7. The Brahmavihāra of Equanimity

The path to the Mirror-Like Wisdom is via the Other Power practice of Equanimity

This series of articles is a sharing of a contemplation that I have been engaged in for many years – a contemplation that I hope will be of interest to both Buddhist and Focusing practitioners, and especially to those who are students of both. Buddhism and Focusing share a deep engagement with the inner world of visionary and bodily-felt experience. I have been highlighting the particular points of connection within Buddhist thought that I find to be key to our understanding of how personality change happens. In particular I would like to explain the understanding that I have come to regarding the four primordial positive emotional attitudes (or brahmavihāras), and the five categories of negative emotion (kleshas) that are habitually generated by the egoic mind. In my experience, the egoic kleshas can undergo a process of profound healing. They can be driven out of the energy fields of the body by the practice of the brahmavihāras, but to achieve this we must understand the correct correspondences, and the subtle ‘hermetic’ relationship between the negative (kleshas) and the positive (brahmavihāras).

As they are so important to both Buddhist meditation and Focusing practice, I have been especially keen, in this series of articles, to show how the brahmavihāras fit within the Tibetan 'mandala wisdom' – and to show how they relate to the Buddha's foundational 'emptiness of the Five Skandhas' teaching. This complex and difficult enquiry takes us, in my view, to the experiential heart of Buddhist meditative and contemplative practice. By drawing on the Tibetan psychology of the Five Wisdoms, and by going deeply into the archetypal psychology of Buddhism's 'Six Realms', we have the opportunity to bring clarity to the skandhas-brahmavihāras relationship, and to both of these key practice frameworks within the Buddha's teachings.

This is the seventh article in this series, and the first of five that will address each of the five Wisdoms that play such an important part in the Enlightenment teachings and the ‘mythic context’ of Vajrayāna Buddhism. You may wish to read from the beginning of the series: Eugene Gendlin’s ‘Clear Space’. You may also wish to read the previous article: Padmasambhava’s Hermetic Psychology.

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Rūpa Skandha – the ‘Form-Creating’ Function of Mind

When we see through, and release our identification with the conceptualising, concretising, 'form-creating' rūpa skandha, the mental clarity, stability and peace of Equanimity arises. This is because the rūpa skandha is that function of mind by which we mentally define, reify and structure our experience, and frame it with defensive descriptions and narratives. It is not enough, in my view, to translate rūpa simply as 'form' as we often do. If Buddhism is to work as a system of moral philosophy and as a critique of our ethics of body, speech and mind – in the sphere of personal relationships, or in the political and geopolitical domains – we need clarity about the negative part played by this narrative-forming, self-justifying, rationalising, function of the mind. We need to recognise its capacity to profoundly distort our individual world-view, to establish group-think, and to create erroneous collective narratives. The Buddhist tradition invites us to recognise the negative emotional colour (dvesha, or 'hatred') that the rūpa skandha gives to our world – in invites us to release our habitual judgements and mental reactivity, by allowing ourselves to rest back out of identification with the momentum of the egoic mind's inaccurate descriptions, reifications and conceptualisations.

What I am describing here in regard to the rūpa skandha and the klesha category of dvesha (hatred), is the archetypal psychology of the Hell Realms of Buddhist tradition. I personally find the imagery of Buddhism's 'Six Realms' to be a powerful source of wisdom when we are seeking to understand the corresponding skandhas and kleshas. The Hell Realms contain two classes of beings – firstly there are the demonic beings who judge and condemn and torture; and secondly there are the victims of that judgement, condemnation and torture. This dark and violent imagery is powerfully illuminating of the rūpa skandha and the klesha category of dvesha. We are all familiar with these archetypal dynamics, both internally, within our own minds; and externally within our global society, within our nations, and within our families and social groups.

While I shall be touching only very briefly on each of the Realms, I regard them as hugely important to our understanding of Buddhism. It is insufficiently appreciated that the construction of egoic identity is a collective, or archetypal process. Our failure to realise true individuality is a group process – we are immersed in the archetypal group dynamics described by the Realms, and these prevent our spiritual progress. Each Realm describes one of the ways in which the egoic mind keeps us enmeshed in a group identity and a group psychology. The collective manifestations in history, of the egoic mind, have often been so dark, violent and extreme, that we find ourselves speaking of them, perhaps appropriately, in terms of 'evil'. In general however, there is a resistance to seeing these collective processes as archetypal in the way that Buddhism does.

When we understand the Hell Realms, and understand how the rūpa skandha leads to rebirth in them, we have an opportunity to see how easily we allow the thinking of 'the group' – the thinking we have been educated into, and that has created our social world – to shape our personal identity. To function as an individual, while also being immersed in, and connected with, our world, requires Mindfulness – and in particular it requires the mental and emotional non-reactivity that we call Equanimity, and the associated mental clarity and objectivity that the Buddhist tradition came to call the Mirror-Like Wisdom.

To dis-identify from the rūpa skandha, we need that aspect of Mindfulness that notices our thoughts, and recognises that as often as not they are not our own, and actually not true – that they are either just received opinions; or 'external' and 'internal' judgements; or rationalisations that we have 'thought-up' in an attempt to achieve cognitive congruence. We need an approach to Mindfulness that allows us to step out of our habitual immersion in the flow of thought and to find an internal place of objectivity – a place from which it is possible to know what it objectively true. This is an aspect of Mindfulness that is strongly encouraged by Eugene Gendlin's Focusing practice, which always endeavours to find that place of internal spaciousness and objectivity from which we can see the rūpa skandha 'point of view' that is describing self and world, and giving them 'form'. The process of 'seeing' these mental patterns requires the relational approach to mind that is emphasised by Focusing. We need to dis-identify from the mind's 'points of view' before we can release them.

The Mirror-Like Wisdom

Buddhism invites us to release our identification with the thinking mind's constructions and projections, and speaks of this using the metaphor of the mirror – since a mirror is unaffected by the reflections that pass across it. Hence the 'empty' rūpa skandha and the brahmavihāra of Equanimity (upekshā) are associated with the Mirror-Like Wisdom – and also with the dark blue eastern quadrant of the mandala, and with the figures of Vajrasattva-Akshobhya and Buddhalocanā who are embodiments of the Mirror-Like Wisdom. The dark blue figure of the imperturbable Akshobya Buddha, was in the course of Buddhist history increasingly often replaced by the pure white (primordially pure and also imperturbable) figure of Vajrasattva (shown above) – hence the two figures share the same qualities, but personify the equanimous Mirror-Like Wisdom (and the 'emptiness' of the rūpa skandha) in slightly different ways.

In his 'emptiness of the five skandhas' teaching, the Buddha is challenging the literalism and materialism of our habitual assumption that the form of our world is as it appears, and the personalising and dualistic assumption that we are fundamentally separate from it. He is asserting the primacy of mind – of Consciousness and cognition and perception – and saying that the 'form' (rūpa), or our appearance, of self and world, is constructed, or 'given form' by the mind's narratives and descriptions. Developing Mindfulness of thought and language – of the conceptual forms by which we describe self and world – is a key aspect of Buddhist practice. At the deepest level, our challenge to this mental aspect of egoic ignorance takes place through our study of the Buddhist wisdom teachings, which challenge us to adopt a radically different understanding of what it is to function as a creative and moral agent in our world.

Thankfully Buddhist philosophy now has many allies in this regard. Neuroscience affirms the same insight that mind is primary and that our apparently objective world is actually assembled ('formed') within the mind by mental processes – by personal and collective mental processes of which we are mostly completely unconscious. Quantum Science also offers a profound challenge to our scientific materialist assumptions – reminding us that what we take to be 'form', is ultimately actually just empty space – an unknowable and un-measurable Quantum reality that defies description. The parallels between Quantum Science and Buddhist wisdom are uncanny – and they provide a profound doorway into wisdom for the modern Western practitioner.

The academic fields of Psychology and Sociology provide further reinforcement of this unknowability of the self and world. In these domains of knowledge we need to be careful not to fall into nihilism. The insight that our belief in an objective perceived world, peopled by objectively perceived 'others', is in some sense an illusion, can be taken in the wrong way – embraced by some as the basis for a form of dark nihilistic metaphysics. We need to challenge mankind's tendency to adopt these modern mechanistic and materialist assumptions, and the judgemental, even inhuman, psychology that arises from unconscious identification with the undifferentiated rūpa skandha. These modern narratives prevent us from entering the domain of Equanimity and the Mirror-Like Wisdom, and can be found at the core of all the challenges that the world is facing – war; empire; injustice; man-made climate catastrophe; mental illness; genocide; wealth inequality; and the failure of the institutions of liberal democracy and international law.

Whether we are looking at the biological mechanics of the sense organs and nervous system; or the construction of our beliefs through social and psychological processes; or the creation of our 'Classical' physical world through the 'collapse' of a Quantum waveform into an appearance called a particle, there is no objective form 'out there'. All of the skandhas participate in the illusion of creating apparent 'form'. Our processes of cognition and perception do not describe an objective reality. Rather they create a reality – an illusion that we do not have to reject entirely, but should view as provisional. While the provisional reality that is collectively created by the egoic mind 'works', it does not work very well – not very well at all in the view of the Buddhist tradition – since it is the domain of dukkha and of the cyclical wandering of samsara. Foremost among the reactive processes of cognition and perception is the rūpa skandha – the describing and conceptualising mind; and the erroneous mental convictions that hold the whole 'form-creating' skandha system together.

Gendlin's Focusing practice shares this deep level of enquiry with the Buddhist wisdom tradition, but also skilfully addresses the psychological detail of how personality is constructed through a series of egoic adaptations and reifications – understandable defensive responses to life's challenges, which solidify into egoic points of view that do not reflect reality. The wisdom of the Buddhist tradition is a resource that we can use to challenge the momentum of the conceptual assumptions that are the mental foundations of the egoic mind, and to challenge the way the egoic mind constructs (i.e. 'forms') our reality. Gendlin's phenomenological and relational approach to mind clearly has the character of Buddhist wisdom in this respect. Very like the Buddhist tradition, it challenges us to go beyond our mental assumptions about the nature of mind – to look at our actual experience of mind, and to develop a more accurate language for describing it.

By dis-identifying from the conceptualising rūpa skandha function of mind, and from the form-creating mental contents that we call 'thought', 'thinking', labeling, naming and describing; and by aspiring to rest 'as' Consciousness (i.e. 'as' the 'empty' vijñāna skandha), and as the Equanimity of the mind's spacious, pure and Mirror-Like true nature, we endeavour to break the momentum of the kleshas of the dvesha (hatred) category, and to enter into a profound healing process – a process of purification which leads to increasing mental clarity, and to an increasing access to mental stillness and Being.

The kleshas in the dvesha category include all manner of judgmental, attacking and aversive mental states, including condemnation and its justifications, and especially the mental impulse to punish – and the creation of judgemental rationalisations that deny the value and humanity of those who are to be punished. The klesha category that we call dvesha, encompasses the collective psychology of the archetypal Hell Realms of Buddhist tradition. Eugene Gendlin was expressing a deep alignment with the core values of the Buddhist tradition when he taught his students to dis-identify from the mind's judgemental and self-critical attacks, including our attacks on ourselves – to return to the clear space and to Presence, and to find a Mirror-Like objectivity and Equanimity in our relationship to the body-mind's contents.

The Narakas, or ‘Hell Realms’ – artist unknown

Because none of the five components of the skandhas model is really available to conventional rational understanding, Buddhists usually take the skandhas model as an article of faith, rather than as an attempt to actually describe, or at least point to, the components of the mind's functioning. This attitude has led to an ongoing confusion where it has become acceptable to teach the skandhas framework without really attempting to deeply engage with it as a model for Mindfulness and self-enquiry, or for understanding the Buddha's anatman ('no-self') teaching. In effect, the tradition has generally put the 'empty' skandhas teaching in the too-hard basket, hoping that its truth will eventually reveal itself – rather than engaging in the sort of contemplative, or 'self-discovery', practice that is necessary to make sense of the model. Because of this, it would seem that the five skandhas are generally either poorly understood, or understood in a way that is substantially incorrect. This deficit is particularly evident in regard to the rūpa skandha, and our lack of recognition of the reifying rūpa skandha serves to profoundly undermine our ability to understand the skandhas teaching as a whole.

Indeed, the skandhas are often presented as 'things', and in a way that entirely fails to acknowledge the core of the Buddha's critique of the original vedic model. The understandable predicament that Buddhists find themselves in, is that some degree of real understanding of the skandhas is needed in order to begin to understand the skandhas. We are faced with the need to pull ourselves up by our boot-laces. To understand the skandhas as a mandala with the vijñāna skandha at its centre, is a great help in this regard – especially if we then also understand the other four skandhas as activities, or processes, or functions, of vijñāna. Another key to breaking through the double bind that prevents us from understanding the five skandhas system, is to start by gaining an understanding of the particular activity or process, or function of the mind that we call the rūpa skandha.

The Mirror-Like Wisdom is a mode of thought that includes the capacity to think systemically and to see 'process' – it uses process language, and uses words with an awareness that they are only symbols – only symbols of symbols. The 'internal' and 'external' aspects of the rūpa skandha are described by the Buddha as 'empty' precisely in order to alert us to the erroneous way in which rūpa concretises and reifies everything in our experience – literalising and reducing everything, including the Dharma itself, to 'form', and to a collection of separate 'things'. So the Buddha was expressing what would later be called the Mirror-Like Wisdom in his description of the skandhas as 'empty'. The 'emptiness' of rūpa is a traditional place to begin our self-enquiry, and is strongly emphasised in the Heart Sutra of Mahayāna Buddhist tradition. I shall be talking a little more about the Heart Sutra in my next article. It is essential that we understand that none of the skandhas are 'things'.

So the rūpa skandha is that function of the egoic mind that takes the five 'empty', intangible components of the Buddha's extremely subtle and sophisticated model of mind and world, and reduces them to apparent 'things', or objects. Both the self and the world however, are 'empty' – but are given form every moment, by the mind's reifying description of them. The 'form' (rūpa) of our self is made to appear fixed, separate and 'physical' by our habitual description of it as such – when in reality that is not our true nature. To start to recognise how much we limit ourselves by giving 'form' (rūpa) to the self-illusion is a great freedom, but the rūpa function of the mind has a great energetic momentum – a karmic momentum that is hard to recognise and turn around. This is why we need penetrating self-enquiry practice (i.e. 'self-discovery') of the sort that we find in the Buddhist tradition and in the Focusing community that was initiated by Eugene Gendlin.

There is a common modern analysis of the skandhas model which incorrectly uses rūpa to denote the 'body' or the 'physical world' in a dualistic mind-and-body (or mind-and-world) system. In this understandable but erroneous analysis, rūpa is the 'body' (or the 'objective' and 'physical' component), and the other four skandhas are regarded as 'subjective and mental'. While it is completely understandable for a Westerner to assume that this sort of presentation is accurate, at worst, this is a deeply unhelpful interpretation, since if falls into exactly the sort of reification and concretisation that the Buddha was trying to free us from. It is essential that we see rūpa as the objectifying function of the mind, rather than as an 'objective' aspect of self and world. Rūpa is that primary 'mental' activity of the mind which turns the activities, or processes, or functions of the mind into 'things'. To truly recognise the form-creating rūpa skandha is to recognise that most of us are captured by the bogus metaphysics of various forms of materialism.

Equanimity – ‘Internal’ and ‘External’

When we start to make the rūpa skandha conscious, we release our identification with it; and as we release our identification with it, its functioning becomes more differentiated – it starts to be informed by the brahmavihāra of Equanimity and by the Mirror-Like Wisdom. One of the effects of this is that the rest of the Buddha's five skandhas model of mind becomes more understandable – there is a new critical engagement with what previously seemed impenetrable. This deeper engagement has an 'internal' and 'external' aspect – corresponding to the 'internal' and 'external' aspects of the rūpa skandha that we find described in the Pali Canon. The 'external' aspect involves a deeper engagement with objective sources of spiritual knowledge like the Pali Canon and the Bardo Thodol. The 'internal' aspect involves a deeper engagement with 'self-enquiry' or 'self-discovery' – a contemplative engagement with the material, through which we make new connections, and allow ourselves to push beyond the boundaries of our previous interpretations. The Buddha, in various different ways, continuously invited his students to go beyond the 'external' thinking of merely memorising his teachings – to enter into an 'internal' thinking-style, or contemplative mode of thought through which we 'make the teachings our own' and glimpse the wisdom beyond the words.

This idea of seeking an integration of the 'internal' and 'external' aspects of each of the skandhas is a fundamental one, in my view. This example of going deeper into the Pali Canon texts, taking the Buddha's reference to 'internal' and 'external', and then contemplating that idea deeply in regard to each of the skandhas, is a very good example of the power of this general principle of integration in the context of the rūpa skandha. This idea of the integration of 'internal' and 'external' is also fundamental to our understanding of the brahmavihāras, in my view, since each of the brahmavihāras has a 'self-regarding' and an 'other-regarding' aspect – aspects that must be first distinguished clearly, and then combined and integrated. This need to first separate and distinguish the inner and outer aspects of the brahmavihāras – to recognise the degree to which they are qualitatively different – is generally insufficiently acknowledged.

It has been acknowledged for example that while 'self-regarding' upekshā (Equanimity) is understandable as a state of peace, or of receptive connection with the primordial peace of the dharmic reality, the extraverted and relational 'other-regarding' upekshā is harder to grasp. To say that we feel Equanimity towards someone does not begin to express the sublime nature and profound importance of this aspect of Positive Emotion. Once again Eugene Gendlin can help us here. The two-word phrase that he uses for that aspect of Presence that Buddhists can recognise as the 'other-regarding' aspect of upekshā, is 'Being With'. This capacity to Be With – to support a person by offering them our Mirror-Like non-judgemental Presence and the stillness and non-reactivity of our relational Being – is a surprisingly neglected virtue in Buddhist circles. Perhaps because we have not generally have an adequate well-established a name for it, we can find ourselves failing to realise how fundamental it is to our experience of spiritual friendship. My intention here, is only to introduce these themes, and to highlight how Focusing can provide illumination. I hope I can provide some sense of these important 'internal' and 'external' dimensions below, in regard to each of the skandhas and their corresponding brahmavihāras.

When we start to recognise rūpa as the descriptive, conceptualising and narrative processes that give self and world their apparently objective 'form', we begin to glimpse a very important dimension of what the Buddhist tradition means by 'emptiness'. The recognition of this aspect of the mind's activity brings a flood of personal psychological insights. Perhaps more importantly however, it also throws us into a whole knew depth of social engagement with our world, because we recognise that our society and everything about our world at any particular time in history is being given 'form' (rūpa) by a vast collective description process that we are participating in – a description process in which most of the fundamental assumptions, and almost all of the foundational conceptualisations and narratives that our creating our reality, are actually untrue. It is not putting it too strongly, in my view, to say that the implication of this is that the normal state of the human mind is one of unconscious ideological possession.

This recognition brings compassion and ethical discernment. We see the people in our life in a whole knew way. We have a sense of how lost and confused humanity is – how lost in delusion we all are. Although the underlying characteristic is compassion, this insight into the 'emptiness' of the rūpa skandha brings the more obvious characteristic of critical thinking – we find ourselves feeling called to push back against the flood of untruths, and to articulate a more accurate description of mind and world. We naturally find ourselves wanting to use language with a rigorous semantic accuracy, and feel motivated to cut through the delusional narratives that pervade our world. This inner call to describe mind and world in a way that takes us closer to the truth, is exemplified by all the great teachers of the Buddhist tradition – they all show this particular style of incisive and penetrating intelligence that arises from recognising the 'emptiness' of the rūpa skandha. It is a quality of mind that Buddhists sometimes associate, not only with the mirror (as in Mirror-Like Wisdom), but with the vajra. Within the symbolism of the Buddhist tradition, the wielding of the vajra – the diamond thunderbolt of Indian legend – is symbolic of the impulse to patiently speak the truth in the face of lies and ignorance.

© William Roy Parker

Consider reading the next article in the Buddha Meets Gendlin series: