In conceiving form… vedāna… perception… fabrications… consciousness, one is bound by Māra (Death). By not conceiving form… vedanā… perception… fabrications… consciousness one is freed…
-the Buddha
Defabrication is a driving force in the pacification of mental construction (thoughts and the concepts they are comprised of). The word ‘concept’ doesn’t even really take it far enough as I mean things like the ability to reason at all, to feel one knows anything other than that ‘stuff is happening’, the understanding that we are a self, that time is passing, that space exists… defabrication can encompass the collapse of all of these.
The process also corresponds to moving from more contraction or restriction to more expansion or openness, or moving from more solid to more liquid and then airy.
The achievement of complete defabrication results in a cessation (fruition) as there is momentarily simply no more experience being constructed.
Yet even before cessations, stream entry and further stages of awakening we can practice defabricating to reduce the construction of experience. This enables us to then devote more of our resources to observation (or ‘being’) rather than ‘doing’ and helps us to get a better grip on the nature of our experience. We are more equanimous to the extent we have defabricated.
So defabrication can be a fuel for our insight fire and help us make progress in our meditative development, yet the additional bonus is simply that the more defabricated experience is the better it feels.
Today we’ll explore some ways we can become better defabricators.