Hi, it’s me again, with another info dump. One thing that I value in good meditation instruction is using plain old words to convey what’s actually going on. I used to be really into researching cool Pali words to flex and I loved getting all technical. But it’s not practical and it’s not fun (it’s actually very boring!).

This is a continuation from my last post. So, we now know meditation is about being happy (I’m using the word “happy” to convey some positive mental quality, adjacent to but not necessarily how we conventionally experience happiness). That’s the root of it all — we’re here learning emptiness and impermanence to realise that yes you can change for the better today. And that happiness is a choice. This is why insights are critical — without having direct knowledge of experience and how our body-mind curates this experience while seemingly forgetting it, we can never drastically undo lots of in-grained instinctual and habitual conditioning to make us and those around us more wholesome.

Fetters

A fetter is a nasty bit of conditioning that we could say are rooted in some sort of instinctual patterning in our body-mind. They work like this:

• I experience X —> it’s what I wanted —> I’ll need more of X —> Now there’s no X —> Suffering —> That’s not what I wanted —> I’ll get some X —> But X is unreachable —> Suffering —> Finally, I got some more X —> Suffering from diminishing returns —> Etc.,
• I experience X —> It’s not what I wanted —> I need to get away from X —> But X is still around —> Suffering —> That’s not what I wanted —> I’ll try getting away from X even harder —> But X is still around —> Suffering —> I’ll try harder by ignoring it —> Diminishing returns from ignoring —> Suffering
• And so the wheel turns. Once we start to get X, we need more of it. More of it means we didn’t have enough of it, meaning we gotta get even more. Sound familiar? Like an addiction. But obviously, at a deeper subtler level than outright harmful substance abuse. Suffering makes us unhappy, stress-filled, and makes us tense. Liberation of suffering leads to happiness, calmness, and relaxation. Simple as.
• Fetters are like algorithms. You input values into an algorithm to make it work. No fetter is fundamentally about a certain thing, but certain things work according to a fetter to produce unhappiness/suffering.

At its core, a fetter turns a momentary want into a need.

1. Identity view: I turn a view of myself into a need to defend, use my energy for, and organise around. This causes unhappiness because it causes us to be very reactive, “No I’m not greedy like Karen said, I’m actually so giving” you repeat to yourself in the bathroom recalling a distressing conversation from 4 years ago. Or this pain in your leg bothers you so much because awareness is embodied in that aspect of your experience, so it causes you to get annoyed and unhappy. That’s not fun. In nondual lingo, we can say that the mind clings to “this side” as being completely separate from “that side”.
2. Conviction: you believe that there’s no way to change, that liberation from suffering is not possible. This is a limiting belief in your ability to change and to become more wholesome. So you get to experience it yourself. Things really do change. No sensation is a self. Everything is always in flux. Sensations can be suffering if we let them. That means there is a choice to make about my happiness in this moment.
3. Rites and Rituals: you believe that there’s a set of pre-determined formulae that guarantee happiness or liberation from suffering. There is no set or fixed anything. So no, burning that candle won’t help you suffer less. You must directly work with the conditions that sustain your suffering. You experience this first-hand and you’re happier, realising that ending suffering is more of a creative exploration of being than some rule-based procedure. That goes for life in general too (e.g., social norms are rites/rituals)
4. Greed: you believe there’s a bunch of things that guarantee happiness intrinsically. You realise there is no intrinsic happiness in any sensation. Instead, there is only happiness in liberation from this fetter. Because, ultimately, the things you thought were make you happy were actually just a choice made a long time ago that we forgot. Ending the fetter itself removes the very condition, revealing the deeper sense of happiness behind the greed itself. Think of a dog chasing its tail, only to realise it was a part of its body the whole time. In nondual lingo, you’d say that “this side” wants to merge and unite with “that side”.
5. Aversion: you believe there are a bunch of things that make you unhappy, and getting away from them makes you happy. This makes us unhappy because we’re running from a thing that’s fundamentally inescapable, the fetter itself. This was a choice made long ago that is reinforced around certain objects. Once we realise there’s no escaping these things, the fetter drops away. Happiness becomes a choice — accept what is and understand its unpleasantness. Think of a man running away from his shadow realising that it was his the whole time. In nondual lingo, you’d say that “this side” wants to decouple from and push away “that side”.
6. Material Lust: you believe there’s an objective position in spacetime where “you” exist. This causes subtle unhappiness in us because we’d like to think our subjectivity is real for us in some significant way. We’ll say “my opinion is just my perspective”, but that is still founded on needing there to be a basis from which a sense of you operates in the tangible world. When we realise that all things change and no sensation in our experience is a self, we can appreciate that even our subjective experience of whatever is happening is not foundational. In nondual lingo you’d say that the mind clings to a side be it “this” or “that”, or better said, the mind clings to the belief that “this side” is relative to “that side”.
7. Immaterial Lust: you believe there’s an objective set of ideas that exist. This causes subtle unhappiness in us because we’d like to think that there really is a thing that our ideas refer to in the world. And so we go endlessly trying to hoard more and more ideas, with better definitions, trying to make sure we’re up to date, instead of experiencing the thing. This makes us unhappy because no idea stays the same forever, information changes, etc… We then liberate this fetter when we’re sure that there is a world of ideas out there, meaning is made to the world, but it is just as subjective (changing/empty) as the experience of the world itself. In nondual lingo, you’d say that the mind clings to the notion of sides existing.
8. Conceit: you believe there is some objective idea of yourself. This is like a self-concept. This makes us subtlety unhappy because we were okay to say there’s no solid identity like the 1st fetter, but the 8th is an idea, which is safer and more secluded. We have this idea that there’s some fixed notion of “I am…” and that makes us unhappy for largely the same reasons as the 7th — ideas and information change. We do stuff that surprises us all the time, we get surprised because we had a fixed idea of what we’re supposed to be. The momentary want is predictability over our lives which turns into a need that gets reinforced over time. In nondual lingo, you’d say that the mind clings to “this side” as an idea independent of sides.
9. Restlessness: you believe there is some endpoint. To whatever it is you’re doing, not just the spiritual life itself, but whatever. The wheel keeps spinning with or without your consent. This makes us unhappy because we get glimpses of things being done, “ahh I’ve attained the happiness, now I can rest”. But everything changes, meaning this endpoint is just a new beginning. And so the whole thing keeps going. We get unhappy because we’re restlessly looking for a time or place to finally say “yep I’m done, this is it” for anything — the bills, food, exercise, music taste, spirituality, learning, etc… This is an entire life thing with which we need to make peace. In nondual lingo, you’d say that the mind clings to notions of being better or worse on “this side” than stuff on “that side”.
10. Ignorance: the root cause of our unhappiness. We forgot or suppressed the memory that we made choices a long time ago that made us unhappy. And this makes us unhappy — “why or why didn’t I take the blue pill?” Because now we see that it is our responsibility. In overcoming the fetter, we’re resolving to set the record straight, going headlong into wholesomeness. We realise it is a choice to make. True liberation is taking responsibility for this Karma we’ve created and that we’re creating now. Because everything is impermanent we can change or re-program these choices we made. And because of no-self, these choices we made are not us, they’re not a core part of us, making them not a burden, but a creative exercise of our free will to understand, accept, appreciate, and liberate. In nondual lingo, you’d say that the mind was getting caught up in sides, the mind assumed there were sides to begin with, and even if there are sides, is that a problem?

Paths?

Cessations? After stream entry, I wouldn’t trust cessations to lead to reliable changes.

I have no idea how to diagnose middle/later paths other than to recommend people pressure test their claims against the world in relatively high-stress environments. Fetters are obvious to see that they’re gone, there are just huge gaping holes in our emotional experience when something should get us recoiling has us neutral or, better yet, smiling, in response. If the fetter is an algorithm, having inputs means nothing, because there’ll be no output, and nowhere to input the data. It just scatters into the winds of time.

Also, notice how I put in nondual lingo for each fetter. I think there are no fundamental differences in the stuff we’re working on, and everyone needs to find a language that works for them. A guy like Ingram will want you to talk about all this phenomenology and awareness collapsing into transcendental other-self duality mumbo jimbo, but that’s just one of many yardsticks on which to measure your progress and work.

What the heck to do?

I’ve just dumped a lot of thoughts, but how can we reduce them into manageable chunks that we can work into our lives and practice? Firstly, have fun. Meditation should be fun. If you can find a way to change from a striving mindset to a thriving mindset, you’ll cruise through all the work.

I think one thing that helped me was writing out a little cheat sheet for the fetters and recognizing them as they happened in daily life. That really helped, because recognising and noticing these naughty mindstates is half the battle. Find things that trigger you. Find things that set you off. Find things that make you want to turn away. Find uncomfortable situations and see how you react in them, paying attention to your body and mind. Try strong determination sitting to get intimate with aversion. Try reading some news article which challenges your view of the world and then notice how your body-mind reacts to it (this is actually a very powerful practice for me).

Fetters in our meditation practise is about recognising the obvious signs and working to accept them, appreciate, gladden, and liberate. Find any technique that lets you do this. I personally found the best results with Anapanasati, but I like that more basic stripped-down meditation. But I also found a lot of value in Tantra at certain parts, and I liked certain deity symbolic representations of certain issues I was dealing with. I also enjoyed non-dual stuff, and still do. Remember the 3rd fetter? Don’t turn any technique or the Path of Insight into another procedure to follow or ritualistically turn to in order to ease your pain. If there’s some part of your experience in need of being experienced but your technique says to ignore it, 80% of the time I’d say go on the detour and learn rather than box yourself in.

Feel free to question, criticise, or complain.

Be happy