Awakening is a Process

I had decided that I should wait until I awakened fully to write more. But Ajahn Sumedho says that “arhant,” the term Theravada Buddhists use to designate a person who is fully awakened, which various observers have applied to Sumedho himself, is just another human term that cannot capture what is at base an experience or state of being.

Sumedho doesn’t put the point this way, but it seems to me that being too fixated on awakening indicates an attachment to self that is not what anyone on the Buddhist path should aspire to.

This is a difficult point to explicate, since we tend to think that what we experience is directly available to us for description and explanation. Courts of law put great weight on eyewitness testimony, which consists of the witness describing and explaining what they experienced. This heavy reliance is misplaced for the very mundane reason that it is not actually very reliable. That is not what Sumedho is on about. His point is more that the concepts we rely on heavily to organize, not just our thoughts, but our perceptions, get in the way of what we are pleased to call “direct experience.”

In one famous discourse of the Buddha, or sutra, the Buddha is reported to have said,

That is how you should train yourself. When for you there will be only the seen in reference to the seen, only the heard in reference to the heard, only the sensed in reference to the sensed, only the cognized in reference to the cognized, then, Bāhiya, there is no you in connection with that. When…