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?

Rob Burbea is a meditation teacher, musician, and author who teaches at Gaia House in Devon, England. Rob is the author of the groundbreaking meditation practice book entitled Seeing That Frees: Meditations on Emptiness and Dependent Arising. I personally love this book and I recommend it to anyone who really wants to investigate the deeper ends of meditation practice. Rob and I will discuss the book and the practices in the book in depth in this episode. 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.” Listen to Yuka Nakamura talks on Dharma Seed; here is a link to one recorded in 2021 with Bodhi College Mudita — The Joyful Heart (Duration 50:41) Please be courteous at all times. If you’re engaged in any kind of discussion, be as prepared to listen as you are to express yourself. Remember that there’s always a real person behind a computer/device screen, and they are likely quite different from you.That one, for me, for example, takes me automatically to a very, very deep level of unfabricating. For someone else, they might not find that argument convincing, or they might not be able to work it quite dexterously into meditation. Maybe something else works. But basically a rational argument has to be woven in to the present moment meditation with all that delicacy and subtlety, and then it can function really, really powerfully. ANTONIA DORTHEA SUMBUNDU has been practicing meditation for more than 30 years and has had the good fortune to practice and study with a number of great teachers in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition and Insight Meditation tradition. Originally trained as clinical psychologist, Antonia has had a long term interest in clinical applications of meditation. She has been teaching and lecturing on MBCT internationally for many years as a trainer and supervisor for Oxford Mindfulness Centre before shifting to teach meditation in a broader context and serving as a dharma teacher for an international meditation community. In 2010, she was awarded a Master of Studies in MBCT by the University of Oxford and in 2022 she completed the Bodhi College Dharma Teacher Training program. JENNY WILKS has practised in various Buddhist traditions since the late 1980s and has an MA in Indian religions. She has taught at Gaia House since 2008, as well as at the Barn Retreat in Devon, and for the Mindfulness Network. She trained in clinical psychology and has taught mindfulness-based approaches in healthcare settings. In recent years her practice has included exploration of deep ecology and nature-based approaches to psychosocial and spiritual well-being. Norman has written many books both as a poet and Zen Buddhist Priest: His latest poetry releases are; "Nature" (2021, Tuumba); "There was a clattering as..." (2021, Lavendar Ink) and "When You Greet Me I Bow: Notes and Reflections from a Life in Zen" (Shambhala, 2021).

Rob: Yeah. I can’t remember so much what’s in the book now; I think there’s a little bit of reconstruction in the book, but yes, I think so, when it gets into the more Vajrayāna practices. One way of conceiving what we’re doing with Vajrayāna or tantric practices – one way of conceiving it – is that one has realized or become quite skilled and adept at this kind of fading of perception, and one can become so skilled at it that it’s almost like it’s a gas pedal on a car; you can press more so that everything just completely fades out, or a little less, or a lot less. So you can kind of modulate where you are on what I call the spectrum of fading, or the spectrum of the fabrication of perception. One of the things you can do is, let’s say, put the gas pedal fairly far down, but not completely far down so that everything fades; you’re retaining an almost light or insubstantial sense of the perception of the body and self and the world of phenomena. What you have there is a very insubstantial, fluid but malleable perception. Then you can actually start shaping perception this way or that. 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). As someone who was a dear friend of Rob’s ( and have been since 1988, when we met at Berklee College of Music in Boston), I am here to share some personal reflections on his kindness, brilliance andgentleness. 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. Michael: Yeah. This is fascinating. You are preaching to the choir here of meta-rationality or metaconceptuality. We talk about that on the show quite a bit, particularly with David Chapman. I’m not sure if you’re familiar with his work, but he’s a Vajrayāna practitioner with quite a large body of work describing meta-rationality, which is essentially what you just described – being able to switch conceptual frameworks based on what’s most useful, most beautiful, most helpful, most whatever right now, and do that very fluidly.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. Rob was the first to admit that his teachings weren’t for everyone or even necessary. So long as there was eros, love, a movement of the soul, it doesn’t matter what you call it or whether you even know it’s there. He wasn’t trying to start a new religion. Yet for many people he voiced a crucial insight: that the profound teachings of emptiness give rise to the possibility of holding different perspectives on reality for different purposes and cultivating a range of qualities which enrich and deepen the journey of life. I don’t know how to reconcile the creative tensions between innovation and tradition. Maybe it’s always just a tension. However, I do know I’m grateful to Rob for his teachings and his way of teaching. They have expanded and enriched the way I practice and conceive of practice and I’m sure they have impacted many individuals and communities beyond Gaia House and beyond even the Buddhist Sangha. Christina Feldman's Talks given at Gaia House on 24.09.2013: Swimming Against the Tide (Duration 61:35) So I think partly in the process of working with these things and trying things out, and really just following the lead of the beauty of it and the sense of the liberation at different degrees of depth, it’s kind of like, what opened up at one depth or in one territory then made another door available, if you like, and I could walk through that one, or it became interesting, or it became possible. So things kind of built on each other to a certain extent. Because I was a little bit exposed to different streams of teaching, I also wanted to know how they related to each other, or were they just contradictory, et cetera.

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. You can access all of Rob's talks, videos, interviews and podcasts here: https://hermesamara.org/resources/all 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.CATHERINE McGEE has been teaching Insight Meditation at Gaia House and internationally since 1997. Her teaching emphasises working with perceptions of the body on the path of awakening and in the healing of the individual and collective crises of our times. She is an advisor to One Earth Sangha . Between 2014 and 2020 Catherine collaborated with Rob Burbea in shaping and teaching a Soulmaking Dharma. Apparently some people saw Rob’s teaching and even Rob as dangerous. On one level at least, that is surely correct. Rob exposed underlying views. Who among us can say they’ve never found it uncomfortable when our clinging to a teaching or a conception of practice is exposed? The Buddha himself was surely a dangerous man to be around for the same reason. But maybe Rob was dangerous in another sense also. In the West and in other parts of the world, the Dharma is finding new forms. Any form of practice is always particular, with particular institutions and ways of doing things, as well as a common language and broadly shared understanding of practice flowing from a lineage of teachers. The form is what defines a tradition and we love our traditions and quite rightly hold them precious. How will it be if we all start bringing in angels, unicorns and the Virgin Mary or whatever pops up in our imagination after a morning meditation? Pandaemonium! He would come to see me play - I had many more gigs and recordings and I think perhaps the direction I chose was a bit more practical and accessible than the music Rob was pursuing. He was interested in music that incorporated and explored the use of atonality, music that has no key centre at times, with melodic content that is hard to remember and not as groove oriented. His music was a bit challenging and over my head.” Michael: This is really interesting. You know, when we’re doing a more phenomenological deconstruction of, let’s say, a meditative object, it’s very often the case that it starts to kind of dissolve before the meditative gaze, right? It fades away or whatever, starts to vanish in one way or another. You seem to be describing something similar happening with this other way, with this analytical way of working. Do you get that same – I think you call it in the book a fading of perception?

SOPHIE BOYER has been practicing meditation for 20 years during her time providing nursing care. After years spent in hospices, she became more interested in exploring silent meditation retreats in Europe, and in the US and spent 2 years in Myanmar as a buddhist nun.I mention this as it is the best teaching on dhyana practice I’ve come across and I’m sure many of us would benefit from studying it. He gives teachings on all eight jhanas and connects them to various insight approaches. Stephen Batchelor's Talks at Gaia House on 24.07.2015: Instructions - Behold the Ceasing (Duration 34:23)