13. The Four Right Efforts and Other Power

Part 1 - How Effort (virya) in meditation becomes more effective as we open to an Other Power perspective.

Continuing this series of reflections on the subtleties of how volition (the samskāras skandha) actually works in the context of meditation and radical spiritual transformation, I am feeling a need to explore the notion of Other Power more deeply. I would like to suggest that Gendlin’s ‘Focusing’ is a form of Other Power practice in several ways – the two most significant of which, I have briefly outlined below.

Firstly, ‘Focusing’ acknowledges that our capacity for Mindful Presence, does itself require our surrender into the objective and collective ‘space of Consciousness’ beyond the egoic mind – a reality that Eugene Gendlin called the ‘clear space’. Through both Buddhist practice and Focusing, we realise that Consciousness itself, when seen in its depth and totality, can be recognised to be ‘other’ – beyond the egoic mind and ‘empty’ of self-nature.

Secondly, ‘Focusing’ approaches everything that arises in Consciousness within the body-mind as ‘other’ – that which is on the threshold of Consciousness is ‘related to’, in order to acknowledge it fully and welcome it into awareness. As Consciousness, we ‘relate’ to what is arising, and empathise with ‘it’. So ‘Focusing’ frames self-empathy as an ‘inner relationship’ – quite literally at first (we may actually ‘say Hello’ to parts of ourselves) – as a way to allow the processes of healing and insight that are trying to happen.

Because the importance of the Other Power dimension is often not well understood within Buddhist communities of practice, this article is perhaps more concerned with Buddhist conceptualisations of meditation than with ‘Focusing’. It is however, once again drawing on insights from the ‘Focusing’ approach to meditative process, and using these to better understand the subtleties of how we apply the Four Right Efforts in our meditative processes.

Please note that this is a two-part article. Key information, regarding the importance of the brahmavihāras to our understanding of the way Right Effort works in the Other Power context, is provided in the second article, which is linked at the end of this one.

This is the thirteenth article in the Buddha Meets Gendlin series. It follows on directly from the twelfth article – Dimensions of the Buddhist Heart. If you wish to read the whole sequence of articles, the first article is Eugene Gendlin’s Clear Space.

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I have been referring to the transcendental level of the mind as the dharmic level. Another way of talking about this is to say that there is a dharmic order of conditionality in the universe and in the mind – a dimension of mind that not only transcends the egoic mind, but is entirely Unconditioned. The Buddhist tradition calls this dharmic level of conditionality the dharma niyama – the fifth level in a five level model of conditionality. It is quite difficult to grasp this idea of a level of conditionality that is itself entirely unconditioned – it can effect us but we cannot effect it. Indeed, it is of the nature of the dharmic level of reality that it cannot be known directly – that it can only known by its effects in the lower levels of conditionality.

While we need to be aware of levels of conditionality that relate to our physical health and the physiological aspects of our mental health, the spiritual life is focused on working with the next level of conditionality down in the five niyama model, which is the karma niyama. We can think of the karma niyama level of mind as that level on which we take action to try to break the momentum of the egoic kleshas. So, it is on the karma niyama level of mind that we work to remove mental and emotional patterning that obscures our deeper true nature, and prevents our recognition of dharma niyama processes. A key aspect of our spiritual work on the karma niyama level of mind, is to cultivate a receptive, or Other Power, relationship with the dharma niyama level of mind. To cultivate an Other Power perspective, is to cultivate a meditative receptivity, and an attunement to the dharma niyama processes of reconciliation that are ‘trying to happen’. This idea that there are beneficent dharmic energies at work everywhere in the psyche, and that these are even at work in processes that feel like resistance, is a foundational one both in Buddhism and in Focusing practice. Indeed this brings us back to the insights of the All-Accomplishing Wisdom, that I mentioned in my previous articles in this series (The Brahmavihāra of Compassion, and Self-Empathy brings Integration).

In it’s closely related three-level, or trikāya model of mind, the Buddhist tradition speaks of the transcendental dharmic reality as having an ultimate, and completely unknowable level – the dharmakāya – and a second level at which this ultimate, or ‘eternal’, dharmakāya level finds resonances in the mind as archetypal imagery and bodily-felt experience. This second level, the sambhogakāya, or ‘body of bliss’ is enormously important both philosophically and practically. We can perhaps think of it as an interface between the dharma niyama and the karma niyama – as a place where these two levels of conditionality interact; or as the only manifestation of the dharma niyama that we are able to experience. It is in the experience of the sambhogakāya that we have the opportunity to relate to the dharmakāya – to relate to the dharmic reality within our own experience. Paradoxically, it is by turning toward the impersonal and Unconditioned reality of the dharmakāya, and recognising a bodily-felt resonance of it, that we find authenticity, individuality and true vocation – and a sense of internal spiritual guidance in our lives. As un-Enlightened beings we are identified with the mundane, and most-definitely-conditioned nirmānakāya. The nirmānakāya is the third and most basic level of Buddhism’s trikāya model of mind – a level of mind in which all four of the lower niyamas are at work. Even while we are identified with this nirmānakāya level however, we all have the capacity to turn inwards towards the sambhogakāya and dharmakāya – the two dharmic levels of mind.

This attitude of turning inwards in search of healing and psycho-spiritual Integration and Positive Emotion, is characteristic of both Buddhist meditation (samādhi) and Eugene Gendlin’s Focusing. Gendlin urged his students to allow there experience to be as it is – to simply adopt the practical discipline of being as objective as possible in their descriptions (rūpa skandha) of their experience, while acknowledging the limits of language in that endeavour. The Buddhist tradition, while also avoiding metaphysics, goes much further into psychological philosophy and method than does Gendlin.

The Buddha emphasised the limitations of our ability to establish Dharmic descriptions of the body-mind. He reminded his students in various ways that the conceptualising mind is inadequate to its task, and that the Dharma is a rickety raft to cross to the further shore – to the further shore of Enlightenment. So the Dharma is not the graceful and elegant craft that we might imagine it to be. Not surprisingly, given the reifying tendency of the conceptualising rūpa skandha, the impulse to set down easily memorisable Dharmic formulations also involves a reduction of the Buddha’s original guidance – a loss of the original subtlety and nuance. Our task as Western students is to bring the truth of our experience and imagination to our contemplation of the traditions formulas – to recover some of the original depth and subtlety. This is what I hope to do in this article in regard to the traditional teaching of the Four Right Efforts.

If we are serious about meditation practice, we sooner or later develop a relationship with the dharmic reality – a relationship in which we recognise it both as a benevolent spiritual resource beyond ourselves, and as the core and essence of our being. Somewhat confusingly, many use the word ‘non-duality’ to describe a recognition of this both-and relationship. Personally, I find that the relational approach that is implicit in both the trikāya doctrine and Focusing, helps us to approach this non-dual reality with less confusion. It is my belief that paradoxically the ‘relational’ frame of reference takes us most effectively to that deeper level of experience in meditation where subject and object are no longer distinguishable.

So, our path to that place where the term ‘non-duality’ might be an appropriate one, is an essentially relational one – a ‘dual’ one – and one in which there is a keenly relational sense of becoming both a grateful receiver of, and an open channel for, the beneficial potency of the dharmic reality. The deeply relational and explicitly dualistic stage of ‘devotional-receptive’ surrender to the transcendental other, leads, seemingly inevitably, to an experience that we can talk of in terms of union or unity – even though the relational quality of that unity is almost always present. Because Focusing practice is explicit in its framing of meditative processes of healing in relational terms – it provides us with a wonderful model and source of guidance in this regard.

There is a humility in this relational framing of our path to the non-dual goal of Enlightenment that is provided by this trikāya model. Indeed it is not just humbling. It is also both comforting and spiritually useful, to recognise that Consciousness itself is an ever-present expression of the dharmic reality – even though a full and comprehensive embodiment of Consciousness and of all the dharmic virtues is difficult to achieve on the nirmānakāya level of mind. Even Gautama Buddha was conditioned by his historical and social context – and by other aspects of the nirmānakāya. What was significant was his freedom from identification with that conditioned level of mind.

As ordinary un-Enlightened practitioners we are, to the extent that we are identified with the nirmānakāya, profoundly conditioned by the inevitably egoic character of that identity. When we mentally construct (rūpa skandha) an identity that is exclusively based on our experience of the sensory and the physical (vedanā skandha), and neglect to include a sense of Other Power and of the dharmic reality, it is very easy to lock ourselves into that sense of separateness and self-obsession that the Buddhist tradition speak of as the klesha of māna (usually translated as ‘pride’). It is only by beginning to recognise the dharmic reality as ourselves – and regularly allowing ourselves moments of rest ‘as’ that non-egoic dimension of mind that we call Presence, as we endeavour to do in Focusing or Mindfulness practice; that we can begin to release the egoic mind’s psychological momentum, and begin to establish an identity that itself rests humbly in the dharmic reality.

As we open inwardly to the dharmic reality, we do not just leave the nirmānakāya behind and enter a non-dual world of blessedness. Rather, we straddle the two realities, with one foot in each world. Indeed, we simultaneously recognise ourselves as embodied Consciousness, while endeavouring to create concrete reflections of the dharmic reality in our ordinary personalities and lives. To recognise that the dharmakāya is inseparable from who we are, is to recognise Consciousness (the ‘empty’ vijñāna skandha) and visa versa. The ever-present awareness of being aware, is always there when we choose to recognise it. Recognising the inseparability of the dharmakāya – its absolutely reliable and ever-present nature – we are aware of the dharmakāya as the all-pervading space of Consciousness in which we rest, while always remaining in a humbling awareness of our nirmānakāya nature. Even is we are aware of our blessedness – resting always in the beneficial dharmakāya – we are fully cognisant of our conditioning and of the limitedness, narrowness, small-mindedness and ignorance of our egoic habits of mind. The holding of this existential tension was, I believe, the essence of the Buddha’s Middle Way.

When we speak in terms of non-duality, we are led to imagine that the reconciliation of nirmānakāya and the dharmic reality might be so complete that the two realities are no longer discernible. While this may be true at the highest levels of realisation, it is not a helpful idea. Rather, our process requires us to learn to hold both realities in awareness – entering into a devotional-receptive and healing relationship with the Other Power of the dharmic reality, and only occasionally and momentarily recognising the dharmic reality as ourselves. Our moments of deep experiential openness to the reality of dharmakāya, are moments of alignment and of healing – of fundamental challenge to the energetic patterning of the egoic mind. Eventually we come to recognise that every moment of Mindfulness has the potential to be a glimpse of the fundamental spiritual reconciliation – and also perhaps a moment of non-dual awareness. On the basis of that recognition, we are naturally motivated to return to that alignment and to that healing as often as we can – or as often as we ‘remember’ (sāti/smrti) to do so. While Mindfulness is essentially relational and is a healing journey, it is through Mindfulness practice that the relationship of Consciousness and experience – the relationship of dharmakāya and nirmānakaya – eventually comes to be recognised as a unity.

So, the term non-duality can be taken, in part at least, as referring to our recognition, fleetingly at first, that our conditioned nirmānakāya world is entirely interpenetrated by the dharmic reality. Our mind and our world are not immediately transformed by this, but as our relationship of faith and confidence in the dharmic reality grows, and if we are willing to allow the process, our transformation naturally accelerates. So, ultimately our task is not the heroic and effortful one that we might have imagined – but is the more subtle work of staying in a relationship of trust and surrender to the dharmic reality. Once we reach this level, the practices of samādhi (meditation), and pūja (worship), both give expression to this attitude of self-surrender, and to this meditative receptivity to the dharmic reality.

There is a very real sense in which all significant spiritual transformation is best thought of as an act of grace – an act of the beneficent Other Power of the dharmic reality – and we grow in our awareness of this as we go deeper in the spiritual life. We may make great personal effort to make changes to our minds and behaviours, and to the circumstances of our lives; but we will often come to the realisation, especially as we get older, that our personality and our life is so inextricably entangled in the various dimensions of the conditionality that are at work in our nirmānakāya world, that our only possibility of really fundamental transformation is through our receptivity to the Other Power of the dharmic reality. The deeper we go in the spiritual life, the more we are faced with the apparent dichotomy of ‘self-power’ and Other Power; and with the need to find a reconciliation of these two principles in our approach to practice. While Sangharakshita’s ‘System of Practice’ process (Integration; Positive Emotion; Spiritual Death; and Spiritual Rebirth) is often over-simplified and presented as if it can be encompassed within a self-power frame of reference, I am of the opinion that, all four stages, including the foundational Integration and Positive Emotion stages, cannot in fact be completed, or even fully understood, without a recognition of the transformative nature of Other Power.

So, while this is a theme that I shall be returning to and exploring in more detail, I would like at the outset to present my own perspective on the very subtle way in which, I believe, the Buddha understood ‘effort’. One of the ‘limbs’ of the Buddha’s Nobel Eight-fold Path is Right Effort (samyak padhāna), and it was via this teaching that the Buddha communicated crucial details about what he meant by the Middle Way approach to spiritual practice – details which I believe were no longer available to be recorded by the time the oral transmission was committed to writing, four hundred years after the Buddha’s passing. This foundational understanding is, unfortunately, quite subtle, and often misunderstood within Buddhist tradition – perhaps especially among Western practitioners, but also, I believe, in the East. I feel a need to outline this Right Effort teaching before we go any further, because it will allow my readers to understand why I give such importance to establishing clarity about the dichotomy of ‘self-power’ and Other Power. My experience has been that Western practitioners can lose their way in the spiritual life, if they do not address this dichotomy – and therefore fail to come to an understanding of how it is resolved in their practice.

We can think of the Buddha’s Enlightenment as a state of both insight and energetic integration that allowed him to rest as Consciousness – to rest in a state in which the dharmakāya and nirmānakāya levels of his being were reconciled. Resting in this state of reconciliation, he was aware of four dimensions of effort, or four dimensions of motivation, that were spontaneously present in his being. He described these four categories of spontaneous positive desire as the Four Right Efforts. While the Buddha embodied a state in which the dharmakāya and nirmānakāya levels of his being were reconciled, in our own rather different experience, as un-Enlightened beings, these two levels are held in tension – and felt to be deeply incongruous.

Indeed, the sambhogakāya mandala can be thought of as a graphic description of the way we hold the tension between our ultimate true nature (dharmakāya) on one side, and the mundane and concrete reality of our embodied being (nirmānakāya) on the other. It is only by our willingness to hold this tension – opening inwardly to aspects of the dharmic reality and allowing these to effect us – that the Four Right Efforts can do their transformative work. Effort, is more subtle than we might imagine, because it includes holding a deep receptivity to the essence of the qualities that we are seeking to develop. So, Effort in Buddhism refers to both our active intentionality and our receptivity. It is through this combination of ‘self-power’ and Other Power factors that the dharmic reality begins to find embodiment in the nirmānakāya and we can achieve significant changes in both our mental and emotional energy, and our personality.

As Westerners, we tend to frame the spiritual life as the activity of a moral will – a moral will that, having discerned what is ethically positive, or skilful, and what is ethically negative, or unskilful, takes action to renounce the negative and cultivate the positive. The Buddha’s view was much more subtle however. He explained that the will is not personal and not single, but a phenomena arising from our identification with a broad constellation of volitional energies (the samskāras skandha), which, in coming together create the appearance of a personal will. In calling these volitional energies the samskāras the Buddha was borrowing from the earlier Vedic teaching of the five skandhas – but re-framing that ancient teaching and presenting it in an entirely new way.

Using this adapted five skandhas model, the Buddha analysed the cognitive processes which guide – or rather fail to guide – our ethical discernment. He also used this skandhas model as the basic for his ‘Four Foundations of Mindfulness’ model. All of the skandhas, when we are identified with them, lead to a particular aspect our failure of ethical discernment, but we can say that the two skandhas most involved obviously in our actual cognitive assessment, or failure to assess, the benefit of a course of action are the evaluative samjñā skandha, which we can think of a being a form of discernment based on emotional memory, and the conceptually describing, concretising, and therefore ‘form-creating’ rūpa skandha, which we can also think of as the ‘thinking’ function of mind. As I have explained previously in this series of articles, the brahmavihāras are characteristics of the dharmic reality that correspond to the four of the skandhas. By understanding these hermetic relationships between the cognitive-perceptual components (skandhas) that give the egoic mind its structure, and the brahmavihāra components of Positive Emotion, we are much better equiped to understand how the Right Efforts work, and how personality change happens. I shall go deeper into this in the second part of this two-part article.

In the paragraphs below, I shall briefly outline each of the Buddha’s Four Right Efforts – and I shall be attempting to explain how each one relates to the Buddha’s notion of the Middle Way, and to the later teaching of the trikāya doctrine. Translated into English, the Four Right Efforts are usually rendered as Preventing; Eradicating; Developing; and Maintaining, but this four-fold framework is best grasped if we break it into two pairs. The first of these pairs, Preventing and Eradicating, is concerned with how, as practitioners, we inhibit and eliminate negative, or unskilful states. The second pair, Developing and Maintaining, is concerned with how we cultivate and maintain positive, or skilful states. So, all four are concerned with how we evolve beyond the state of being ‘reactive’ beings, helplessly caught in harmful or limiting egoic conditioning; and become ‘creative’ and evolving beings, who have mastered the subtle art of self-transcendence – of evolving beyond our conditioned limitations and cultivating our embodiment of the beneficial characteristics of the dharmic reality.

I shall take Preventing and Eradicating first. As practitioners of Mindfulness, or of ‘resting as Consciousness’, we notice the egoic minds tendency to generate currents of thought, feeling, and volition that are potentially harmful either to ourselves or others. In an English-speaking Buddhist cultural situation we call the negative arisings in the mind ‘unskilful’ (akusala). If we are Mindful, we naturally desire to inhibit such processes from arising – maintaining a vigilance (apramāda) against their arising, as I spoke of in my last article. Unfortunately, we may not always recognise that unskilful mental states are unskilful, but to the extent that we do, we also notice a natural desire to cultivate the positive and prevent the negative from arising. The Right Efforts are closely related to our general sense of spiritual purpose (virya), and to the natural arising of Compassion (or Empathy) towards ourselves and others, as we grow in Mindfulness. To the extent that we connect deeply with ourselves and others, and really recognise the potential harm that unskilful mental states can cause to ourselves and others, we naturally wish to prevent the arising of unskilful mental states by resting as Consciousness. When we adopt this as a foundational intention in our lives, we can speak of this as the practice of the first Right Effort of Preventing (saṃvara).

Similarly, when we become conscious of the natural impulse to eradicate unskilful mental states that have already arisen – so that they do not grow and become more deeply established in us – we can speak of this as the practice of the second Right Effort of Eradication (pahāna). It is helpful to acknowledge however, that these impulses of prevention and eradication arise spontaneously from Mindfulness. Once we recognise the internal relationship between Consciousness and the cognitive-perceptual objects – the contents of the mind arising within Consciousness – we recognise that we, as Consciousness (or Mindful Presence) always have the choice to dis-identify from unskilful mental states. By dis-identifying we break the energetic momentum of these unskillful aspects of our conditioning. This characterisation of Mindfulness as a state of dis-identification, and of inner relationship, is much more clearly highlighted in Focusing, than it is in most Buddhist teaching on Mindfulness.

The recognition that we always have the option to dis-identify, is essential to the practice of Mindfulness – but it is often not recognised. It is also often not recognised that Compassion (and Loving Kindness, and Equanimity and Appreciative Joy – the other three brahmavihāras) – is always inherent in true Mindfulness. The highly functional and intensely-focused awareness of the sniper or the bomber-pilot is not Mindfulness. When we learn the discipline of resting as Consciousness and allow ourselves to become familiar with our deepest true nature as Consciousness, then Compassion will be there in that experience. Indeed, as our familiarity with our natural Compassion develops, Preventing and Eradicating become, not efforts in the conventional sense, but choice-less volition – compassionate choices that arise naturally from our self-Empathy towards ourselves and our Empathy towards others.

To the extent that we are Mindful, we recognise the potential for harm in our unskilful states, and recognise those mental states as kleshas – as energetic states of the body-mind that obscure our true nature. The best list of kleshas is the five-fold list that we find in the Tibetan Buddhist mandala-wisdom – Spiritual Ignorance, Craving, Envy, Pride and Hatred. The true, or dharmic, nature of the mind has five corresponding positive characteristics – Consciousness, Loving Kindness, Compassion, Appreciative Joy and Equanimity, the last four in that list being the brahmavihāras. Preventing then, is the impulse by which we guard against the arising of the kleshas by resting consistently – or at least frequently – as Mindful Presence. Eradication, on the other hand, relates to situations where the egoic kleshas are already present in the mind. In this situation, the solution still involves returning to Mindful Presence – to Consciousness, and to the brahmavihāras. It is only from that place of Presence (which Gendlin called the ‘clear space’) that we can just allow the egoic phenomena to be as they are. While some Buddhist practitioners may develop the ability to temporarily suppress currents of negativity in the mind, this is usually found to be only a temporary solution – the negativity returning at a later time to be wrestled with again.

If we want to release the kleshas entirely, so that they do not return, the approach needed is the approach of Mindfulness – and paradoxically this involves allowing each of the mental processes that are troubling us to be as they are. Once again Gendlin’s Focusing describes the subtlety of this somewhat better than does Buddhism, generally speaking. Those Buddhists whose preference is for a conceptual framing of Buddhism which is essentially a ‘self-power’ (‘self-development’) perspective, generally see Eradication as involving identification with a moral understanding, with moral values, and with the agency of a moral will. This principle of moral responsibility and moral agency is also present within the Other Power view. The acknowledgement of the additional dimension of Other Power brings much more subtlety and nuance – and a complexity that I shall be trying to explain - to our understanding of the Four Right Efforts. Those for whom both Consciousness itself (the ‘empty’ vijñāna skandha) and the brahmavihāras are objective and collective Other Power realities within the mind, naturally have a more developed understanding – one that, in my view, is very likely much closer to what the Buddha was trying to communicate in his Four Right Efforts teaching.

When we come to address the third and fourth Right Efforts – Developing and Maintaining – the difference between the exclusively ‘self-power’ approach, and the inclusive ‘self-power’ plus Other Power approach, is perhaps even more marked. When we approach the Right Efforts of Developing and Maintaining there is clearly a dimension of ‘self-power’ – of moral idealism, of taking responsibility, and of identification with a moral will. Once we are practicing Mindfulness however – actually resting as Consciousness and relating to the minds objects – the Other Power view brings in a very different different dimension. There may be an awareness that the moral will is only a provisional mental construction and that deeper transformation and insight requires us to release our identification with the volitional components (samskāras), and to rest as Mindful Presence – which can be distinguished by the fact that it has the character of the brahmavihāras. By choosing to entrust ourselves to the Other Power of the dharmic reality through the practice of Mindfulness (resting as Consciousness and recognising the inherently present brahmavihāras), we not only Prevent the arising of unskilful states, and Eradicate those that have arisen (and release the karmic momentum that is generating them); we also Develop and Maintain states of Positive Emotion – learning to embody the brahmavihāras more and more fully.

Conventionally, the second pair of Right Efforts is Developing and Maintaining are understood, especially in the West, as expressions of Buddhist idealism. So, they are framed as the volitional activity of a moral will directed towards the cultivation of positive mental states like the brahmavihāras – the brahmavihāras being viewed both as an expression of the ethical imperatives and compassionate idealism of Buddhism, and held to be mental states that reflect the state of Enlightenment that we are aspiring towards. When we expand into an Other Power perspective however, and incorporate this understanding into our practice of Mindfulness, we a forced to acknowledge that the desire to ‘cultivate and maintain’ the positive tends to arise naturally once we become familiar with the dharmic reality. Because Compassion, Loving Kindness, Equanimity and Appreciative Joy, are inherent in Consciousness on the dharmic level of mind, the act of regularly resting as Consciousness and becoming familiar with its qualities, leads us inevitably to a process in which we increasingly begin to integrate and embody those qualities – and become increasingly motivated to return to such states of alignment.

As with the first pair of Right Efforts, the recognition of Other Power profoundly changes the way we practice, and also changes the way we conceptualise our practice. It is not that we give up effort – indeed a true integration of an Other Power dimension of practice makes us more motivated than ever, and more effective than ever at transforming ourselves. It also allows us to leave behind various incongruities that are inevitably present in a narrowly ‘self-power’ approach. I refer my readers back to my earlier articles in this series, for more information on the problematic psychology of the personal will (The Six Realms as Archetypal Psychology, The Brahmavihāra of Compassion, and Self-Empathy Brings Integration. The psychology arising from our identification with the volitional samskāras skandha and the corresponding klesha of irshya (envy) is symbolised in the violent and conflictual imagery of the archetypal Asura Realm. If we want to be vigilant regarding the Shadow of the egoic will, we need to be aware of the stark warnings that the archetypal psychology of the asura presents us with.

To recognise Other Power, is to recognise that the brahmavihāras (Loving Kindness, Compassion, Equanimity and Appreciative Joy) all exist objectively and collectively beyond the egoic mind – as if woven in the fabric of the universe. To practice in an Other Power way is to acknowledge that our personal experience of the brahmavihāras is an emanation of the the mahabrahmavihāras – the ‘great’ brahmavihāras – which are archetypal forces woven into the fabric of an objective and collective dharmic reality. When we rest as Consciousness (as the ’empty’ vijñāna skandha), and familiarise ourselves with that objective and collective reality, we also recognise that the sources of the brahmavihāras are ‘in here’ as attitudes of Consciousness – but beyond the egoic mind. While Mindfulness practices appear to require a focus on particular objects of Consciousness, they are equally directed towards our familiarisation with the nature of the inner relationship and with Consciousness itself – noticing our innate capacity for Equanimity, Loving Kindness, Compassion, and Appreciative Joy in our relationship with our experience. We are especially keenly aware of these brahmavihāra qualities of Presence when we practice Mindfulness in the form of Gendlin’s Focusing self-empathy practice.

The recognition of Other Power highlights and heightens our perception of the tension between, on one side, the dharmic reality of the dharmakāya and sambhogakaya, and on the other side, our embodied nirmānakāya experience of a very conditioned, limited, and separate, ‘self’ – in the Buddhist context, an apparent self that is nevertheless attempting to become an embodied reflection of its ultimate true nature at the dharmakāya and sambhogakaya levels of mind. So, the four brahmavihāras (Compassion, Loving Kindness, Equanimity and Appreciative Joy) are examples of qualities which may be viewed either as Buddhist ideals, as they are seen within a ‘self-power’ perspective, or as inherently present suprapersonal forces with the field of Consciousness, that are revealed as such when we practice within the framework of Other Power.

© William Roy Parker 2025

This is Part 1 of a two-part article on the importance of incorporating an Other Power dimension into the way we think about personal transformation in the context of Buddhist meditation and ‘Focusing’ practice. In the second part I go into much more detail on how a deep familiarity with the brahmavihāras brings a corresponding depth to our understanding of the Four Right Efforts. I will post a link to the second part below, as soon as it is published.