PARADIGM SHIFT by Bhante Punnaji (Portland, 2004)

TRANSCRIPT:

The emotional excitement leads to the personalizing, and the personalizing leads to the personality, and the personality leads to birth, old age, disease, death. All the suffering comes from there. This is why the Buddha said Taṇhā is the cause of this suffering, which is the emotion. Emotion can be brought to an end through the proper technique which was that Supernormal Eightfold Way. We have to go beyond the normal to the supernormal state to solve the problem. This was the ending of the problem of dukkha, or suffering. This can be done only by calming the mind. But the mind cannot be calmed without calming our behavior. So the first step is to calm the behavior. And the behavior cannot be calmed if our goal is not calmness. If our goal is simply seeking sensual pleasure, we cannot calm the mind, or the behavior. This is why this whole problem of existence can be solved only by going gradually. First the devotion, then the control of behavior, the good life, which is called Sila. Devotion is called Saddhā. Sadh means what is good and true, dha is to uphold. That is the devotion. Then comes the Sīla which is the good behavior, and then comes Samādhi which is the purity and tranquility of mind, and after Samādhi comes the understanding of the problem. This understanding of the problem is really the solution of the problem.

When we have understood that there is no being, although we think there is being. This is a paradigm shift. In this process of becoming aware of this delusion, it is really a maturity of our consciousness. The consciousness has to evolve. Normally all animals are just conscious of a world. They see, hear, smell, taste, touch through the senses. We become conscious of a world, that is consciousness. But this consciousness is taking place without our knowledge. We are not in control of this. It's just happening. It’s happening due to the presence of the necessary conditions. When the necessary conditions are there, it happens. When the necessary conditions are not there, it does not happen. We are not doing anything. In other words it is an unconscious process. It is from a state of unconsciousness that consciousness comes into being. But that consciousness is actually what is called cognition, that is seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching, thinking. This is Cognition. This whole process is occurring in an unconscious state. If we want to stop this process, we have to become conscious of that. It is only by becoming conscious of that, that this process can be stopped. This is the important thing to understand.

This whole process of the practice is an effort to become conscious of the process of the consciousness itself. It is not trying to become conscious of something outside, it is trying to become conscious of the process of consciousness. That is the paradigm shift. This paradigm shift cannot occur automatically. You have to go through that process which has to be done consciously. This is the growth of consciousness, consciousness grows fully only when consciousness has become conscious of itself. That is the ultimate point in the evolution of the consciousness. When speak of the Buddha, we are speaking of a person who has evolved to that highest level, where a person becomes conscious of consciousness. That is the meaning of Nirvana.

Nirvana is not simply calming the mind. That simply calming the mind is Samādhi. When we speak of Nirvana, we are speaking about the growth and evolution of consciousness to the point where this consciousness becomes conscious of itself. When that has happened, that emotional agitation, excitement will never come back. That is becoming calm while being active. The action is there, it’s not inactivity. But in the Samādhi state, it is all inactive, the calmness. But you can be active and at the same time be calm inside because the emotional excitement never takes place. This is the important thing to understand.

In this process, the perceptual process is going on, conceptual process is going on, but the emotional process has stopped. The perceptual process is aware of itself. And because the perceptual process is aware of itself, it sees through the process. And therefore when you perceive a book for example, there is a book in front of me and I perceive the book as normal people do, but at the same time, what you are perceiving is not just the book. What you are perceiving is the perception of the book. Instead of saying ‘there is a book in front of me’, you can say ‘there is the seeing of a book’.

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