The World as Emptiness, Part 6: Presence of Mind

We come, then, to the final parts of the eightfold path. There are two concluding steps which are called—I explained the word samadhi, but I’ll write it here again—smṛti; samyak-smṛti and samyak-samadhi. Smṛti means recollection, memory, present-mindedness. Seems rather funny that the same word can mean ‘recollection,’ or ‘memory’ and ‘present-mindedness.’ But smṛti is exactly what that wonderful old rascal Gurdjieff meant by ‘self-awareness,’ or ‘self-remembering.’ Smṛti is to have complete presence of mind.

There is a wonderful meditation called The House that Jack Built meditation—at least that’s what I call it—that the Southern Buddhists practice. He walks, and he says to himself, “There is the lifting of the foot. There is the lifting of the foot.” The next thing he says is, “There is a perception of the lifting of the foot.” And the next, he says, “There is a tendency towards the perception of the feeling of the lifting of the foot.” Then, finally, he says, “There is a consciousness of the tendency of the perception of the feeling of the lifting of the foot.” And so, with everything that he does, he knows that he does it. He is self-aware.

This is tricky. Of course, it’s not easy to do. But as you practice this—I’m going to let the cat out of the bag, which I suppose I shouldn’t do—but you will find that there are so many things to be aware of, at any given moment in what you’re doing, that, at best, you only ever pick out one or two of them. That’s the first thing you’ll find out. Ordinary conscious awareness is seeing the world with blinkers on. As we say, you can think only of one thing at a time. That’s because ordinary consciousness is narrowed consciousness. That’s being narrow-minded in the true sense of the word; looking at things that way. Then you find out that—as, in the course of going around, being aware of what you’re doing all of the time—what are you doing when you remember? Or when you think about the future? I am aware that I am remembering? I am aware that I am thinking about the future?

But, you see, what eventually happens is that you discover that there isn’t any way of being absent-minded. All thoughts are in the present and of the present. And when you discover that, you approach samadhi. Samadhi is the complete state; the fulfilled state of mind. And you will find many, many different ideas among the sects of Buddhists and Hindus as to what samadhi is. Some people call it a trance, some people call it a state of consciousness without anything in it; knowing with no object of knowledge. Some people say that it is the unification of the knower and the known. All these are varying opinions.

I had a friend who was a Zen master, and he used to talk about samadhi, and he said a very fine example of samadhi is a fine horserider. When you watch a good cowboy, he is one being with the horse. So an excellent driver in a car makes the car his own body, and he absolutely is with it. So also a fine pair of dancers. They don’t have to shove each other to get one to do what the other wants him or her to do. They have a way of understanding each other, of moving together, as if they were Siamese twins. That’s samadhi on the physical, ordinary, everyday level. The samadhi of which Buddha speaks is the state which is, as it were, the gateway to nirvāṇa, the state in which the illusion of the ego as a separate thing disintegrates.

Now, when we get to that point in Buddhism, Buddhists do a funny thing, which is going to occupy our attention for a good deal of this seminar. They don’t fall down and worship. They don’t really have any name for what it is that is, really and basically. The idea of anātman, of non-self, is applied in Buddhism not only to the individual ego, but also to the notion that there is a Self of the universe, a kind of impersonal or personal god, and so it is generally supposed that Buddhism is atheistic. It’s true, depending on what you mean by atheism. Common or garden atheism is a form of belief, namely that I believe there is no god. The atheist positively denies the existence of any god. All right. Now, there is such an atheist—if you put dash between the ‘a’ and ‘theist,’ or speak about something called ‘atheos’—theos, in Greek, means ‘god’—but what is a non-god? A non-god is an inconceivable something or other.

I love the story about a debate in the Houses of Parliament in England—where, as you know, the Church of England is established and, therefore, under the control of the government—and the high ecclesiastics had petitioned Parliament to let them have a new prayerbook. And somebody got up and said, “It’s perfectly ridiculous that Parliament should decide upon this, because, as we well know, there are quite a number of atheists in these benches.” And somebody got up and said “Oh, I don’t think there are really any atheists here. We all believe in some sort of a something somewhere.” Now again, of course, it isn’t that Buddhism believes in some sort of a something, somewhere—and that is to say, in vagueness.