Seeing That Frees: Meditations on Emptiness and Dependent Arising

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Rob: Yes, I’m aware some people really don’t like the title and don’t get it, and some people love it. What people might not know is that Rob struggled with finishing his book and not only because had a heavy teaching round at Gaia House and many students to meet. By 2012 he had already begun on a new phase in his practice and thought. He said his experience of Dharma practice left various important questions unanswered. After all, one cannot spend all one’s time in the realm or neither-perception-nor-non-perception, can one? Rob had turned his attention to the much broader and possibly more vital matter of how we really breathe life or soulfulness into our Dharma practice, in an age which is dominated by modernist, reductionist and materialist assumptions about reality. Leela Sarti's Talks at Gaia House. 19.10.2015: Bowing to Instinct and Embracing Desire (Duration 51:54)

SUMEDHA became interested in spiritual practice in her teens and, after studying Comparative Religion at university, practiced as a nun in the Thai Forest Tradition in the UK. After disrobing in 2010 she co-founded Ekuthuleni retreat place in France with Noon Baldwin, bringing together ecology, simple living and meditation. So in some sense, the premise of the book, or one of the premises, one of the sort of starting strands of the book turns out to be the actual delivery point where it all ends up. So that’s part of it. I think maybe another sort of weave in the story was – and again, it’s today’s story, right now, at this time, when you’re asking me – I think, perhaps, I certainly felt helped by a lot of the teachings that were out there. Certainly, as I mentioned, Ajahn Geoff, and Christopher Titmuss, and Christina Feldman – actually lots of teachings. But I also felt, somehow, nothing fully satisfied me. There were lots of questions that I couldn’t really find answers to, or people with the same degree of burning interest in them. So I had a lot of time on retreat – years, in fact. And I was, to a certain extent, it was a natural kind of move for me to just begin experimenting and seeing what happened and getting super interested in stuff, with this burning curiosity about it. Listen to one of River's talks on Dharma Seed: The Story of Ptolemy the Tortoise and Mettā (Duration 46:24)

Jacob Robert Burbea was born on September 5th 1965. His mother was English and converted to Judaism before marrying Rob's father - a Sephardic Jew from Libya who had spent time, along with his father (Rob's Kabbalist grandfather) in Nazi concentration camps, including Bergen-Belsen. Most of his father's family settled in Italy after the war, and during his childhood Rob's family spent many summer holidays with the relatives there. Rob grew up in the strict Jewish religious environment of the family home in North London, with his older sister and younger brother. Alongside the religious rules and observance at home, Rob's childhood was also very ordinary - he loved skateboarding and bike-riding, was devoted to football (a passion he retained throughout his life), loved 70s and 80s British TV comedy and would do almost anything to get out of doing the dishes. YANAI POSTELNIK first encountered the teachings of the Buddha while travelling in Asia in 1989, and has been teaching Insight Meditation and Buddhist practice internationally for 30 years. Yanai is much inspired by the forest tradition of Thailand, and the transformative power of the natural world. He is a member of the Gaia House Teacher Council, and a Core Faculty member of Insight Meditation Society, Massachusetts. Since 2018 Yanai has devoted a significant amount of his time to activism and nonviolent civil disobedience, calling for an appropriate response by government, to the climate, ecological and social justice crises of our time. Having grown up in New Zealand, with parents of European and Asian heritage, Yanai lives with his wife Catherine McGee in Devon, England. BHANTE BODHIDHAMMA started training in Soto Zen in 1977, then in the Mahasi Theravada Tradition with Sayadaws U Rewata Dhamma, U Janaka and U Pandita. In 1986 he ordained, subsequently spending eight years at Kanduboda Mahasi Meditation Centre in Sri Lanka. He has been teaching in England, Ireland and internationally since 1998. From 2001- 2005, he was the Resident Teacher at Gaia House. He founded the Satipanya Buddhist Retreat in Wales, a meditation centre devoted to the Mahasi tradition. She has been trained under the guidance of Martine Batchelor and completed the Bodhi College Dharma Teacher Training. She also took the MBCAS instructor training program (mindfulness based cognitive approach for seniors).

Jake Dartington's Talks given at Gaia House on 20.08.2017: Wisdom, wellbeing and awakening (Duration 47:08) JULIA WALLOND has been meditating regularly since 2005, mainly with teachers at Gaia House. She trained as an MBCT teacher with Exeter University in 2011, and later as a ‘Community Dharma Leader’ with Gaia house. In this time she supported Bristol Insight to develop and become a charity. More recently she completed her Dharma teacher training with Bodhi College. She currently lives in Machynlleth, west Wales, where she combines work in health care with teaching in a local community meditation group. She enjoys exploring Dharma in everyday life, connecting with the natural world, and exploring engagement with the challenges of our times, socially and environmentally. Rob: I feel like the contextualization of it is itself what I would call a soul question and empty. For me, going thoroughly, deeply into emptiness – as coming out in the way I teach now – means also that conceptual frameworks are empty, which includes the conceptual framework of Buddhadharma, of the Buddha’s teachings, the conceptual framework of awakening, the conceptual framework of Jung, the conceptual framework of what we’re now calling soulmaking – all of it. That leaves us, again, with a playground of conceptual frameworks. Yeah, there’s some interesting philosophy to discuss there, because you can’t just say everything is true. But basically the idea that there’s any kind of, “This is the right way to see it, or the true conceptual structure that reveals or discloses reality,” that starts opening up.

The Boundless Heart

Ayya Santacitta co-founded Aloka Vihara in 2009 and received Bhikkhuni Ordination in 2011. She is committed to Gaia as a living being and is currently developing the Aloka Earth Room, currently located in San Rafael, California. Rob: Yeah. As I said before, this was very strange to me when I came across this kind of talk and these kind of teachings in, for instance, Tibetan Gelug traditions. So one example would be – you mentioned the chariot earlier. It’s something that appears in the Pali Canon, the original Buddhist teachings. A nun introduces the teaching of deconstructing the self like you would deconstruct a chariot. It’s given there as a sort of philosophical argument, but in the Tibetan Gelug teachings they develop that into a meditation with certain instructions. I guess, for me, again, the instructions that I found for that were – they didn’t feel very satisfying or very powerful, and I certainly never met anyone who had any really liberative power for. So I just experimented with finding ways that they would be really satisfying for me. DENE DONALDS Committed to socially engaged Buddhism. Dene has helped establish a number of social enterprises working with people with learning disabilities , people with autism, and with refugees. He also offers the teachings of Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh in prisons. ROB BURBEA (1965-2020) was Gaia House’s much-loved resident teacher for 10 years, from 2005 to 2015 when he had to leave after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.

AYYA SANTACITTA was born in Austria and did her graduate studies in Cultural Anthropology in Vienna. In 1988 she met Ajahn Buddhadasa in southern Thailand, who sparked her interest in Buddhist monastic life. She trained as a nun in England and Asia from 1993 until 2009, primarily in the lineage of Ajahn Chah, and has practiced meditation for over 30 years. Since 2002, she has also received teachings in the lineage of Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche. Rob: That’s an interesting question, Michael. My immediate response is I can’t remember. [ laughter] I’m sure it’ll come to me in a minute. My other immediate response is that, so, if there’s a story, then this will be like today’s version of the story, which might be a different telling of history than on another day or in another mood or whatever. You know, past is empty, too. So, I know where I got the idea of fabrication from. I got that from Ajahn Thanissaro, who maybe many of your listeners will know him – Thanissaro Bhikkhu, Ajahn Geoff, who is an American monk with a monastery in San Diego. He was a monk in Thailand for 25 years, I think. He was a very important teacher for me for a kind of short period. I was actually thinking of becoming a monk at his monastery for a while. The idea of fabrication I got from him. I’m not sure if he would feel, if he read Seeing That Frees, if he would feel I had taken it too far and beyond the range of what he would feel comfortable with, or into territory he would not feel comfortable with. I don’t know. So a lot of that kind of stuff found its way into Seeing That Frees. I was just kind of obsessed about the whole thing – or I think it’s fair to say I was pretty obsessed for a number of years about emptiness and the Unfabricated, the Deathless. I had an intuition even before I got into deep practice – this drew me. I didn’t quite know what it was, but I had this mystical intuition of something that was – I remember saying to someone, “I would stake my life on this. I don’t know what it is yet, but I just know that I would stake my life on it.” So that kind of intuition was there for me. These are some of the factors, but I feel I’m not giving you a very good answer to your question. That’s what I can do for right now.LAURA BRIDGMAN was a Buddhist nun in the Theravada tradition from 1995 to 2015. Her main teachers within this school have been Ajahn Sumedho, Ajahn Sucitto and Sayadaw U Tejaniya. She has been offering retreats since 2007, most recently mainly at Gaia House where she is also the staff support teacher. Her practice orientation is the Buddha’s teaching of the Five Spiritual Faculties (trust, balanced effort, mindfulness, composure and wisdom). Alongside her Vipassana (Insight) practice she is a student of the Diamond Approach (Ridhwan). For many though, their first encounter with Rob was in his seminal book Seeing That Frees, published in 2014. After a startling chapter laying out the connections between Samadhi and Insight practice, the reader is guided deep into the heart of emptiness and dependent arising. In his inimitable prose - gentle, precise and inviting of personal exploration - Rob sets out what he had discovered about how to use the wisdom teachings with skill, subtlety and without limiting the profundity of the Buddha’s core teaching to any single conception. Seeing That Frees joins up the dots and has become a classic manual for practitioners, one to take on a solitary retreat and really soak up. Christina Feldman's Talks given at Gaia House on 24.09.2013: Swimming Against the Tide (Duration 61:35)

Almost miraculously, Rob taught a three week retreat at Gaia House in December 2019 - January 2020. Rob had long wanted to teach a retreat on the Jhānas, and he did so in almost virtuosic form despite the worsening pain of his cancer. Experiencing Rob teach on Practising the Jhānas was like watching a master musician perform, holding as he did the kind of deep knowledge of his subject's form and structure that allows for organic and fluid improvisation. It was during this, Rob's last retreat, that the holistic nature and stunningly cohesive integrity of his teachings became clear through his full and deep exposition. Michael: It’s today’s answer. Perfect. So I’m just going to ask you an impossible question, which is, okay, Rob, you have this deep insight into emptiness – what can you say about emptiness? What is it? Why does it matter? Why should someone care? Soon after he arrived in the States Rob began meditating at the Cambridge Insight Meditation Centre, an urban non-residential Dharma centre not far from his neighbourhood in Boston. There he met Narayan Helen Liebensen, one of the teachers at Cambridge Insight, and practised with her from 1993 to 2002. Narayan remembers “how unusual a student he was because of his fierce curiosity and compassionate heart.” She recalls the students in the experienced practitioners’ classes with him being “inspired and even awed by his passionate search for the truth.”Michael: Yeah, it’s something I found really interesting about the book. You do have experiential meditations, and then you have these analytical meditations where I would even call them philosophical meditations because you’re deconstructing the object philosophically or conceptually. I wonder if just for listeners you could give the briefest hint of an example of how that actually works in practice. We can do that with different intentions. So, for example, one might do that with mettā practice or lovingkindness – I decide to see this person in a certain way; I play with that way of looking that sees them in a certain way for the sake of mettā or whatever. But I can also do that for other reasons. So I can broaden the scope of why I’m doing it; it’s not just for the release of obvious suffering. Does this make sense?