Awakening, Mindfulness, Collective Action
We had a beautiful conversation this week about “stream-entry,” the term the Buddhist tradition uses to describe a moment or process of inner breakthrough that makes full liberation inevitable and (relatively) imminent. Like so many important images in the discourses, from the descriptions of jhāna to “streams of merit,” the Buddha uses the metaphor of water. Stream-entry suggests that the path consists of finding your way to a river and then getting out into the current, which then takes you inevitably to the ocean, borne by a momentum inherent in the process of awakening.
This list of the ten “fetters” we’ve been exploring these past couple months is both an expanded list of hindrances we may find coloring our experience any time and a sequential description of the process of awakening. The whole sequence can be understood as the inevitable result of seeing through the root delusion of unchanging individual identity or sakkāyadiṭṭhi (personality view, substantialist view), the first fetter. When the heart knows for sure that it is not the evidence of an eternal individual but an expression of a dynamic impersonal ecosystem, everything else we need to know unfolds naturally.
How do we practice an understanding like this?
The entire Dhamma points toward this realization, but moment to moment the most important inner tool is our most fundamental: mindfulness. If you think of mindfulness as simply being present, or as a synonym for awareness, you're not wrong, but with mindfulness being a viral term now, its radical purpose can be lost. Mindfulness leads directly toward stream-entry because it depersonalizes. The shift is from interpreting all of my experiences as happening to me to experiences arising as conditioned phenomena being felt by a consciousness that is itself a conditioned phenomenon. (It’s a mouthful because the norm is easier to describe—our language itself is structured to make individuality the default position.)
Mindfulness brings about a kind of alienation—a refuge in witness awareness that enables us to be with both delightful and painful moments without over-interpreting them. This is why it's so helpful in relieving stress. But the real stress is the sense of being a permanent individual. Seeing through sakkāyadiṭṭhi is the heart of liberation, and paradoxically has to be understood directly by each person for themselves—though it undermines separateness, it has to be realized one by one, because it’s in each one of us that the delusion has taken root.
But even with that, I think it’s the hidden truth at the heart of all collective movements. When we realize that we can never be at ease when we perceive others as our competitors or enemies, we easily make choices that tend the well-being of the whole community over the default preference of individual comfort. When collective political movements fail, as many communist states have, it’s often because individuals used the collective for personal power and gain. When collective movements succeed, as they have done in some socialist democracies or in healthy grassroots movements, one condition is the strength of the feeling of selflessness and service in the community.
Many of us are celebrating an election that had at its heart ideals of service and care for each each other: affordability, safety for immigrants, care for the vulnerable among us. Victories like these come when millions of us are moved to look together to help others—they only happen because of volunteers, donations, and the conversations we have with each other that help us stay involved. Many of you were active in this election, and most of you tracked the process and cared about the result. Thank you for being an engaged and vibrant Saṅgha, and may our practice truly be a condition for deepening beauty and good in our world.
