 20, 2020 4:11 am
"Awareness" is not a thing but an activity that grabs onto the 6 sense objects.
I agree. I didn't mean to imply that the classification schemes, such as aggregates and sense bases, refer to "things". Sorry if it looked like that. Quite the opposite: I'm working on ways of seeing that this "background awareness" is just another activity...
retrofuturist wrote: ↑Sat Jan 18, 2020 6:28 am
You may find something useful in ven. Nanananda's explorations of the term
manasikara.
I searched through his talks. I have often found his meditation instructions and analyses very useful, but I was unable to locate anything specifically about the "feeling of constant background awareness". Was there something in particular that you had in mind.
However, it is useful to be reminded that the
nama-rupa-viññāṇa analysis (name&form and consciousness) is
not identical to the aggregates analysis:
And what are name and form?
Katamañca, bhikkhave, nāmarūpaṃ?
Feeling, perception, intention, contact, and attention.
Vedanā, saññā, cetanā, phasso, manasikāro—
This is called name.
idaṃ vuccati nāmaṃ.
...
https://suttacentral.net/sn12.2/en/sujato#11.1
In contrast the
khandhas are:
rūpa, vedanā, saññā, saṅkhāra, viññāṇa.
This talk from Ajahn Sumedho is interesting:
It may well be a useful approach in a meditative context, but his use of terminology seems very non-standard (which is not unusual for Thai Forest monks, of course), as he appears to be postulating a "consciousness" that is not impermanent. See Ajahn Brahm's comment further down...
Joseph Goldstein's talk "Reflections on non-self"
https://dharmaseed.org/teacher/96/talk/54689/
does address some of the issue of "creating the observer", from about 39 minutes, and discusses approaches from various traditions.
Some of the other talks and Q&A sessions on his page are also useful:
https://dharmaseed.org/teacher/96/
Here's a quote from the "Mind Contemplation" section of Ajahn Brahm's book "Happiness Through Meditation", page 116 (also printed as "Mindfulness, Bliss, and Beyond"). He, of course, sees Jhana as an essential preparation.
Brahm wrote:
... Before you begin to investigate the nature of the citta you have to insure that this mind consciousness is purified from all other types of consciousness, i.e., that the five external sense-consciousnesses have been abandoned. Again, this can be done only after emerging from a jhana. Then superpower mindfulness takes the jhana experience just past, a sustained experience of the citta set apart from the five senses, as its object of investigation. Only in this way will the truth be seen that the citta is anatta, tha mind consciousness is subject to arising and passing, that it is neither "me" nor "mine" nor a self, that it is neither God nor cosmic consciousness---that it is just citta, a flame burning because of fuel.
One of the things I have noticed is that the "background awareness" is where the focus goes as I become more concentrated. It's what "brightens". I've definitely not had the sort of jhana experience that Ajahn Brahm describes, but I can see that such blissful, radiant, experience could easily lead to the idea of a "cosmic consciousness" or "true self". This, to me, is the key reason for asking questions about the nature of such experience.
As Thanissaro Bhikkhu observes:
Thanissaro wrote:
Although at present we rarely think in the same terms as the Sāṅkhya philosophers, there has long been—and still is—a common tendency to create a “Buddhist” metaphysics in which the experience of emptiness, the Unconditioned, the Dharma-body, Buddha-nature, rigpa, etc., is said to function as the ground of being from which the “All”—the entirety of our sensory & mental experience—is said to spring and to which we return when we meditate. Some people think that these theories are the inventions of scholars without any direct meditative experience, but actually they have most often originated among meditators, who label (or in the words of the discourse, “perceive”) a particular meditative experience as the ultimate goal, identify with it in a subtle way (as when we are told that “we are the knowing”), and then suppose that level of experience to be the ground of being out of which all other experience comes.
https://www.dhammatalks.org/suttas/MN/MN1.html
Mike