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What was that lyric from The Verve?
Imagined the future, I woke up with a scream
I was buying feelings from a vending machine.
Except the vending machine is really our phones, of course, and this is actually nice to see.
We’re told that Bāhiya had no contact with Buddhism prior to receiving this teaching. In fact, the story goes that he walked across half of India immediately before hearing these words and died, fully accomplished, soon afterwards. I used to find this context a little baffling, but I suspect it’s the tradition’s way of hermetically sealing this teaching. Rhetorically, it says, “This is entirely sufficient by itself. The pith.”
Image from Ud 1.10 in Anālayo, The Signless and the Deathless.
Atammayatā: an intriguing quality mentioned in a handful of suttas. I’m not 100% sure what it means. Possibly it’s another term for the practice of non-identification: it literally means “not made of that”. It’s described by some as “non-concoction”. I’ve heard Ajahn Amaro refer to it as an awareness that is free of clinging, in which conditioned phenomena have no place to land. Here’s a quote from Francesco Sferra https://www.academia.edu/5706097/Atammayatā_in_the_Pāli_Nikāyas_2007c_
“'This [samādhi] is peaceful and sublime, gained by full tranquilization, and attained to unification; it is not reined in and checked by forcefully suppressing [the defilements].'”
In Mark Edsel Johnson’s book, Tranquil Wisdom Insight Meditation. Seems that we’re talking about a relaxed and gathered state that relaxes craving. Not an excluding concentration that tries to block craving out. The latter approach being the old yogic techniques. At least, that’s how I make sense of it.
