The Ninth Fetter
My Experiences
When starting to explore the ninth fetter, what immediately struck me was that, with all sense of “I” and identity gone, there was still a tremendous amount of thinking going on. In general, the thinking was an attempt to answer the question: “how does this strike me?” in response to essentially everything that might happen in daily experience. By asking that question, it felt as though I was still baby-sitting myself, even during times when nothing in particular was happening. It was simply a deeply-ingrained habit, by which I would try to somehow keep tabs on what was happening.
Without any sense of “I”, I still felt the tendency to want to find what felt like a landing place of some sort, which the belief in “I” had provided. And yet, all I could do is “abide” in complete non-duality, without anything as a foundation or reference point. I realized how I very much missed the perceived safety and security of an identity.
Life was still happening as it always had, and I continued to recognize and engage with the people and things around me. I no longer had the sense that the mind was manifesting all of it; instead, it was all simply happening. However, I was still experiencing agitation, and a subtle push and pull at what was happening. I noticed that if I sat quietly and looked for “me”, not only did I continue to not find anyone, but it served to calm everything down, perhaps because it was a reminder that there is no one that needs to be catered to any longer.
When it seemed time to press forward, I could only ask myself: OK, what’s left? I didn’t have an answer at first, but knew there was more to be done nonetheless. Though I was inclined to meditate, doing any sort of inquiry with my eyes shut no longer worked: I needed access to normal daily experience, by which there would be something happening which affected me.
I eventually realized that there was still the belief that there was something to know, by which I could reliably predict what will happen next. Because of this belief, there was the urge to prove that I could in fact know, but I could no longer find any particular thing that could be known. That led to an obvious sense of restlessness, as if there was “something wrong”, and the urge to somehow compensate for that inability to find something to know. All I could do, though, was to think about it - there was nothing I could actually do about it.
The question then became: why does the urge to know have to lead to any thoughts? Seeing that there is in fact no reason whatsoever allowed my dependence on thinking to gradually fall away, because I saw that I didn’t have to think in order to navigate daily life. It might be said that I started to fully trust that life would continue just fine without the intervention of thoughts. The urge to cast about for something reliable and predictable was more and more clearly a pointless mental exercise, and no longer triggered the usual a stream of thoughts. I realized that this underlying urge to know was what made all that thinking and casting about seem necessary. My daily “practice’ was simply to notice when the casting-about was occurring, and to see whether it was needed.
As a result, about two months after the eighth fetter disappeared, I finally gave up the casting-about effort altogether. There was no singular “aha!” moment: it was more a matter of there being a gradual decrease in this subtle reactivity, until I noticed that it had been several days since the urge to know something had manifested as this mental “casting about”. As a result, the urge to “know” no longer had an outlet or application (such as a “me”), and also no longer had a vehicle (thought) which made it seem that there was any point to cast about in the first place. Sure, I still wanted to have reliability and predictability in life, but I no longer felt I had to DO something about the fact that I didn’t have them.
At the beginning of working with the ninth fetter, the habitual casting about struck me as “oh, this is what life is like”, which for many decades was in fact the case Once I disconnected the unease from all of its outlets, however, that casting about simply seemed awkward and unnecessary.
Compared to every other shift to that point, the falling away of the ninth fetter was remarkably uneventful. I knew that the underlying tendency and belief around seeking reliability and predictability was still there, but also that there was nothing I needed to do, or even could do, about it. It then allowed access to the underlying tendency and belief themselves.
Without any sense of “I”, I still felt the tendency to want to find what felt like a landing place of some sort, which the belief in “I” had provided. And yet, all I could do is “abide” in complete non-duality, without anything as a foundation or reference point. I realized how I very much missed the perceived safety and security of an identity.
Life was still happening as it always had, and I continued to recognize and engage with the people and things around me. I no longer had the sense that the mind was manifesting all of it; instead, it was all simply happening. However, I was still experiencing agitation, and a subtle push and pull at what was happening. I noticed that if I sat quietly and looked for “me”, not only did I continue to not find anyone, but it served to calm everything down, perhaps because it was a reminder that there is no one that needs to be catered to any longer.
When it seemed time to press forward, I could only ask myself: OK, what’s left? I didn’t have an answer at first, but knew there was more to be done nonetheless. Though I was inclined to meditate, doing any sort of inquiry with my eyes shut no longer worked: I needed access to normal daily experience, by which there would be something happening which affected me.
I eventually realized that there was still the belief that there was something to know, by which I could reliably predict what will happen next. Because of this belief, there was the urge to prove that I could in fact know, but I could no longer find any particular thing that could be known. That led to an obvious sense of restlessness, as if there was “something wrong”, and the urge to somehow compensate for that inability to find something to know. All I could do, though, was to think about it - there was nothing I could actually do about it.
The question then became: why does the urge to know have to lead to any thoughts? Seeing that there is in fact no reason whatsoever allowed my dependence on thinking to gradually fall away, because I saw that I didn’t have to think in order to navigate daily life. It might be said that I started to fully trust that life would continue just fine without the intervention of thoughts. The urge to cast about for something reliable and predictable was more and more clearly a pointless mental exercise, and no longer triggered the usual a stream of thoughts. I realized that this underlying urge to know was what made all that thinking and casting about seem necessary. My daily “practice’ was simply to notice when the casting-about was occurring, and to see whether it was needed.
As a result, about two months after the eighth fetter disappeared, I finally gave up the casting-about effort altogether. There was no singular “aha!” moment: it was more a matter of there being a gradual decrease in this subtle reactivity, until I noticed that it had been several days since the urge to know something had manifested as this mental “casting about”. As a result, the urge to “know” no longer had an outlet or application (such as a “me”), and also no longer had a vehicle (thought) which made it seem that there was any point to cast about in the first place. Sure, I still wanted to have reliability and predictability in life, but I no longer felt I had to DO something about the fact that I didn’t have them.
At the beginning of working with the ninth fetter, the habitual casting about struck me as “oh, this is what life is like”, which for many decades was in fact the case Once I disconnected the unease from all of its outlets, however, that casting about simply seemed awkward and unnecessary.
Compared to every other shift to that point, the falling away of the ninth fetter was remarkably uneventful. I knew that the underlying tendency and belief around seeking reliability and predictability was still there, but also that there was nothing I needed to do, or even could do, about it. It then allowed access to the underlying tendency and belief themselves.