by Bruce Tift
GROUND, PATH, FRUITION
The discussion of a Buddhist psychotherapeutic view is not easy, because it refers to experiences that are difficult to describe with language. The term fruition itself is hard to define. Broadly, it refers to the goal or outcome of a particular endeavor—in this case, developing a good state of mind that’s independent of external and internal conditions. The fruitional or Buddhist view asserts that the state of mind we’re seeking is already present, right now, regardless of circumstance. By contrast to the developmental or Western view, which focuses on releasing old strategies in order to achieve the freedom we seek at some point in the future, the fruitional view takes the position that we’re already free. Nothing needs to change for us to feel complete and at peace except our own perception of reality.
The term fruitional, as I’m using it, comes from the view that a spiritual journey can be described as having ground, path, and fruition. This ground, path, fruition model is useful in helping us explore the hypothesis that everything we need in order to have a good state of mind is already present, right now. When we talk about ground, we’re talking about the place we’re starting from. What are we experiencing right now? What’s the truth of our experience in this moment? Fruition is where we want to be—our goal, the direction we want to go in, how we would like things to be. The term path refers to how we get from here to there. What are the things we might do to head in the direction of the fruition we seek?
Paradoxically, Tibetan Buddhism considers the ground and the fruition to be essentially the same. What we’re going to find out, after walking the path, is that our immediate experience was the whole point—right from the beginning! The whole journey is—and always was—about being present with reality. But something must differentiate the ground, or starting place, from the fruition. When we begin, the ground—our day-to-day reality—is experienced as if it were the whole story. We believe it to be completely real. Not only that, but we embellish it with a running commentary in our mind—“content” that keeps us from noticing the “context” in which our experience is arising. During the path phase, we gradually shift our perception so that we no longer focus solely on the content of our experience—our thoughts, feelings, sensations, and ideas. Instead, we begin to recognize the context within which these experiences arise—a context that can never be captured and understood conceptually. We call this context “awareness.” We still experience the content, but we are simultaneously aware that it’s not the whole story; it does not completely represent reality.
So you might say that the ground is our present-moment experience without awareness. The fruition is that very same experience with awareness. The path creates the conditions for this shift of perception to arise. We meditate, we do different spiritual and psychological practices, we study, and we think about things. And in the process, something shifts in our perception. It’s as if we’re walking down the street past a house with a big picture window, and the sun is shining directly on the glass. It appears opaque; we can’t see into the house. All we see is the sun shining back at us. Yet if we walk another ten feet, the angle of the light changes. The glass becomes transparent, and all of a sudden we can see into the house. The glass hasn’t changed. The sun hasn’t changed. We haven’t changed. It’s only our perspective that has shifted. In that same way, this whole approach is not about improving the content of our experience. Instead, it’s about creating a shift in how we relate to the experiences we are having at any moment.
PRACTICING AWARENESS
The title of this section is actually misleading. You can’t use awareness as a practice, because awareness is always already there. We are simply out of conscious participation with it most of the time. So any so-called awareness practice—including Buddhist meditation—is actually a practice of inviting more conscious participation in the awareness that already exists. When we look back from the fruitional perspective, we see that these practices were never going to “cause” anything to happen. The fruition—awareness—was already there, all the time. These practices weren’t really necessary. Yet at the same time, we understand why we do them. They somehow create an environment in which a shift of perception, an increasing capacity to be aware of awareness, is more likely to arise.
Most spiritual path work involves practices that are intended to do exactly this: to invite more conscious participation with what is already true. The simplest and perhaps most popular of those practices is basic breathing meditation.
PRACTICEBASIC BREATHING MEDITATION
Here’s a simple version of a meditation practice. If you like, you may set a timer so you know how long you will be practicing. I suggest starting with five minutes if you are a beginner. Over time, you may want to increase your practice to fifteen, twenty, or thirty minutes.
Find a quiet place with minimal distraction.
Sit down in whatever posture feels upright, awake, and comfortable enough to not call attention to any bodily tension or pain.
Begin by paying attention to your breathing, without commentary. Once you feel settled, attend to any experiencing that arises. Maintain a sense of open curiosity and awareness.
If you become fascinated with some drama or dialogue, return to your breathing as a way to return to embodied immediacy.
Practice with a sense of nothing to accomplish, only appreciating your irresolvable and unending stream of experiencing.
The metaphor of the sun shining on the window can help us understand the shift from ground to fruition. At first, our perception of reality has an opaqueness or solidity to it. We have a sense that the world is reflecting back something about our “self.” We unconsciously relate to almost everything in terms of how it might affect us—as positive, negative, or neutral. This constant self-referral feeds an ongoing drama about how we’re doing, whether we’ll get what we want, whether we’re safe, and so on. This chronic self-absorption supports the sense of being a significant self, the center of the universe, a self we must protect. From the fruitional perspective, however, our perspective has changed. Now we see through the apparent solidity; we’re aware of a larger context. Our attention goes out, but it doesn’t bounce back to us. In this way, fruition is the same experience as ground, but within the environment of and as the expression of awareness. We may investigate just what this mysterious “reality” is for the rest of our lives, but we can do so without the imposition of a subtle layer of self-referential interpretation.
THE NATURE OF AWARENESS
The experience of awareness cannot be completely captured or defined, so it is usually talked about in metaphor. One common simile is that awareness is like space. It’s not space, but it’s like space. More precisely, our experience of awareness is like our experience of space. Space accommodates everything. Its nature is openness without conditions. Space can accommodate an airplane, a butterfly, pollution, clouds, the earth, anything. That said, we can never actually get a hold of space itself. Another common image would be that awareness is like the sun. It’s constant, and it shines on everything without bias. The sun’s energy shines on a little baby or on a murderer. It goes out into empty space without any agenda. Similarly, awareness is said to be without bias. We’re just as aware of feeling happy as we are of feeling sad; we’re just as aware of being healthy as we are of dying. Awareness doesn’t have preferences. It’s always there, regardless.
Awareness could also be considered to be like light. We’re never going to experience light directly; we only experience it as it interacts with matter. Imagine a stained glass window, for example. The light shining through the window animates and enlivens the display. The display itself is visible—we can see all the colors—but we cannot define or capture the light. In the same way, awareness enlivens the display of the self. We can try everything to protect that self or give it the best possible quality of life, but we are still talking about the display of our experience, not awareness itself. Gravity is the same way. We’ll never be able to get a hold o
f it; we can only know it through the experience of it pulling us downward. Likewise, we’ll never experience our breath directly. We experience our breath through changes in temperature, the sensation of our chest expanding, the rush of something against our skin. But we can never hold onto the breath itself. A lot of meditation practices talk about following your breath, but in truth we can only follow the interaction of this ungraspable experience as it interacts with our senses. Similarly, the only way we can really talk about awareness is by referring to how we are experiencing it through our sensations, feelings, thoughts.
From a Buddhist view, awareness is always present, even if we can’t grasp it completely. It’s nothing we achieve or create or attain—it’s always there. Awareness is said to be what is most fundamental to our experiencing, a nonconceptual knowing. We will never find anything more basic, more intimate, in every moment of our engagement with life. If we were to ask ourselves off and on throughout the day, “What am I aware of experiencing right now?” we would find an ever-changing display of sensations, feelings, thoughts, and fantasies. But what will always be present is our awareness of this display. Moreover, the only thing that turns out to be aware of awareness is awareness itself. Awareness is “self-aware,” though we usually approach this understanding by first trying to make awareness an object to be grasped. That sounds a little abstract, but it may be that there’s nothing definitive that can be said about it. Still, those who begin to experience their lives within the context of awareness report an increasing sense of relaxation, confidence, clarity, humor, and openheartedness. There seems to be a very consistent report about the effect of experiencing our thoughts, feelings, sensations, and so forth in the larger environment of awareness, even if we can never get a hold of that experience. It can be experienced; it just can’t be captured or adequately described.
So in approaching the fruitional view, a paradox arises. We have the experience that we’re “doing something”—we’re beginning to practice living in the greater context of awareness. But more and more, we start to understand that what we are “doing” is only happening in the present moment. It’s not designed to create anything in the future. We’re not trying to “achieve” enlightenment or wakefulness; it’s already here. Our work, then, becomes holding the intention to relax, over and over again, into what is already present. This experience can be talked about, but it’s difficult to truly convey.
So how does awareness relate to the freedom we’re discussing in this book? From the fruitional perspective, every experience—however depressed or however joyful—arises in a larger environment of awareness. When viewed from the perspective of awareness, our preferences fall away. We no longer have a bias toward joy and away from depression. Regardless of circumstances, our experience is one of freedom. Resting in awareness is resting in a freedom that is not dependent on any conditions. We begin to see that, in the present moment, nothing is incomplete. There’s no deficit; there’s nothing missing. Everything is just what it is, with no comparisons possible until we introduce interpretations. Whatever the moment brings is workable, because our state of mind is always workable. As Trungpa Rinpoche said, “There’s no such thing as an underdeveloped moment.”
WHAT IS FREEDOM?
In the West, we tend to think of freedom as an absence of limitations. In our culture, we may feel limited by our circumstances—our job, relationship, health, or financial situation. So we feel free when we get some time off from work and can go on a vacation or when we have plenty of money. When we feel healthy and our relationship doesn’t feel like a burden, we feel free. When we can have as ideal a life as possible, one that is perfectly free of limitations, when we can do whatever we want whenever we want, then—we think—we’ll be free.
Upon further examination, however, we find that this absence of limitations can only go so far. As embodied beings, we are always living a life of limitations. We have our bodies and their relative levels of health. We have our physical needs to sleep and eat. We are all aging and heading toward death. We have to deal with our physical and social environments. We have to deal with other people. For every capacity we have, there are thousands of things we can’t do. We’re never going to be without limitations.
Strangely enough, the Buddhist idea of freedom is completely the opposite—a more profound experience of freedom arises from an unconditional commitment to the truth of our experience, and our relative experience is basically a collection of limitations. So, rather than arranging our lives to have as few limitations as possible, we unconditionally commit to being embodied with, and being kind toward, whatever it is we experience. We intentionally explore the claustrophobia of our profoundly limited human lives. As we discover that this is not a problem, we start to relax our struggle with reality. We stop complaining about reality and even commit to it unconditionally, without reservations. We agree to stay present with whatever is happening—good, bad, or otherwise—to make space for all of it without bias.
We may begin to feel more relaxed, present, and confident, and we may gradually start to dissolve our self-absorption. When we’re struggling with life, trying to accomplish and avoid things in order to feel free, our attention tends to become very self-referential. When we feel that our survival is threatened, our awareness tends to contract. It’s a biological response. It’s very difficult to look at the flowers when we’re running from a bear. But as we become less and less preoccupied with resisting our limitations, less self-absorbed, our awareness relaxes and spontaneously becomes more expansive. Eventually it may even occur to us to ask, “What is aware of all this that I’m experiencing?”
THE LARGER CONTEXT OF AWARENESS
The fruitional approach is about realizing, over and over again, that everything arising in our experience is inseparable from awareness. Over and over, we experience the simultaneity of awareness with that which we think, feel, and sense. Awareness, as I’ve mentioned, has no bias. It’s simply open to whatever happens. As it stands, however, most of us are trying to put our thoughts, feelings, and experiences into a context of positivity. Of course, that’s very intelligent, as most of us prefer positive feelings and experiences to negative ones. But it’s not sustainable, given the way life works. What’s more, we begin to draw meaning from whether we can keep our life in a positive context. If I feel attractive, rich, and secure, I start to think, “I must be doing something right. I’m a good person. I’m okay. My life is going well.” Of course, the converse could also be true: “Oh, I’m feeling depressed. I just got a divorce. I’m not feeling very healthy. There must be something wrong with me.”
This bias toward positive emotions, feelings, and experiences is pervasive in Western culture, perhaps especially in America. Many people come to therapy or spiritual work with the unexamined goal of having a life free of disturbance—a “happy” life. Western therapy, as a historical, developmental view, tends to work with the idea that we have wounds or traumas that need to be healed before our lives can be positive. We’ve inherited issues from our parents and the experiences of our childhood that have to be cleared up before we can be free of negative feelings. Because we are identified with these circumstances, we believe that we need to improve them. Thus, we look for unconscious patterns that seem to be causing negative emotions and experiences, and we investigate them until they begin to loosen up. And we do, in fact, start to feel better, because some of the outdated limitations we’ve been living with have been removed. The “display” of our life is improved.
But from the Buddhist point of view, self-improvement is never going to give rise to freedom. It’s only going to give rise to an improved display of our experiencing. Improvement can, in itself, be very valuable. (In chapter 3, we talk about how this is helpful, even from a fruitional point of view.) Given the choice between satisfaction and dissatisfaction, good relationships and difficult ones, health and illness, most of us would certainly choose the more positive experiences. But a positive display cannot be continuall
y sustained, since life is incredibly complex, always changing, and not under our control. The content of our lives will sometimes be positive, sometimes negative. From the Buddhist point of view, freedom arises from a profound disidentification with any content—good or bad. When our circumstances and experiences are held in the context of open awareness, we are not captured or identified with them. We are no longer “inside” the content; rather, we are “witnessing” it within the context of awareness. With that shift in perception, we begin to have a choice about how to relate to our experience. The current display is revealed not to be the whole story; in fact, it’s not even “about us.” We talk about this shift as a move toward placing all of our experience in the larger context of awareness.