Cessation
by Culadasa John Yates
The
Mind-System model and unification process help us understand one of
the most profound Insight experiences, the cessation
event. A
cessation event is where unconscious sub-minds remain tuned in and
receptive to the contents of consciousness, while at the same time,
none of them project any content into consciousness. Then,
consciousness ceases—completely. During that period, at the level
of consciousness there is a complete cessation of mental fabrications
of any kind—of the illusory, mind-generated world that otherwise
dominates every conscious moment. This, of course, also entails a
complete cessation of craving, intention, and suffering. The only
information that tuned in sub-minds receive during this event is the
fact of a total absence.
What makes this the most
powerful of all Insight experiences is what happens in the last few
moments of consciousness leading up to the cessation. First, an
object arises in consciousness that would normally produce craving.
It can be almost anything. However, what happens next is quite
unusual: the mind doesn’t respond with the habitual craving and
clinging. Rather, it fully understands the object from the
perspective of Insight: as a mental construct, completely “empty”
of any real substance, impermanent, and a cause of suffering. This
profound realization leads to the next and final moment of complete
equanimity, in which the shared intention of all the unified
sub-minds is to not respond. Because nothing is projected into
consciousness, the cessation event arises. With cessation, the
tuned-in sub-minds simultaneously realize that everything appearing
in consciousness is simply the product of their own activity. In
other words, they realize that the input they’re accustomed to
receiving is simply a result of their own fabricating activities.
This has a dramatic effect. The sub-minds of the discriminating
mind
have the Insight that everything ever known, including the Self, was
nothing but a fabrication of the mind itself. The sub-minds of the
sensory
mind
have a slightly different Insight: the only kind of information that
ever appears in the mind that isn’t purely mind-generated is the
input coming to them directly from the sense organs.
If the
sub-minds are receptive but there’s nothing to receive, can a
cessation event be consciously recalled afterward? It all depends on
the nature of the shared intention before the cessation occurred. If
the intention of all the tuned in sub-minds was to observe objects of
consciousness, as with popular “noting” practices, all that’s
subsequently recalled is an absence, a gap. After all, if every
object of consciousness ceases, and there’s no intention for the
sub-minds to observe anything else, then nothing gets imprinted in
memory. However, if the intention was to be metacognitively aware of
the state and activities of the mind, we would remember having been
fully conscious, but not conscious of anything. We would recall
having a pure
consciousness experience(PCE),
or an experience of consciousness
without an object
(CWO).
To be clear, there is no actual “experience” of
“consciousness without an object” during the cessation
event, nor could there possibly be. That experience, like any other,
is a construct of the mind, and in this case is generated after
the cessation event has already ended. How the memory of a
cessation event is interpreted retrospectively takes many forms,
depending on the views and beliefs held by the person whose mind is
doing the interpreting. Thus, the cessation event itself is not a
mental construct, but the subsequent interpretations are entirely
constructed.
Regardless of what does or doesn’t imprint in
memory, every sub-mind tuned in to consciousness during cessation
must assimilate the event into its own representation of reality. As
with any Insight experience, the new information forces a
reprogramming of how all future experiences are interpreted and
responded to. Realizing that all phenomenal experience, including the
Self, are mere mental constructs, and therefore “empty” of any
real substance, radically transforms how the mind functions. We
understand, more clearly than ever before, craving and suffering as
the grasping after mere mental constructs—and the more sub-minds
are tuned in during the event, the stronger that understanding will
be. Of course, it’s not that hard to acquire a conceptual grasp of
these truths. Many have done so. But only Insight can establish this
understanding at a deep, intuitive level.
The transformative
power of a cessation event depends on how unified the mind was.
Unification determines the overall size of the “audience” of
sub-minds receptive to events in consciousness. Only the parts of the
mind-system that were tuned in during the cessation are affected. If
the mind were
completely
unified, then every sub-mind within the mind system would be affected
simultaneously, and there would be a complete Awakening of the entire
mind-system. [Footnote: nirodha-samāpatti]
However,
if the mind was only partially
unified, there are two possibilities: no transformation, or
incomplete transformation. This is because a certain degree of
unification is needed during the event to reach enough sub-minds to
make any tangible, lasting difference to the whole mind-system. With
too little unification, a person may have a very memorable peak
experience, but with little or no lasting effect. However, if the
critical threshold is reached, the second possibility is an
incomplete
transformation of the mind-system, limited to those sub-minds that
happened to be tuned in at the time. Complete transformation must
await subsequent cessations or other Insight experiences that have a
similar impact on the remaining parts of the mind-system. This
incremental process of transformation explains why Awakening is
traditionally described as occurring in a series of stages.
:)
Cessation refers to ceasing of notions and impressions, or ceasing of
all self-based mind processes. It is discussed and described
everywhere in both buddhist and hindu scriptures. In Sanskrit words
such as nirvana, nirodha and nirodha samapatti are used to refer to
this experience which actually is an opposite of experience because
cessation is rather ceasing of all kinds of experiences. 
