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July 4 - September 17, 2019
Succinctly stated, this theory maintains that the manifold of phenomenal existence is made up of a multiplicity of “thing-events” called dhammas, which are the realities that conceptual thought works upon to fabricate the consensual world of everyday reality.
For wisdom or insight to arise, the meditator must learn to suspend the normal constructive, synthesizing activity of the mind responsible for weaving the reams of immediate sensory data into coherent narrative patterns revolving around persons, entities, and their attributes. Instead, the meditator must adopt a radically phenomenological stance, attending mindfully to each successive occasion of experience exactly as it presents itself in its sheer immediacy. When this technique of “bare attention” is assiduously applied, the familiar world of everyday perception dissolves into a dynamic
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The Abhidhamma is above all an investigation of the possibilities of the mind, and thus its most impressive achievement is the construction of an elaborate map revealing the entire topography of consciousness. Like all maps, the one devised by the Abhidhamma necessarily simplifies the terrain which it depicts, but again like any well-planned map its simplification is intended to serve a practical purpose. In this case the map is drawn up to guide the seeker through the tangle of mental states discerned in meditative experience toward the aim of the Buddha’s teaching, liberation from suffering.
If systematic thought is cautiously and critically applied, it can fulfill a valuable function, providing “weapons of defense” against the overwhelming assault of innumerable internal and external impressions on the human mind. This unceasing influx of impressions, by sheer weight of number and diversity alone, can be either overpowering and fascinating or else confusing, intimidating, distracting, even dissolving.
First, Nibbāna, mostly under the name asaṅkhatā dhātu (“the unconditioned element”), also appears in the “Enumeration of Phenomena” (Dhammasaṅgaṇī) in several of the classificatory groups treated in that work. Being “supramundane” (lokuttara), Nibbāna is certainly, in the sense of the term lokuttara, a metaphysical or transcendent entity.
The analysis as undertaken in the Dhammasaṅgaṇī shows that the smallest accessible psychic unit, a moment of consciousness, is as little indivisible (atomos), uniform, and undifferentiated as the material atom of modern physics. Like the physical atom, a moment of consciousness is a correlational system of its factors, functions, energies, or aspects, or whatever other name we choose to give to the “components” of that hypothetical psychic unit.
The present is certainly the only reality concretely existing, but it is a very elusive reality that is constantly on the move from an unreal future to an unreal past.
To a philosophical mind, the duration of the object of bare analysis in an artificially delimited, elusive, and not even genuine present lends to it a strangely illusory character, which contrasts quaintly with the frequent assertion of “pure analysts” that they alone deal with “real facts.” Indeed, these “hard facts” are constantly slipping through their fingers! A frequent and vivid experience and contemplation of that illusory nature of the present, not in the well-known general sense but as established by Abhidhammic analysis, will greatly help in the final understanding of suññatā, that
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A king levies a tax on the different crafts and professions, commanding that those who execute several crafts pay the corresponding amount of tax units. Now, the different professional activities of a single person correspond to the different functions of a single factor of consciousness. The number of tax units payable by the same person are to be compared to the number of classifications corresponding to the various functions of a single factor.
