Awakening Then, Awakening Now

Greetings, Friendlies. :)

As an extension on last week’s OG-awakening-as-recorded-in-the-Suttanipata, I’d like to highlight a sliver from Rob Burbea’s 2019 “Stream Entry – Conceptions, Value and Realisation“. [1]

Burbea describes the entire body of Gotama’s teachings as “set within the cosmology of rebirth”. He invites us to suspend our current operating frame and submit, in imagination, to inhabiting that cosmological view:

It’s not just a few births; it’s endless. Endless cancer, endless being murdered, endless losing of people you love, endless separation, endless betrayal in romance, endless your children dying, endless pestilence and plague. It just goes on and on and on, and then you get some good bits, and they go too.

I recently spent several days at the hospital bedside of a friend as they were pumped full of oxycodone. To imagine having been with them without the painkillers… days of fiercely grasping their hand, impotent, as they writhed in agony.

To imagine a world without antibiotics. The suffering, the disability, the death. I’d be dead seven times over. Friends would be dead. Family members would be dead.

Gotama’s teachings, and his awakening, are embedded in this saṃsāric understanding of endless, endless, endless suffering. To be freed from that, to be released from that wheel of Saṃsāra, would be everything.

Having taken this journey, Burbea returns to our modern frame and asks: absent that saṃsāric, dukkha-ful view, what might be the meaning of awakening? Can “the end of suffering” touch us the way it touched Gotama and his followers? In our world of relative comfort, relative safety:

[to] say, “My purpose in life is to be free of suffering,” how does that sound? … Is it even that big a deal, compared to this infinite cycle of saṃsāra — … Is that the most important thing in your life?

And again, I’m saying this as someone who is almost — very probably — certainly dying of cancer.

Is that the most important thing?

Somehow this never landed so strongly before. I’d not felt viscerally the gaping chasm between my lived experience and the lived experience of Gotama and his followers. And I’d not understood how significantly that must affect each of our subjective experiences.

I always thought there was something about the OG awakening, and the OG interpretation that should somehow take precedent. But if the frame is so drastically different, can I possibly have access to the subjective experience?

So what?

Well, to some extent, recognizing that the world view/lived experience of Gotama and his followers is inaccessible to me, there is a decoupling from what Gotama “experienced” and what I or my peers may “experience”.

For some this may be disappointing. But it also is liberating. It permits a fresh, honest, idiosyncratic awakening that need not be defined strictly in terms of the material available in the Suttanipata.

Your thoughts? :)

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[1] This entire series of seminars is UH-mazing. Burbea knows he is dying; one feels the urgency of the transmission. And he is speaking to his tribe; there is none of the measured language-ing he would use with a more general audience. Highly highly recommend. (Here or on Hermes Amara’s (HAF) Website.)