A few days ago, I had the chance to speak with Advaita Vedanta teacher Francis Lucille, and I want to share a deeply moving exchange I had with him. An exchange that may not seem like much on the surface, but is nevertheless the most moving teaching I’ve received in recent memory. It came as a single line Francis sent me over email:

Ninety-nine out of a hundred times you read Francis’ email, it says nothing special. But like a Zen kōan, if it meets you at the right moment and the right state of mind, it can shake you to the core. It did me.

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Love that can bear no hatred is only hatred on a finer level. Freedom that cannot dwell with limitation is but a tyrant in disguise. Only that rest which remains in the midst of movement is the “peace that passeth understanding”.

What is it that holds life in all its contradictions, yet remains whole? What is that Yes that covers the world like rolling thunder and “maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust”?

Is it not the very ground we stand on? The space that holds everything beautiful, terrible, and absurd within us? That love that never recedes, that freedom immune to limitation, that peace beyond understanding—is it not you, reading these words?

May we find the source and rest,

Simeon

Suggested Reading

The Perfume of Silence by Francis Lucille

“[The realization of Oneness] means being constantly open to the possibility that we are like two flowers looking at each other from two different branches of the same tree, so that if we were to go deep enough inside to the trunk, we would realize that we are one. Just being open to this possibility will have a profound effect on your relationships and on your experience of the world.”

― Francis Lucille, The Perfume of Silence

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In my search for the eternal, I flee from time, place, and circumstance. I flee this cage of a self, barred in by fear and desire, regret and ambition, and all things mundane. I flee the concrete in search of the absolute, and end up stranded in between.

For such is the mystery of the absolute, that it is always only concrete. Such is the play of eternity, that it speaks only in the moment.

What separates here from everywhere, now from always, is only a way of seeing.

May we rest and see,

Simeon

Suggested Reading

The Essential Dogen: Writings of the Great Zen Master

Dōgen’s writings return us to the intimacy of the present moment. What we seek as timeless, he suggests, is not hidden behind the world but shining through its suchness. His thought refuses every easy division between absolute and relative, eternity and time, awakening and ordinary life.

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Sometimes, it won’t be me who sees you, but a kid lost in the ruins of a childhood. Sometimes I won’t look at you, but through you—and you’ll be the facade of all my fears.

At times, your smile will open wounds so wide, we’ll both be swallowed. At times, my love will shrivel into want, and my want crumble into need.

There will be days that sink down a me-shaped hole. Days when we know our love only by the pain its absence brings.

On days like these, don’t pass the cup. Don’t spare your eyes. What needs healing first needs seeing. Be my eyes when I go blind, and show me to myself.

May we both be seen and seeing,

Simeon

Suggested Reading

The Drama of the Gifted Child: The Search for the True Self by Alice Miller

This is one of the books that has most impacted my self-understanding. Alice Miller explores how early emotional wounds shape the adult self, often invisibly directing our perceptions and relationships. What we take to be love may conceal unmet needs; what we see in others may reflect what we have not yet faced within ourselves…

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Dear friends,

I hope you are well in these confused and trying times. Something that has served me as an anchor for years (and even more so lately) has been my meditation practice. I thought I might share a new perspective on it that’s recently opened for me.

I try to do a bit of formal practice every day. Some sits feel like a waste, as my thinking has so much inertia that no amount of mindfulness seems to slow it down. (Still, I think this makes these sessions no less valuable, as it is one thing to be distracted and quite another to know just how distracted you are.) But sometimes, the mind does cool down, thought subsides, and the openness of non-dual awareness blossoms. It is after these sessions that something special occurs.

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“In this organism I begin, and in it I end. This body-mind, with its thoughts, feelings, and organs—this is who I am.” So goes the “self” superstition I live by.

But then a bird warbles in the branches overhead, and my heart leaps to dance. This joy then is my own, part of my self, but the birdsong that called it forth is not?

Or I open a book, whose beauty consumes me, whose depth and power reshape me. When I close the book, has it not nested within me? Does it not live through my actions and speak through my words?

I am lost in the ecstasy of my lover’s embrace, the smell of her skin, and the call in her eyes. Her body is my body, and my mind is a nameless passion; who or where am I then?

This self—or body-mind—isn’t it made of birdsong, poetry, and lovemaking just as much as of thoughts, feelings, and organs? Isn’t it life itself that speaks when I say “I am”?

It is thinking that fractures life into inner and outer, into self and other. But even thought, in its violence, is nothing other than life at play, life blooming, life exploring its abundance from endless angles, sinking in ever-deepening enchantment at its own mystery. And you and I are that!

May we rest as the mystery,

Simeon

Suggested Reading

The Interior Castle by Teresa of Ávila

In this classic of Christian mysticism, Teresa of Ávila describes the soul as a castle whose innermost chamber reveals a profound union with the divine. The journey inward becomes a discovery that the deepest center of the self is not separate from God. A luminous account of the unity underlying all experience.

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What is the true purpose of human life? In this world where nothing but hardship is guaranteed, is there something really worth striving for, something worth staking your life on?

When Jesus of Nazareth delivered his message, the “Good News”, he offered a profound answer to these questions. He delivered this answer in the form of parables. This spoke directly to the people, but also veiled his words in mystery. So much so that he has been misunderstood, misrepresented, mistranslated even, to this day.

Here, we will look at Jesus’ parables through the lens of depth psychologist Carl Gustav Jung. Without reducing Jesus’ teachings to psychology, we will nevertheless look at their psychological significance. That is, what they tell us about our inner life as individuals. As you’ll see, this will reveal a whole new dimension of Jesus’ message to the world.

We begin our journey at the end. The place Jesus points to again and again…

I. THE KINGDOM

In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus delivers many parables concerning the “kingdom of heaven”. Let’s look at two which he tells back-to-back. As I read these, pay careful attention to the wording, and see if you can notice a subtle discrepancy between the two. Jesus says:

The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which a man found and reburied; then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field.

Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant in search of fine pearls; on finding one pearl of great value, he went and sold all that he had and bought it.

Matthew 13:44-46

On the face of it, the two parables use different images to say the same thing. Something like: “The kingdom of heaven is extremely valuable; when you discover it, you relinquish all other pursuits so you can fully devote yourself to attaining it.” But look closer…

Psychologist Fritz Kunkel notes that in the first parable, the kingdom is the treasure or that which is being discovered, while in the second, the kingdom is the merchant, the one who discovers the precious pearl. The discrepancy is so odd, so paradoxical, that the mind automatically corrects for it, reading the two parables as duplicates. But the language is very precise and intentional here.

The two parables clearly speak of a two-way relationship between us and the kingdom (whatever that is). The kingdom is the most precious possession for an individual, but an individual, too, appears to be priceless for the kingdom.

Unlike many Christian authors, Jesus is speaking quite encouragingly of human beings. First, he says, we are fully capable of recognizing that which is of the highest value and of attaining it. Second, we ourselves are of such value that the kingdom of heaven would sacrifice all to attain us. So here is a teaching on the intrinsic value of the individual, and of a two-way search. The same kind of search Rūmī means when he writes:

What you seek is seeking you.

Rūmī

In fact, the more time we spend with these two parables, the more we may suspect that Jesus is not talking about two separate things when he refers to the kingdom and the individual. We may also notice that the individual does not find the kingdom on a mountaintop or in some foreign land, but buried. Hidden right beneath his feet.

The kingdom Jesus is talking about seems to be something other than the popular image of a place among the clouds. To gain a different perspective on what he might mean, let’s arm ourselves with one of the most important insights of depth psychology.

II. BECOMING YOURSELF

For Swiss psychologist Carl Gustav Jung, what we call “I”, “me”, or “myself” is really only a tiny part of who and what we are. It is what he calls the “ego complex”, or “ego” for short. The ego is the collection of thoughts, memories, and other psychic content that fills our conscious experience. Since the ego processes literally all we are conscious of, it feels like our identity, like who we are. But in fact, it is only a fragment of our whole self. Jung writes:

[T]he ego is only the centre of my field of consciousness, it is not identical with the totality of my psyche … I therefore distinguish between the ego and the self, since the ego is only the subject of my consciousness, while the self is the subject of my total psyche, which also includes the unconscious.

C.G. Jung, The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche

We can imagine the ego like the visible part of an iceberg, exposed to sun, wind, and all things above water. The self is the entire iceberg, exposed to the whole environment above and beneath the water surface. For example, people go to hypnotherapy and suddenly remember a traumatic experience they had 30 years ago. But it is the ego, really, that “suddenly remembers”. By ‘self’, Jung means that greater, hidden personality that has contained the memory all along.

The self contains repressed and forgotten things, but more importantly, it also contains potential things. Every time we grow as individuals, and our understanding of life deepens, more of the self enters into the tiny vessel that is our ego. The two are in a symbiotic relationship: the ego needs the self in order to grow and develop, while the self needs the ego in order to find expression in the world.

We won’t go any further into this, as I explore Jung’s model along with the Buddha’s view of no-self, in another essay. I invite you to read that for a fascinating comparison.

In any case, for Jung, the purpose of human life is to establish and maintain a creative relationship between ego and self. He calls this “individuation” and, borrowing the phrase from Nietzsche, describes it as the process of “becoming yourself”. Jung sees this as the fundamental religious attitude, seeing religion as a state where:

… the life of the individual is not determined solely by the ego and its opinions or by social factors, but quite as much, if not more, by a transcendent authority…an intensely personal, reciprocal relationship between man and an extramundane authority…

C.G. Jung, The Undiscovered Self

Let’s now take this psychological insight and see what new meanings it reveals in the sayings of Jesus.

III. ἐντός

There has been much debate and argument around these two verses from the Gospel of Luke:

Once Jesus was asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God was coming, and he answered, “The kingdom of God is not coming with things that can be observed, nor will they say, ‘Look, here it is!’ or ‘There it is!’ For, in fact, the kingdom of God is among you.”

Luke 17:21

The English translators of the Bible have struggled with this immensely. Some render Jesus’ words as “the kingdom of God is among you”, others as “the kingdom of God is in your midst”. Both are viable, but more conscientious editions add a footnote which says the words can also be rendered as “the kingdom of God is within you”, as indeed they are in older translations.

The Ancient Greek word translated here, ἐντός (entós), literally means “inside”. To make his meaning clearer, Jesus explicitly says the kingdom is not something that can be observed here or there, meaning it is not an external thing. You can see how subversive this claim is, given that we are still struggling with it some 2000 years later.

So, what could it mean that the kingdom of God is within us? This may remind us of that strange claim in the Old Testament that human beings have been created in the image of God. It may also remind us of Jung’s insight that the ego–or our surface personality–though being only a fragment of our self, is also the carrier of this self in the world.

If we apply Jung’s model to Jesus’ parables, we may see the ego as he who must discover the kingdom within that is the self. Indeed, that is the true purpose of the ego: it is an imperfect image of the self that must continuously develop to allow more of the self into the world. It must bring the buried treasure out from within.

The problem is, the ego is often its own worst enemy. Its narcissism clogs it up, cutting it off from the self and stifling the growth of the personality. Consider this as we look at the following words of Jesus:

If any wish to come after me, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.

For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.

Matthew 16:24-25

In these two lines, Jesus says what takes Jung volumes to elaborate. That is, we must continually sacrifice our small, ego-centred personality if we are to keep uncovering our true individuality.

On the level of the ego, or who we think we are, this feels like death, like a loss of identity. This is why change and growth can be so difficult. Letting go of the person we’ve been so far, and of life as we’ve lived it, can be frightening, painful, and a loss… And yet this loss of who we are is what it takes to uncover more of who we could be.

Jesus is clearly saying that to follow him to the kingdom requires the sacrifice–nay, death–of who we are, and that whoever is unwilling to bear this sacrifice cannot receive the new kind of life that results from it. Or, as he says:

[N]o one can see the kingdom of God without being born anew.

John 3:3

I don’t think Jesus is speaking only psychologically here. It would be wrong to reduce his words to Jung’s theory or to anyone else’s. But we may recognize that it is central to his teaching that we must grow as individuals through continual self-sacrifice. This growth has a paradoxical quality, as it is the greatest gain and yet comes only through loss. It requires sacrificing yourself of your own free will, and yet it leads to truly becoming yourself.

But the ego is not the only obstacle we face in our quest for the kingdom. There is another force continually opposing the growth of individuals.

IV. THE EASY ROAD

Let’s now look at another powerful image Jesus uses. He says:

Enter through the narrow gate, for the gate is wide and the road is easy that leads to destruction, and there are many who take it.

For the gate is narrow and the road is hard that leads to life, and there are few who find it.

Matthew 7:13-14

To get to the kingdom, it is not enough to relinquish our egoic interests. We must also depart from the easy road taken by the many. We must depart from the collective, leaving its security behind to embark on the solitary and difficult journey of self-understanding. Jung, too, has noted the necessity of this. He writes:

[T]he development of personality … is the conscious and unavoidable segregation of the single individual from the undifferentiated and unconscious herd.

C.G. Jung, The Development of Personality

We can never attain an individual–and thus, authentic–attitude to life if we live according to the values and opinions of others. Whether it is our family, friends, coworkers, country, or church–it doesn’t matter. The more reliant we are on a group, the less we have to come up with our own answers to life’s challenges. We receive our ideas about right and wrong, about what is valuable and what is meaningful, from outside. Our life then is only vicarious, an echo of the collective. We are like the man possessed by a legion of spirits, only we are possessed by the thoughts of those around us.

Even living according to Christian values is against the teachings of Jesus if we have not arrived at these values through authentic conviction. Jesus says:

[U]nless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.

Matthew 5:20

The scribes and Pharisees, during the time of Jesus, were those most responsible for preserving the values of the Jewish community. He is not criticising the values themselves, as he clarifies:

Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfill.

Matthew 5:17

Jesus is rather condemning the outer obedience to moral values as a mechanical gesture when it is disconnected from inner experience. In fact, he goes as far as to say to the Pharisees:

[T]ax collectors and the prostitutes are going into the kingdom of God ahead of you.

Matthew 21:31

This proclamation may sound harsh, but in fact, it contains the most loving and life-affirming aspect of the “Good News” Jesus brings.

V. THE GOOD NEWS

The path Jesus is leading us on passes between two abysses–the ego and the collective–each ready to swallow us whole. And the path itself is “hard”, no less perilous than the danger it is leading away from. Finding our authentic stance on life requires moral experimentation that can easily turn us into villains. And the impulse to be free of our ego can easily degenerate into self-repression dressed as virtue. Whether we take the hard road or not, our souls are always in mortal danger. The only difference is the path Jesus takes us on offers the possibility of salvation.

Unfortunately, most, if not all, of us cannot find this path most of the time. It is not our fault, really… It is just that we are facing near-impossible odds in a world of confusion, apathy, and suffering. But here comes the good news. The one insight I would most like to leave with you.

Let’s read that reproach to the Pharisees again; this time, with a bit more context. Jesus addresses them:

“What do you think? A man had two sons; he went to the first and said, ‘Son, go and work in the vineyard today.’ He answered, ‘I will not,’ but later he changed his mind and went. The father went to the second and said the same, and he answered, ‘I go, sir,’ but he did not go. Which of the two did the will of his father?”

They said, “The first.”

Jesus said to them, “Truly I tell you, the tax collectors and the prostitutes are going into the kingdom of God ahead of you.”

Matthew 21:28-31

It is better to lose your way, Jesus is saying, better to deny God outright, if that is what it takes to one day “change your mind”, than it is to live with outer obedience but no inner conviction. In fact, Jesus goes so far as to say that those who lose their way only to find it again are of greater value to the kingdom than those who have never gotten lost in the first place:

Which one of you, having a hundred sheep and losing one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness and go after the one that is lost until he finds it?

…

Just so, I tell you, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance.

Luke 15:4,7

Now this is really good news, for the fact is, each one of us is that lost sheep. This, to me, is what makes Jesus’ message truly universal and timeless. He is not preaching a certain doctrine you have to follow or elaborate rites you have to perform. He also doesn’t care whether you’re a pastor or a prostitute. (The latter, as we’ve seen, can be preferable.) All Jesus cares about is whether you are willing to “change your mind”. This core message has also become the victim of translation, as we’ve come to refer to it with the rather unwelcoming English word “repentance”.

VI. BORN ANEW

The word “repentance” comes with connotations of guilt and self-condemnation, which have sadly become a big part of the popular image of Christianity. In the original Gospels, Jesus uses the word μετάνοια (metanoia), which literally means a transformation of one’s understanding. A change in our way of being so profound that Jesus says:

[N]o one can see the kingdom of God without being born anew.

John 3:3

“Being born anew”, like the caterpillar beginning a second life as a butterfly, is what Jesus is calling us to. This dramatic change is impossible when you are barricaded behind the ego or the collective, hardened with self-righteousness. So this is one part of the message: losing your way is no cause for despair; in fact, it is necessary.

One sure strategy to never discover the kingdom is to remain forever in the bubble of the ego or in the slumber of the collective. This is to remain forever in the womb of your small world, refusing to be born anew and become yourself.

There is another important point. Many Christians may imagine that this transformation Jesus is preaching is a one-off event, like our physical birth. But Jesus is preaching a spiritual kind of birth, a birth “from above”, as he calls it [John 3:3]. He is calling us not so much to the kingdom as a destination, but to the path to the kingdom as a journey.

Whether you hear Jesus’ words for the first or for the millionth time, whether you hear them as a prostitute or as a priest, they are never any less relevant. The butterfly is always needing to be born, in one aspect of our lives or another. This may be one reason why the Gospels refer to the soul by the Ancient Greek word ψυχή (psukhē), which also means “butterfly”. This is the origin of the word “psychology” as well.

As Jung points out, individuation, or becoming ourselves, is a never-ending process of emptying the ego and making more room for the riches of the self. This process makes us less egotistical but more individual, less beholden to social norms, and yet of greater value to the community. It connects us to a higher power that both transcends us and yet lives at our very core. Most importantly, both Jung and Jesus see this as the ultimate purpose and deepest realization of human life. It constitutes not only our discovery of the treasure, but our own transfiguration into treasure, into precious pearls for the kingdom within.

We’ve taken a psychological view of Jesus’ teachings here, which tells us a lot, but not all. For a mystical and no less profound take on how we enter the kingdom, I invite you to my essay on Meister Eckhart’s most famous sermon.

Carl Jung dedicated his life to understanding the human psyche—and his own. Borrowing Nietzsche’s incendiary phrase, “Become yourself!”, he developed his vision of “individuation” (or uncovering one’s unique potential and stance on life) as the ultimate purpose of human existence.

But despite all his self-inquiry, self-knowledge, and self-development (or perhaps because of them), Jung shares some striking non-dual experiences in his late years. In his autobiography, written in his old age, we read:

“At times I feel as if I am spread out over the landscape and inside things, and am myself living in every tree, in the plashing of the waves, in the clouds and the animals that come and go, in the procession of the seasons…”

— C.G. Jung and Aniela Jaffé, Memories, Dreams, Reflections

We may wonder whether Jung is not contradicting his earlier preoccupation with “becoming oneself” here… Or whether, on the contrary, he is describing an advanced stage of self-awareness. In his personal letters, he reveals even more:

“I observe myself in the stillness of Bollingen and with all my experience of nearly eight decades must admit that I have found no rounded answer to myself. I am just as much in doubt about myself as before, the more so the more I try to say something definite. It is as though familiarity with oneself alienated one from oneself still further.”

— Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II

The Buddha, I think, would be happy to hear Jung’s ultimate conclusion about himself… That is, his lack of any conclusion whatsoever.

In Ānandasutta (SN 44.10), the Buddha is silent when asked whether the self exists; he is then asked whether the self does not exist, and he remains silent. Could there be more freedom in that silence than any conclusion could convey?

May we grow familiar with ourselves,

Simeon

Suggested Reading

Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self by C.G. Jung

“Aion, originally published in German in 1951, is one of the major works of Jung’s later years. The central theme of the volume is the symbolic representation of the psychic totality through the concept of the Self, whose traditional historical equivalent is the figure of Christ. Jung demonstrates his thesis by an investigation of the Allegoria Christi, especially the fish symbol, but also of Gnostic and alchemical symbolism, which he treats as phenomena of cultural assimilation. The first three chapters—on the ego, the shadow, and the anima and animus—provide a valuable summation of these key concepts in Jung’s system of psychology.”

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You read these words and encounter them as novel, as unfamiliar. I read them, and I know them as my own, thought up and laid down in print by my self. We both grasp at the text: I by claiming ownership over it, and you by seeking to profit from it. We may call this spontaneous grasping egotistical, and therefore ‘unenlightened’, but that makes it no less natural. In fact, to condemn our grasping is only to grasp on a higher, more “spiritual” level: “I must not grasp, I must not be egotistical—I must be better!”

If this self-making occurs so spontaneously, we may do well to pause and consider why it arises in the first place. Why has nature seen fit to create diverse loci of consciousness, diverse sentient beings, each striving to preserve, reinforce, and express itself? Or, in our limited case study, why is there me as the writer, and you as the reader?

Nature is far too consistent, determined, and creative in its self-making to write this off as a mere error. And we ourselves are far too fruitful in the endless variety of perspectives we bring to life.

We may wonder whether nature has not overdone things by separating itself into various identities, as we are destroying the world (and ourselves) over what belongs to whom and which self is more important than the other. But maybe the suffering that springs from egoism is the wake-up call we need to develop a more holistic understanding of reality. We must only remember that the impulse to this waking up, the drive to become free from suffering, can arise only in our selves.

Our individual consciousness is the soil in which nature plants its seeds. How would the insights of the Buddha, for example, have entered the world had the Buddha not awakened to them? How would this text have been written if I had not grabbed the pen, and how would it have become known if you, my reader, “mon semblable, mon frère”, had not arrived here to read it? Perhaps our selves are all so many masks nature puts on to catch a glimmer of its ever-elusive face?

May we wake to and beyond ourselves,

Simeon

Suggested Reading

The Phenomenon of Man by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Teilhard de Chardin presents a sweeping vision of evolution not merely as biological change but as the unfolding of consciousness within the cosmos. From matter to life to reflective mind, the universe becomes increasingly aware of itself through countless individual centers of experience. Human consciousness, in this view, is not an accident but a pivotal moment in the story of the world.

Order here to support SEEKER TO SEEKER at no extra cost. You can also browse my personal list of favourite books here.

I’m happy to share the new BEYOND MEANING episode with you, where I speak with Stephen Mugen Snyder, Roshi, a lineage teacher in both Theravāda and Zen, and the only Jhāna meditation master also recognized as a Zen meditation master.

For all his accomplishments and his 5 decades of practice behind him, you’ll find Mugen is such a gentle, open, and generous human being. I had a wonderful time speaking with him, and we covered a lot! We went over the fundamentals of Buddhist meditation (in both Theravāda and Zen), some common challenges and misconceptions, as well as some rarely talked about topics like past-life recall in deep meditation. I also asked Mugen a few of the questions submitted by channel members and patrons, AND we closed the conversation with a guided meditation.

Here is more of what we covered:

• Samatha vs vipassanā (purifying mind vs purifying view) and how they can support each other

• The Zen path of open awareness (“just sitting”) and koans, and how Mugen combines this with jhāna training

• The heart practices (brahmavihāras), and why Mugen starts his students with them

• What awakening changes in everyday life (and what it doesn’t change unless the personality is also integrated)

• Why deep practice also requires psychological integration, and how therapy can prevent spiritual bypassing

• A discussion of the potential role of psychedelics in the awakening journey

I hope this conversation brings you inspiration, clarity, and perhaps some new questions, too, that help you move forward on your path. The episode goes public this Saturday, the 28th.

With love and gratitude,

Simeon

🌐For more by Stephen Mugen Snyder, Roshi, visit:

https://awakeningdharma.org/

⌛ Timestamps
00:00 Introduction
08:36 A clear map of Buddhist meditation: key terms and core techniques
12:07 How the different kinds of meditation fit together
15:22 The heart practices (brahmavihārās) explained
18:35 What is “the Absolute” in meditation?
19:55 Invitation to the community
20:35 Is a “technique” even necessary in meditation?
22:09 A practical guide to open awareness practice
24:40 The jhāna stages of meditation explained
29:56 What does entering jhāna actually feel like?
32:39 How meditation transforms everyday life
35:01 What is the true aim of meditation?
38:35 What does “awakening” really mean?
43:49 What is an awakened person like in daily life?
46:33 Why psychological work and therapy matter on the path
51:41 Realistic meditation advice for busy lay practitioners
54:54 Concentration vs. “letting go” — which matters more?
56:40 How to combine concentration and open awareness in one sitting
1:00:43 Intensity or consistency — what leads to progress?
1:01:54 Meditation, awakening, and scientific research
1:04:14 Past-life recollection and extraordinary experiences in meditation
1:09:42 Can psychedelics support awakening?
1:13:03 Guided meditation
1:22:26 Books, retreats, and further resources

🎵 Original music by Ray Mickey

Our deepest insights and our most original ideas come when we are in a state of rest. When we are not trying. They arise in us, but not from us, and should we have enough space for them, they choose us as their vessels.

Our times, possessed as they are with activity-psychosis, have forgotten the significance of rest. We wage war on rest with our arsenal of deadlines, to-do lists, vision boards, productivity systems… One may wonder whether we know rest at all, or only entertainment. We gorge ourselves on activity, hoping for some feat of alchemy to transform it into satisfaction. The idea that satisfaction should come before activity, that our work must be the expression of a life well lived (rather than the means to such a life), is alien to us, suspect… Blasphemous?

The Buddha makes a profound distinction when he lists the mind as one of the sense organs: a receiver of thoughts (rather than their maker, as we believe it is in the West). If we consider this perspective seriously, we may see how counterproductive it is to always keep the mind busy, always consuming, always entertained, always full. A full mind is a mind with no capacity to receive new understanding or to question what understanding it has. It is a mind dulled by the monotony of its patterns, conveniently susceptible to the coercion of leaders, “influencers”, and charlatans of every kind.

Rest, the cessation of activity, the surrender of pursuits—including the pursuit of rest—is essential for the cultivation of insight. Rest (to phrase it in a way more palatable to modern sensibilities) is the divine form of work. When we are at rest, we become the space in which life spontaneously reveals what our shortsighted efforts can never attain.

May we remember to rest,

Simeon

Suggested Reading

Leisure: The Basis of Culture by Josef Pieper

“One of the most important philosophy titles published in the twentieth century… Leisure is an attitude of the mind and a condition of the soul that fosters a capacity to perceive the reality of the world. Pieper shows that the Greeks and medieval Europeans, understood the great value and importance of leisure. He also points out that religion can be born only in leisure—a leisure that allows time for the contemplation of the nature of God…

“Pieper maintains that our bourgeois world of total labor has vanquished leisure, and issues a startling warning: Unless we regain the art of silence and insight, the ability for non-activity, unless we substitute true leisure for our hectic amusements, we will destroy our culture—and ourselves.”

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The cultivation of insight into self and world—whether through philosophy, science, or meditation—tends to make obsolete certain interpretations of reality we have so far taken as self-evident, as common sense. But these interpretations we later condemn as “ignorant” (even “wrong”) are what has allowed and compelled us to seek and cultivate insight in the first place.

The womb nourishes and protects the fetus, providing it with comfort and predictability, only to then expel it into a strange, terrifying, and miraculous world that is yet needed for the further development of life. In this same way, our ignorance, immaturity, and errors seem to be no random “mistakes”, but the very soil in which the seed of insight can grow.

Ignorance is not the enemy of insight, but its womb. Ignorance is the past tense of insight, and we are ignorant indeed when we take our current understanding to be final and complete. Nature is continually expelling us into the strange, terrifying, and miraculous as we stumble towards understanding, climbing a ladder of errors towards… Truth? Could positing truth be the final womb keeping us from birth beyond ignorance and insight?

May we never cease being born,

Simeon

Suggested Reading

Nicholas of Cusa: Selected Spiritual Writings translated by H. Lawrence Bond

Nicholas of Cusa proposes a paradox: the highest wisdom is “learned ignorance.” Before the infinite, the intellect must relinquish its claim to completion. Knowledge grows not by conquering mystery but by deepening reverence for it. A luminous Christian counterpart to the insight that every birth of understanding reveals a wider horizon of unknowing.

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Dear friends,

This Valentine’s Day taught me a simple but deeply meaningful lesson, one I’d like to share with you.

It was time for breakfast, and my partner and I were waiting for our boy, Alexy, at the kitchen table. He was taking more time than usual to get ready, and when he arrived, he came with two Valentine’s Day cards, one for me and one for Elly, my partner. The cards were in DIY envelopes on which Alexy had drawn heart-shaped portraits of Elly and me. Inside, he expressed his love and gratitude for our being there for him. (Alexy’s cards were all the more moving for his brazen disregard of Bulgarian grammar and punctuation; modernist prose at its finest!) Elly teared up, and the three of us embraced… But I was filled with a mixture of feelings that was altogether not too pleasant.

Alexy’s gift moved me deeply, moved me to tears in fact, but in spite of that—or rather, because of that—a gnawing sense of guilt arose within me. First, I thought, I had not gotten any present for him, and second, the beautiful necklace I had bought for Elly seemed like such an inadequate, impersonal gift next to what Alexy had made for us. So, there I made my first mistake; clinging to my perceived “performance” on the occasion, I made myself unable to receive Alexy’s gift, unable to allow myself the love he was giving me freely. I made my second mistake, too: I determined to “fix” the situation by buying more gifts.

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My life is my revelation of the mystery of being. In a language of images, sensations, and feelings, the universe speaks to that knowing nested in this body-mind—a knowing no other than the world’s own knowing of itself. Thus, being is both speaker and listener, and my life is the speech. By speaking, it reveals as much as it conceals, for every experience is a translation of the universal in the language of the concrete.

My life is my revelation, and yet I roam through books and teachers, philosophies and poets, inhaling the exhaust of their revelations, seeking to feed on the vapors of their truths. Thus, I silence the one true teacher—call it life, being, universe, or God—who is patiently waiting for me to hear its voice, to learn its primal language.

This very body-mind is the scripture of being; my own heart and soul are the psalms of God. I am the place where the ink meets the paper, and that is often too frightening and lonely. So I flee to my books and teachers, philosophies and poets—opiates against the unbearable truth of my being here and now.

May we learn to bear the revelation,

Simeon

Suggested Reading

Self-Reliance and Other Essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson

In Self-Reliance, Emerson challenges us to abandon secondhand truths and trust the living current of insight within. A bracing reminder that the soul’s voice is older than scripture, and speaking still.

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Many live within me—angels, devils, beasts, and men. A society of broken voices, chanting ancient, aching thirst. In me dwells the world I inhabit.

When I look outside, I am partial; a fragment of a boundless whole. But when I turn inside, I am the boundless: the being of which all partakes.

The is-ness of all that is arises of its own accord. A being-and-knowing that echoes as self within and world without. But itself, it is neither here nor there. No name can land upon it, though it sounds in every breath.

May our breath move in worship,

Simeon

Suggested Reading

I Am That by Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

Few books speak so directly to the intuition that the boundless is not “out there” but the very fact of awareness itself. Nisargadatta relentlessly dissolves the imagined fragmentation between self and world, knower and known, until only the simple, luminous “I Am” remains.

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The Absolute does not need to be attained, realised, or even known. Summoned or not, it is. That is why we call it Absolute. It is this frightened flicker of life that is our self, and this bleeding world, that needs our tending. The Absolute will tend to itself.

If my practice is a sideways move, a stepping back, a search of a different angle of perception, then I am practicing escape. The Absolute cannot be known apart from the world and our selves. Can the ocean be known apart from the water and the waves? What is known apart is only thought, the fumes of being, but never being itself.

The ten thousand things blind us to the One until we know them as the One in action. But to know the One that is the ten thousand, we must know our self as one of the ten thousand. For the One, the Absolute, in all its terrifying glory, has seen fit to lay its head within the feeblest of things. Our self. Its call echoes in ten thousand tongues throughout the bleeding world, and it is never “go” or “leave”. It is “Enter and stay.”

May we heed the call,

Simeon

Suggested Reading

The World as Lover, the World as Self by Joanna Macy

Macy gives voice to a radical non-duality that refuses transcendental escape. Drawing on Buddhism, systems theory, and ecology, she shows how awakening matures not into withdrawal, but into participation. The One knowing itself as soil, grief, responsibility, and care.

Order here to support SEEKER TO SEEKER at no extra cost. You can also browse my personal list of favourite books here.

Practice is difficult, for it is only here and now. It is easier to plan a retreat or pore over ancient texts. It is easier to study and debate technique, tradition, and meaning. It is easier to write about practice—as I do—and to read about it, as you do. Easier to seek as a pilgrim for miles, or for years of sitting in silence. But practice is difficult, for it is only here and now.

Practice abides not on the cushion, in the rosary, incense, or candle. It is not found in books or relics, and no guru has ever possessed it. It does not roam the wilderness, it dwells in no temple, and you will not find it on the street. Of words thought, written, and spoken, not one has come close to it.

The practice is not outside or inside us; we can’t reach it in any direction, but we can cease departing from it. When the search ends, it is the first thing we see. If we see that first thing as practice, we will not be far from the truth.

May we remain with the first thing,

Simeon

Suggested Reading

The Practice of the Presence of God by Brother Lawrence

Brother Lawrence offers one of the most radical articulations of practice as ordinary, immediate, and unlocatable. The Practice of the Presence of God records a life lived in continuous attention, where the here and now becomes prayer without words.

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Dear friends,

Lately, I have been slowly finding my way back to the Christian tradition. Or it may be more accurate to say that I am finding my way to it anew, now that I have spent years focused on the contemplative traditions of the East and on the insights of depth psychology.

In any case, I have been reading John A. Sanford’s book, The Kingdom Within, where he applies Jungian concepts in his reading of the Gospels to reveal the hidden meanings of Jesus’ teachings. (You can read it for free here.) It is a wonderful book, and here I wanted to share with you one interesting observation the author makes on how Jesus uses language.

Sanford points out that Jesus’ parables release meaning in the same way that our dreams do. In Jungian terms, Jesus’ language is not semiotic, nor allegorical, but symbolic.

A semiotic expression would be to say, “I’m travelling to the Big Apple”. Here, I say one thing which both you and I know means some other specific thing. “Big Apple” means “New York City”.

An allegorical expression would be to say, “A relationship is like a tree, and good memories are like the fruit of the tree, so tend to the tree if you wish to reap the fruit.” Here, I am using images to illustrate some facts from life we are both familiar with. I am paraphrasing reality in the language of images. We may easily assume this is what Jesus is doing in his teachings, but we would then miss out on the true depth he is offering.

Jesus speaks symbolically, which Carl Jung defines so:

[T]he best possible formulation of a relatively unknown thing, which for that reason cannot be more clearly or characteristically represented, is symbolic…

C.G. Jung, Psychological Types

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How real is reality, really? I mean, look around. How much of this world you are perceiving is really “out there” and how much of it is a mental creation, like a dream? You never question the reality of a dream until you wake up, so how are you so certain that what you are experiencing now is not just a different kind of dream? And if it is, what would it mean to wake up from it?

There is a fascinating tradition of Buddhist philosophy built around these questions. This tradition is called Yogācāra, and it is entirely dedicated to the study of mind and reality (or rather, mind as reality). Fifteen centuries before Freud and Jung, Yogācāra discussed the ego, the unconscious, complexes, and projections (using different terms, of course). But their study of the mind goes beyond the bounds of modern psychology, into a non-dual view of reality, where distinctions such as mind and matter, internal and external, observer and observed, no longer hold. Couple this with the Buddha’s teachings on karma, rebirth, and enlightenment, and you can imagine how interesting things get…

Here I will present the deepest and most transformative insights from Yogācāra Buddhism I have discovered, but I should mention one caveat before we begin. Yogācāra philosophy is vast; it has been evolving for centuries, and there are many different interpretations of it. At one end, you can read Yogācāra as saying that all we experience is subjective, coloured by our personal cognitive patterns–a pretty innocuous statement. At the other end, you can interpret Yogācāra as saying that nothing exists apart from consciousness, that the external world, objects, space, and time are only mental constructs. I personally lean towards the latter interpretation, as I do think the Yogācāra arguments inevitably take us there.

Yogācāra philosophy is commonly known as citta-mātra, meaning “mind-only” or “consciousness-only”. Citta-mātra studies the world, objects, our bodies, and all our experiences not as objectively “out there”, but as conscious appearances “in here”, within the mind. Citta-mātra is the result of empirical and rational observations by generations of meditators. So, for all its sophisticated theory, it is grounded in direct experience: in meditation. To immerse us in this experiential kind of exploration, I’ve divided this essay into two parts. Part One is something of a guided meditation, only I’ll do a bit more talking than is usual for a meditation guide. Here, we’ll discover the key Yogācāra insights into consciousness for ourselves by observing our own minds. Part Two is more theoretical and will show us how our meditation insights come together into a non-dual view of reality as the activity of consciousness.

Again, here I’ll lean towards one interpretation of Yogācāra, which you don’t have to agree with to benefit from reading this essay. By the time we are done, you’ll have a subtler and deeper understanding of your mind. You’ll also get an idea of what a non-dual, non-conceptual experience of reality might actually mean. Now, without further ado, I present to you citta-mātra, the Yogācāra view of mind-only.

Part One: The Guided Meditation

[To best experience the following section, you can play the video from this timestamp.]

The Six Sense-Consciousnesses

Let’s explore citta-mātra with a meditation object. Something simple, like this yellow circle. I invite you to rest your eyes on the circle now. Take a few breaths, and settle in. When you’re ready, gently shift your attention from the circle you are looking at to the experience of looking at that circle. What is this experience made of? Let’s peel back its layers one at a time.

First, there is the visual perception of the yellow circle. In Buddhism, this is called the “eye-consciousness”. The Buddha himself analyses consciousness down into separate channels of perception, one for each sense organ. So, there is ear-consciousness, tongue-consciousness, nose-consciousness, and so on. Right now, the yellow circle is a visual impression in your eye-consciousness. So far, so good.

But consider this: how do you know you are looking at a circle right now, and not a triangle, a square, or a squirrel? And how do you know the circle is yellow and not green or blue? “It’s obvious,” you may think… But how is it so obvious?

See, you are not simply perceiving a visual impression at the moment, but also a conceptual interpretation of that impression. This interpretation places the labels “circle”, “yellow”, “looking”, and so on, to translate visual data into a narrative, such as “I am looking at a yellow circle”. In Buddhism, this is called manovijñāna, meaning “mind-consciousness”. The Buddha includes the mind among our sense organs, treating it as that which perceives mental objects, such as thoughts, desires, feelings, and the like. But the mind is also a unique sense organ in that it interprets the information the other sense organs are feeding it.

Let me give you an example. If I put these twelve lines on the screen in a particular way, what do you see? You see a cube. The flat image in your eye-consciousness suddenly becomes three-dimensional in your mind-consciousness. Also, you can see the cube facing either up or down, again, depending on the mind’s interpretation. Observe just how much of your seeing is done not through the eyes, but through the mind’s interpretation of what the eyes are seeing. So it is with all the senses: the same smell may repulse you when you think it’s coming from your socks and make you salivate when you think it’s coming from a slice of blue cheese. We mostly don’t experience what we are experiencing, but our thoughts about what we are experiencing.

Now, back to our meditation. We’ve recognised that seeing this circle happens in both your eye-consciousness and your mind-consciousness. Speaking more broadly, we can say experience involves the six channels of consciousness, through which our sense organs feed us information about the world. This model is what the Buddha taught his earliest disciples. But Yogācāra takes things further. Let’s now peel back the next layer of experience…

The Object-Concept

Settle your attention again on the experience of seeing this yellow circle. We will now hone in on a subtle quality present in all conscious experience. Since this quality is always “on”, it is difficult to recognise it as a separate activity of the mind; Buddhist meditators took centuries to notice it, so don’t feel disheartened if it takes you some time as well. I am speaking of viṣaya-vijñapti, meaning “object-concept”.

Think of a dream you remember vividly. In that dream, you encountered people, objects, and places. You experienced these as external and separate from you. You interacted with them as if you were one entity and they another. Only upon waking did you realise all you had been experiencing happened within the mind. While dreaming, you took your own mental creations for real, external objects… How curious! Well, that sense that what you are experiencing is external to you–or objective–is what Yogācāra calls viṣaya-vijñapti, the object-concept.

Now let’s return to our yellow circle. You are not dreaming the circle; it is right here, before your eyes, cognised by your waking mind. But how do you know this circle is an object external to the mind perceiving it? Notice how automatic the assumption is that you are perceiving an external “thing” separate from consciousness. You make the same assumption when you are dreaming, and you never question it then, even though every time you wake up, you know you were only experiencing the activity of your own mind.

Notice the colour of the circle. This colour appears as something external to your mind, something independent from consciousness. Scientifically speaking, we know this is not the case. Colours do not exist outside of our perception. The screen you are reading this text on is emitting electromagnetic radiation with a certain wavelength; the colour yellow is simply how the mind visualises that wavelength. If I shorten the wavelength, you see green, but this green is, again, only a mental representation. As Yogācāra would say, it is citta-mātra, “mind-only”. Still, we see the colour, and we are convinced it is “out there”, in the objective world, not an activity of the mind. This automatic conviction in the objectivity of perceptions is what Yogācāra calls viṣaya-vijñapti.

Great, now let’s peel back the next layer of experience. This will take us to an even subtler activity of the mind, one responsible for most of what we do and most we suffer. The construction of a self.

Manas

The Buddha’s analysis of the self is probably his most powerful teaching. I explore this in depth in previous essays, which I invite you to read (or watch). Yogācāra, however, again takes things further. It distinguishes a dedicated mental structure that creates and sustains the sense of being a self. They call this function manas (not to be confused with manovijñāna, which is “mind-consciousness”). Let me read you the description of manas in the famous Thirty Verses on Mind-Only by the Yogācāra genius, Vasubandhu:

Its character and nature are that of thought. [Manas] is always associated with the four afflictions, which are delusion of a self, perception of a self, identity with a self, and love of a self, as well as mental contact and the others.

Vasubandhu, Triṃśikā Vijñaptimātratā

This can sound a bit technical, but it is a simple observation. When I say “Look at the yellow circle”, you know it is you I am talking to, you who must look at the circle, and you who sees it. What can be more obvious than the fact that you are the experiencer of experience?

But let’s do a simple experiment. Consider this: do you see your self? I don’t mean your hands or the reflection of your face on the screen, but your self, do you see it? Do you hear your self? And I don’t mean your heartbeat, breath, or other bodily functions, but your self – do you hear it? Or do you smell it? You may smell your perfume, clothes, sweat, or the like, but can you smell your self?

Your physical senses never come into contact with your self or with my self, or with any self for that matter. And yet, the self feels just as real as any physical object. It is a virtual entity the mind inserts into experience automatically – that is to say, unconsciously. Otherwise, we would all be able to drop our sense of self at will, and the Buddha would not have had to teach us how to do so.

As we’ve explored in previous essays, the sense of being a separate self has many evolutionary benefits. Indeed, if somebody lacks a stable sense of identity, this is usually pathological and requires treatment. The point of Buddhist practice and philosophy is not to abolish the self, but to see it for what it is. To see that the self is not the thinker of thoughts, but just a very persistent thought; not the one who is conscious, but an appearance within consciousness.

A few minutes ago, we explored how the mind applies the object-concept to experiences, interpreting them as external. Well, we can say that through manas, the mind also applies the subject-concept (or self) to counterbalance external experiences with an internal experiencer. Yogācāra calls this our “dualistic grasping”. This is the mind’s bifurcation into one part that is internal and experiencing, and another part that is external and being experienced. The line dividing experience into these two aspects, the external and the internal, or the subjective and the objective, exists within the mind only.

This is not a mystical or speculative claim. Observe your present experience. As you are reading this text, viṣaya-vijñapti is the conviction that the text is external to the mind, and manas sustains the sense of being the one inside the mind, reading this text. But both this text and the sense of being the one reading it are appearances within the mind; otherwise, you would not be conscious of them. These appearances do not, by themselves, belong within or without, to the self or not to the self. It is the mind that processes this field of thoughts and sense impressions into a binary picture.

We’re nearly done now with our meditation. We have only one final layer of experience to explore, and this is the greatest discovery the Yogācāra made. Something Freud thought he discovered a millennium later.

Ālayavijñāna

Consider what we’ve explored so far. Consider how you automatically see the yellow circle. Consider how you automatically recognise it as a circle in your mind. Consider how you automatically perceive the circle as external to your mind. And finally, consider how you automatically experience being the one who is seeing the circle. “Automatically” here is to say unconsciously. All this mental activity is somehow orchestrated without any conscious work. This begs the question: What is the origin of the mind’s activity?

Here, we arrive at the most famous Yogācāra term, the ālayavijñāna. Ālayavijñāna literally means “storehouse-consciousness”. It designates the deepest region of the mind, the origin and support of all conscious experience. In an earlier essay, I compared the ālayavijñāna with Carl Jung’s understanding of the “unconscious”. The similarities are fascinating, so I invite you to check out that video essay to learn more.

Yogācāra sees the storehouse-consciousness as a subliminal, ever-present stream of mental impressions. Whether we are awake, asleep, in deep meditation, or in a coma, the ālayavijñāna is always on, always absorbing experiences and storing them up as impressions. This store then serves as the material out of which future experiences arise.

Before getting too abstract with this, let’s explore it with a simple practice. Please close your eyes for a minute and listen to this sound.

Listen closely. Soak your attention with the sound, and see if anything emerges in consciousness. The mind may respond to the sound by bringing up images, thoughts, memories, feelings… It’s quite magical, really. Now, where did all this new content of consciousness come from? It wasn’t here a minute ago… And where will these impressions go once the sound fades and you focus on something else? You can open your eyes now.

The Yogācārins use a beautiful simile to explain this. They compare sense impressions with seeds and the storehouse-consciousness with the soil, where these seeds are stored. For example, taking a stroll along the beach plants seeds of sensory impressions in your ālayavijñāna. Once you leave the beach, you move on to other things. On the surface of the mind, the experience is gone, just like how you don’t see the seeds buried in the ground during winter. But one day, you hear the sound of waves breaking on the shore. Suddenly, you’re back on the beach; you can almost feel the cool water lapping at your feet, the salty wind, and the laughter of seagulls overhead. Like seeds sprouting in spring, past sense impressions burst out of the storehouse-consciousness. As Yogācāra says, they become reactualised.

But the ālayavijñāna doesn’t only store sense impressions. Much more importantly, it stores habit energy. Every intentional action leaves an imprint on the storehouse of the mind, creating the potential for a similar action or experience in the future. This is most obvious when we think about our habits, especially our bad ones. There, we can see how repetition ingrains certain patterns of behaviour in our being, sometimes so deeply that even conscious effort can’t break the vicious cycle. To extend the Yogācāra metaphor, you can’t plant peaches and expect apple trees.

We are done now with our guided meditation. Observing our experience, we discovered all the major elements of consciousness Yogācāra described: the six sense consciousnesses, the object-concept, manas, and the storehouse-consciousness. Now it’s time to go the other way. Let’s take what we’ve learned about consciousness and see how it comes together to produce the reality we think we are experiencing.

Part Two: The Theory of Mind-Only

The 3 Transformations

How does reality arise in the mind? Let’s begin with ignorance, even though there is no real beginning. The prima causa of this spectacle we call reality is the mind’s ignorance of itself: mind not recognising mind. With this ignorance as a condition, the mind carries out a series of automatic operations known as the Three Transformations of Consciousness. These operations arise simultaneously, but Yogācāra lists them starting with the most fundamental.

First Transformation: Ālayavijñāna

Ālayavijñāna, or the storehouse-consciousness, is the First Transformation of Consciousness. Here, mind manifests as a flow of impressions called vāsanās. These impressions include images, ideas, sensations, and so on, but most importantly, they include acts of volition. All these are the latent seeds that later flower into conscious experiences. The ālayavijñāna is not an entity, not a self, not a soul, but a flow of momentary impressions. It is not found within space or time, as space and time are impressions within it.

This can all sound very abstract, but it refers to our daily reality. For example, let’s do a quick body scan. See if you can hone in on any bodily sensation that you haven’t been paying attention to while reading this text. The sensation can be an itch, some extra pressure, discomfort, pain, pleasure… Whatever you discover, notice how you just became conscious of the sensation, even though it’s been there for a while. And once you shift your attention away from it again, you are no longer conscious of it, and yet it’s still there. But… still where? In the ālayavijñāna. The ālayavijñāna is that great expanse of impressions in which consciousness acts like a tiny mirror. A mirror shifting restlessly from one appearance to another, capturing fleeting images of the storehouse and trying to hold on to them. This takes us to the next step of how the mind constructs reality.

Second Transformation: Manas

Manas is the Second Transformation of Consciousness. Here, the mind acts as a mirror to itself. We can compare manas with the myth of Narcissus, where the boy sees his reflection in a pool, mistakes it for the face of a stranger, and starts clinging to it. Manas captures a subliminal impression from the ālayavijñāna like how a mirror captures an image and reflects it. But more importantly, manas reflects not only the content of the ālayavijñāna, but the ālayavijñāna itself. Of course, the ālayavijñāna is not an entity separate from its content, but it does appear as such in the reifying mirror of manas. So, if you’re wondering what the ālayavijñāna looks like, the best image the mind can have of it is simply your self. You are the reflection of the ālayavijñāna in the tiny mirror of manas.

Let’s return to our body scan. When you locate that bodily sensation, this is manas reflecting an impression within the ālayavijñāna. But your experience is not simply that of a bodily sensation, but of your bodily sensation. That itch is palpably your itch. When manas reflects an impression, it also reflects the space within which this impression arises, meaning the ālayavijñāna. The reflection of this space for mental appearances becomes the image to which manas clings as a self.

But manas does more than simply reflect the ālayavijñāna. It obsesses over its reflection. Manas literally means “thought” or “thinking”. Yogācāra has chosen this name to highlight the constant mental activity here aimed at reinforcing that sense of self. You don’t just cognise the itch as your itch; you also think, “Why do I have this itch?”, “Should I scratch this itch?”, “Maybe I should practice non-scratching.”, “But maybe I shouldn’t repress my desire for scratching...” Thus, manas immediately obscures direct experience with countless narratives, thoughts, and emotions concerning the imagined self…

Third Transformation: Viṣaya-Vijñapti (via the Six Sense-Consciousnesses)

To complete the picture of reality as we know it, the mind performs the Third Transformation of Consciousness. Here, mind takes the form of our six sense-consciousnesses as coloured by viṣaya-vijñapti, or the object-concept. So, once the mirror of manas reflects that bodily sensation within the ālayavijñāna, viṣaya-vijñapti (via the six sense consciousnesses) adds the icing on the cake, the conviction that your bodily sensation is something objectively “out there”, something perceived by the mind, not an activity of the mind. Consider the fact that over 80% of people with amputation still feel sensations in their missing limbs. This goes to show just how much the object-concept shapes our experience of the world–even when the object is obviously not there.

These, then, are the Three Transformations of Consciousness: the ālayavijñāna, manas, and viṣaya-vijñapti via the six sense consciousnesses. Their simultaneous activity arises due to the mind’s ignorance of its own nature. It creates the illusion of an external reality and an internal self experiencing that reality. This illusion, in turn, further confuses the mind, prevents self-realisation, and feeds the cyclical arising of experience we call birth, death, and rebirth. As one scholar puts it:

We are enwrapped like the silkworm in the cocoon [spun] by our own selves and transmigrate from one form of existence to another, from one world to another forever.

Chhote Lal Tripathi, The Nature of “Reality” in Yogācāra Buddhism

So this is how the mind creates the appearance of an external reality according to Yogācāra. Clearly, this view opens up at least as many questions as it seeks to answer. Let’s look at a few really important ones.

First, if reality is just a mental creation, how does the mind choose what experience to have? Why would we experience so much hardship and sorrow if the mind has the power to experience whatever it can imagine?

Second, what about our shared perceptions? If you share this essay with a friend (which I would appreciate), you will both be reading the same text. Doesn’t this prove that this text is an external object, independent of both of your minds?

And finally, what’s the point of all this theorising about the nature of mind and reality? The Buddha’s aim was always liberation from suffering, not philosophical diversion. Does the Yogācāra view of citta-mātra have any utility in helping us out of our everyday ignorance and suffering?

Consciousness & Karma

There is an important element of citta-mātra I haven’t mentioned. Now that we know about the Three Transformations of Consciousness, it is time we look at the force behind them, the law that directs the mind’s generation of experience. It’s time we talk about karma.

In the earliest sutras, the Buddha says:

Karma is what creates distinctions among beings…

Cula-Kammavibhanga Sutta, MN 135

He also says:

The [body-mind] is to be regarded as old karma, brought into existence and created by intention…

Kamma Sutta, SN 35.145

I have an in-depth essay about karma and rebirth. I invite you to read/watch that to see just how profound and elegant this teaching of the Buddha is. Here, I’ll only briefly mention the aspects most relevant to Yogācāra.

The Buddha teaches that all experience is the result of karma. Your karma includes all your intentional thoughts, words, and actions in this life, and in an infinite series of past lives. Everything you experience in life, the Buddha says, down to the most trivial detail, even down to reading this text, is literally what your past karma looks like. Your life is your karma objectified. For example, if you’ve spent years reacting to stress with anger, you’ll tend to find yourself in situations full of conflict and tension. If you’ve spent years practicing patience and kindness, you’ll tend to find yourself surrounded by more trust and goodwill. Different seeds, different “worlds.” Now, Yogācāra elaborates on this teaching with a profound psychological twist. To my understanding, Yogācāra says consciousness and karma are all you need to explain reality. Let me explain…

First, Yogācāra notes that the ālayavijñāna is what makes karma and rebirth possible. Only an unconscious storehouse of past experiences can explain how something you did a decade ago shapes your experience today. The intentional action of hurting or helping somebody leaves an impression in the ālayavijñāna, where it becomes the seed of a future experience. When the right conditions appear, that impression (or vāsanā) becomes reactualised, and you experience being hurt or helped by somebody. To give an extremely simplified example, if you punch the wall in a fit of anger today, your hand will hurt tomorrow. The Buddha has taught in detail how there is no self who punches the wall today, and there is no self whose hand is hurting tomorrow. But there is the punch, and there is the hurt. Yogācāra adds that it is the ālayavijñāna that provides the continuity between the two. The punch plants a seed in the ālayavijñāna, and that seed flowers into hurt. In the same way, the ālayavijñāna connects all moments of cognition in this life and across lives.

So, the ālayavijñāna allows karma to work. Karma, in turn, determines what experience the mind will form at any given moment. This text is how your past intentional actions appear to your eyes and mind at this moment. In turn, your choice to read this text (and thanks for that, by the way) informs what future experiences your mind will generate. The mind doesn’t choose what to experience; it simply responds to past karma and to the present causes and conditions. It is like the ocean, which doesn’t choose when to ebb and when to flow, but simply responds to the law of gravity and the movement of Earth, Moon, and Sun.

The Yogācārins say karma is also the reason why different beings seem to perceive the same external objects. For example, Elly, my fiancé, has a pair of red socks. When she looks at her red socks and when I look at the red socks, we both see the same thing: a pair of red socks. A Yogācārin would say Elly and I have a lot of shared karma, hence our similar body-minds, hence we both perceive a pair of red socks. Now Barney, our dog, has a different kind of body-mind, the result of different past karma. When Barney sees the red socks, I don’t know what he sees, but he goes crazy, he starts biting, licking, and tossing them around. Obviously, he is experiencing a very different kind of object.

Such differences in perceived reality exist between people, too. For example, this essay will seem fascinating to one reader, boring to another, and to another it will be blasphemy against the one true religion. Now, which is it? Is the essay fascinating, is it boring, or is it blasphemous? “That depends on your past karma,” Yogācāra would answer. In reality, there are no two people who will read the exact same text when they see this. For Barney, I doubt this essay even appears as an object in consciousness.

Still, to me, to you, and to pretty much every reader, this text is, well, a text. For Yogācāra, this is not an argument for the objective existence of this text outside our minds. It is simply a consequence of our shared karma. You and I, and pretty much every reader of this text, for all our differences, we are all human beings. This means we are experiencing many shared karmic patterns, which our limited human language represents as objects and events in a shared “external” world. In fact, says Yogācāra, we are each trapped in our own private mental simulation of reality. The question then is, how do we exit the simulation? How do we experience reality beyond mental constructs? How do we wake up?

Awakening

After all their sophisticated analysis, the Yogācārins end up back with the Buddha’s fundamental insight. Ignorance of the mind’s workings leads to craving and aversion for objects that are only as real as a dream. These craving and aversion lead to misguided intentional actions (or karma), which then fuel the vicious cycle of becoming, where ignorance and suffering propagate from one lifetime to another. You can compare this with the Buddha’s teaching of Dependent Origination, his most profound doctrine, which I explore at length in a previous essay.

In any case, to end the vicious cycle of suffering, one must end its root cause, which is ignorance; more specifically, ignorance of how your mind functions. So, how do we end ignorance? In short, first we learn citta-mātra—then we unlearn citta-mātra.

In his Thirty Verses on Mind-Only, Vasubandhu writes:

So long as one has not given rise to the mind which seeks to abide in the nature of mind-only, then regarding the two types of grasping dispositions, he is still not yet able to subdue and extinguish them.

Vasubandhu, Triṃśikā Vijñaptimātratā

In other words, so long as you have not started investigating the backstage of the mind, where experience is constructed, you remain caught in dualistic grasping to subject-and-object, self-and-other, internal-and-external. You are not experiencing reality, but your own private karmic dream. Noticing you are dreaming is the first crucial step. Still, it does not constitute waking up. Vasubandhu continues:

Setting up and establishing even something small and saying this is the nature of mind-only, because there is still something which is grasped, it is not truly abiding in Consciousness Only.

Vasubandhu, Triṃśikā Vijñaptimātratā

This is a profound and subtle warning. You see, waking up is not a matter of thinking about reality in a new way. If we return to our meditation object, the yellow circle, we may now see it as a creation of the Three Transformations of Consciousness. We’ve learned some new terminology, but are we any nearer to awakening? Have we not only substituted one concept with another? To go beyond the mind’s creations, we clearly need an approach other than conceptual thinking. Let me read you how Vasubandhu concludes his Thirty Verses:

Without grasping and not conceptualizing—this is the wisdom of the supramundane realm which abandons the coarseness of duality and naturally attains transformation of the basis.

This itself is the realm of no outflows, inconceivable, good, and eternal, the peaceful and blissful body of liberation, and what the [Buddha] called the Dharma.

Vasubandhu, Triṃśikā Vijñaptimātratā

This is the Yogācāra view of final awakening. The “transformation of the basis” occurs when ordinary consciousness (or vijñāna) becomes direct knowing (or jñāna). This is pure experiencing, devoid of subject-object duality, devoid of conceptual interpretation. We get a taste of this when we’re absorbed in music, or watching a sunset, and for a moment there’s just the colour and just the sound, no commentator in the background saying, “I like this” or “I should take a photo.” Just experiencing.

This may seem like a unique conclusion of the citta-mātra doctrine, but it is only a reformulation of the Buddha’s original teachings. When Bāhiya, a sage who was soon to die, asked the Buddha for a concise summary of the Dharma, the Buddha told him:

When for you there will be … only the sensed in reference to the sensed, only the cognised in reference to the cognised, then, Bāhiya, there is no you in connection with that. When there is no you in connection with that, there is no you there. When there is no you there, you are neither here nor yonder nor between the two.

This, just this, is the end of suffering.

Bāhiya Sutta; Ud 1.10

What the Buddha describes to Bāhiya is just that non-dual awareness that Yogācāra calls jñāna. Jñāna designates direct knowing, raw immediacy prior to the mind’s conceptual processing. The experiencing of suchness.

As we see, this conclusion of Yogācāra teaching does not belong to Yogācāra, but neither does it belong to the Buddha. I see it as a universal insight of non-dual traditions. For me, the person who communicates it most clearly is a modern sage who belongs to no tradition, Jiddu Krishnamurti. He says:

In the state of experiencing, there is neither the experiencer nor the experienced. The tree, the dog and the evening star are not to be experienced by the experiencer; they are the very movement of experiencing. There is no gap between the observer and the observed… Thought is utterly absent, but there is being.

Jiddu Krishnamurti, Commentaries on Living Series 1

You can taste this in small ways. After reading this essay, when you’re washing a dish or walking to the next room, see if there can be only the sensation of water on your hands, only the sound of your footsteps, letting your train of thought dissolve into presence. That tiny shift is already a kind of awakening.

The Yogācārins, of course, being the hyper-analytic psychologists they are, have a technical vocabulary surrounding awakening. We could go into that, but I think it would defeat the purpose of what we’ve been talking about. After all, how many more mental models do we need before we are ready to experience reality beyond mental models?

I hope this essay has given you some new perspective on the workings of your mind and the nature of what you experience as an external reality. Please don’t take what I’ve presented here as a definitive introduction to Yogācāra, but as one possible reading. Citta-mātra is a profound and subtle view of reality, which even a lifetime of study cannot exhaust.

The question remains, how are we to actualise this non-conceptual mode of experiencing the Yogācārins call jñāna? How can we perceive reality beyond the constructs of the mind? Here, I would rather leave Yogācāra territory and direct you to the most lucid nondual teacher I know of, Krishnamurti. Coming into contact with his teachings has had a lasting impact on my mode of being in the world, and I present his insights in another essay. If you’d like to explore this non-conceptual way of living in more practical detail, I recommend reading/watching that next.

Thank you for reading, and remember: “What you seek is seeking you.”

Nothing I am ever conscious of is other than consciousness.

The taste of snow melting on the tongue, the bleeding sky at sundown, my lover’s sigh of surrender, the silent glory of my child… Life in its countless guises—human, demonic, and divine—ten thousand variations on the ten thousand things, and yet never for a moment other than consciousness.

The mind is seeking always to become not-mind, and so crafts apparitions such as self and world, seer and seen, mind and not-mind. It crafts past, present, and future, and space with its directions; it fills these with beings, objects, and events. Diving into this whirlwind of phantoms, it loses itself in its own vapors.

And all the while, consciousness abides. It accompanies all movement, yet remains unmoved. It receives all wounds unwounded and lives through every death. It embraces every height and depth without extending. Though older than the world, it is ever born anew.

The mind, frightened of its empty nature, seeks to fill itself with its creations. Or once exhausted by this work, it seeks to return to the rest it has forsaken. Thus, it spirals and tangles up the knots it then untangles. And all the while, consciousness abides.

But empty or full, manic or at rest, the mind never knows anything other than its knowing. The emptiness it flees is the fullness it is seeking. Bidden or not, found or forgotten, one or in ten thousand pieces, consciousness abides.

May we rest as that emptiness full to the brim,

Simeon

Suggested Reading

The Essential Ananda K. Coomaraswamy

The Essential Ananda K. Coomaraswamy is especially powerful for seekers who feel that spirituality has been reduced to technique or self-improvement. Coomaraswamy writes with uncompromising clarity about tradition, symbolism, and the sacred foundations of art and culture. His work points beyond belief systems toward a lived participation in truth.

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