Chapter 1: Introduction to the 10 Fetters
The 10 Fetters
We assume that most people doing this course will be at least marginally familiar with the Fetters, but it's possible this will be the first introduction for some. Regardless of whether you are new to FetterWork, or have been practicing for years, it might be pertinent to clarify what we will be discussing over the coming weeks and months together.
This is also important since everyone likely comes from disparate backgrounds with varying conceptual understandings of what the 10 Fetters are, based on their source(s) of information about them. In short, the Fetters aren't the same thing to everyone.
We’re not going to go deeply into the history of the Fetters, especially since our formulation and way of working with them is rather different from some of the historical formulations.
In short, the concept of the 10 Fetters originated in Theravadan Buddhism. Depending on where the focus of the interpretation lay, they outline either the hindrances to becoming enlightened, (doubt, craving and aversion, conceit, restlessness, etc.) or the steps of insights one may have on the path from wandering in samsara, (being lost in delusion) to reaching nirvana or enlightenment.
There are multiple variations of the Fetters with some permutations placing certain Fetters in different locations. But this doesn’t need to be a scholarly discussion of all of the variations because we take a rather different approach to the Fetters, a practical one that integrates FetterWork into daily life.
Our Fetter model looks like this:
The 1st Fetter is our primary illusion of being a separate, inherently existing self. This has various different facets, which is why it can take so long for people to explore, get a feel for, and eventually see through it. The 1st Fetter encompasses all of our identification with thoughts, the body, and the narrative self. Essentially everything we think of as being "me" or "mine" gets addressed here. This also ties into long-standing beliefs about the self which need to be investigated and dispelled, such as the idea that we have free will, can make choices, claim total responsibility for anything, and instigate volitional action.
This is the fetter that most of us spend the most time investigating because it is foundational to how we experience ourselves and everyone else. It is ingrained in every aspect of our daily life, including our language ("I am hungry," "I'm decorating my house," etc.) and the very laws of society that reinforce each person's individuality and ability to act freely and responsibly. Most of us don't even know what it actually means to feel like a self, we just do, so that's generally the best place to start your investigation.
The 2nd Fetter is one that we work with much differently than others. Traditionally the 2nd Fetter dealt specifically with Doubt, but in our formulation, it also includes all of the identification with feelings and emotions that help to reinforce the First Fetter sense of self. When we work with the 2nd Fetter, we are going to need to encounter all of the shadow material that might never have been experienced or expressed. We might find that we need to turn to therapy, trauma work, bodywork, or other types of practices to get to the roots of the identification that this fetter represents.
When we work with the 2nd Fetter, we are asked to discover and question our limiting beliefs - those Toxic Starting Points that make us believe that we are a Shameful, Angry, Guilty, or Fearful person. It's why we feel that we’re perpetually either not good enough, or always too much. And of course it also addresses the Doubt that people on the awakening path so often experience before, during, and after having experienced a first shift of identity. We get to investigate all of the beliefs about why we feel the way that we do, and how we can approach our traumatic histories now in a way that allows all of that baggage to be acknowledged, felt, and released.
The 3rd Fetter is traditionally called attachment to Rites and Rituals. We also extend this to include all of those things that we do for a purpose. These habits and rituals are done mostly to distract us from needing to feel the uncomfortable emotions mentioned in the 2nd Fetter. (These distracting behaviors can be anything from Astrology to Guru-Worship to prayer to dieting or exercising to lose weight, or even becoming enlightened to escape the cycle of suffering, etc.)
The Foundational Triangle
In some traditions it is said that the first three fall, or are seen-through, all at once. We should take this opportunity to pause and discuss this a bit here.
As we said, in traditional formulations, the first three Fetters are Self-View, Doubt, and Clinging to Rites and Rituals. If our definition of the first three comes purely from within the Buddhist tradition, then this makes perfect sense.
You see through the First Fetter when you have an experiential insight, a moment of clarity, or feel a dropping away of the self that you have always taken to be "you". It might be subtle, or it might be a profound shift in what you take yourself to be, and how you believed the world to be presented. And due to that massive insight, you have now lost all Doubt about the Buddha’s teachings, and your ability to become awakened in this lifetime. You have no doubt about the veracity of your experience because it has been such a unique paradigm shift based in the Dharma. In this way, the first and second fetters have dropped together.
You then no longer need to cling to rites and rituals, because they are seen to be fruitless and irrelevant. There is no point in praying to an outside source, or performing ritualized fasting, making offerings in hopes of receiving blessings that could lead you to one day become awakened, because it is already happening. You have a newborn faith in your own ability to walk the path. And you see that there is no connection between the movements of the stars and planets and your aggregated perception of self.
In this way, we can say that all three Foundational Fetters have been seen through. And this is what is traditionally called becoming a Stream Enterer. You have set foot into the stream of awakening, and the current is going to take you with it, no matter what. Enlightenment is guaranteed, even if not in this lifetime.
As we said, we take a somewhat more expanded view of 2nd and 3rd Fetter. The way we work with 2nd Fetter, it involves not only Doubt regarding the Dharma, but also the Doubt that is persistent throughout your life. It also covers the traumas and emotional wounds that shape and mold our perception of ourselves and the world around us, and the Doubts that they create.
3rd Fetter also involves all of the things that we do for a purpose, mostly to distract from the discomfort inherent in living a life with uninvestigated emotional pain. As we said, these habits and rituals can even be things we generally consider to be beneficial or beyond reproach, like meditating to further your practice, changing your diet to prevent cancer or heart disease, or even seeking awakening to avoid rebirth or daily suffering.
The first three fetters are often deeply intertwined, and the reason why so many people struggle for decades to see through self. We will talk more about this in the lesson The Foundational Triangle. For now it's relevant to understand that so often it is our old traumas and emotional habits that we are still identified with that are keeping us bound into selfing, and thus also bound into suffering.
Without addressing these old limiting beliefs and painful places in the body that haven’t been felt in years, all we can do is bypass and pretend that none of it exists.
Which many do when they take on spirituality, non-duality or awakening as another belief system. It gets used as a convenient way to bypass the difficult and often uncomfortable shadow work which is an indispensable part of the awakening path. Ultimately this bypassing only works until the issues pop up in a new form (often as a physical ailment) which becomes unavoidable. We see this happen in people who have a strong conceptual understanding of non-duality, but who have not yet experienced the full embodied understanding that takes it out of the mind in a way that transforms their daily experience. To do this, we need to be available to feel and allow everything to be experienced.
It should be said though, that the stories that we are meeting in the 2nd Fetter are just that: stories.
They represent something metaphorically relevant to this moment, and we ignore them at our own risk. Seeing through the delusions of the Fetters is greatly facilitated by finding and releasing the emotional anchors that reinforce aspects of our identity. And these are the insights that might have been dismissed when we rely on a premature conceptual understanding of non-duality, and use it to indulge in spiritual bypassing. This can be summed up in a sentiment like: "There is no one here who could be suffering, so I don't need to do anything. I'm beyond that."
The 4th and 5th Fetter are two sides of the same coin. They are respectively Cravings and Aversions, Wants and Don’t-Wants, Desires and Reactivity. In the 4th, we investigate not just why we crave something, but whether we even can crave something! What is craving?
And in the 5th we work with reactivity: do we need to deflect from uncomfortable sensations and thoughts? What does it actually mean to ‘not want’ something?
Our habitual reactions like anger and boredom, and our various addictions to substances and activities all get addressed in these fetters.
Some people experience a reduction of activity in these during the honeymoon period after seeing through self, but they inevitably come back without recognition and further investigation. If you are still getting irritated by Facebook posts, think Christmas is a particularly stressful time of year, or if the sound of your partner’s chewing makes you want to storm out of the room, then there’s some identification left to be investigated. 4th and 5th Fetter deal specifically with that type of identification.
The 6th Fetter is traditionally known as Attachment to Form. This is generally a much more fun Fetter to explore, especially after the first five. Working with the 6th Fetter is like entering a carnival funhouse. All of your perceptions start to come into question. Can you really trust your senses? Does the world really exist the way you think it does?
The most prominent aspect to the 6th Fetter is the Subject-Object Illusion. "Even though there might not be the self that I believed in before, there is still something here which is separate and apart from everything else." In other words: "I can tell that I am not that tree." This is a more subtle "me" than in the 1st Fetter, but still an aspect of identity that creates and experiences the concepts of space and distance.
Seeing through this fetter is the core experience of Non-Duality.
Again, some people do experience this one temporarily falling away during the honeymoon period after seeing through the 1st Fetter, but it generally needs to be specifically addressed once the honeymoon period has subsided to solidify and deepen the insights once the world has returned to “normal.” Finding the lack of separation between the one who seems to be hearing, and the actuality of the raw sound itself, or between the seer and the seen, opens up a deeper insight to allow us to let go of another persistent identification that has yet to be acknowledged.
The 7th Fetter pairs with the 6th Fetter, and is traditionally called ‘Attachment to the Formless’. In some formulations it is the considered to be the illusion of Perception, the idea that there is anything separating sensations from the recognition of the sensations. In other words, is there an actual faculty of perception that somehow stands between the visual appearance of a flower and the perception or knowing of that flower? We tend to deal with this in the 6th Fetter since it coincides so well with the illusion of seer and the seen. If there is no seer separate from the flower, we can at the same time investigate as to whether there is anything but the raw impression of a flower which is itself self-illuminated.
We won't go deeper into that here as it starts to sound rather heady. We approach this fetter differently. We discuss how it is at the root of our ability to make something out of nothing. In other words, what actually exists when you don't think about it? How much of your experience of anything is inherent to the object itself, and how much is your overlay based on your particular conditioning?
This fetter also deals with our illusory belief in Time, and how our perception of it, and everything else, sculpts our reality from moment to moment. So if you still feel stressed about not having enough time or money, or feel that Direct Experience is the most raw your experience can be, then this is the Fetter to look into.
The 8th Fetter, traditionally known as Conceit, is also referred to as the "I Am" sense. It is the subtlest form of the self-feeling, the one that Advaita Vedanta and popular non-dual teachers often point to as a goal, a place to rest. It’s the wonderful, spacious, expansive feeling of being a “Big I Am,” “Cosmic Consciousness,” “One-With-God,” “Divinity,” “Awareness,” etc. Seeing through this identification is the full experience of the Buddhist Anatta. This is the end of all identification of self.
The 8th Fetter is a wonderful place to be, and most people would prefer to stay here for the rest of their life. And some do, which is fine if that’s what works for that person. For those who have had difficult lives, or have had a lack of love and connectedness early in life, it can feel like the reward that they have been seeking for decades.
But there is still identification in that space, (which again is fine, there is no moral failing in remaining here!). For those who want to see what life is like free from all identification, then this too will eventually be seen through.
The Fetter 9 is traditionally considered to be the hindrance of Restlessness. In some formulations of the Fetters this is seen as a subtle, but very uncomfortable final restlessness that comes about when we encounter the realities of impermanence, and that life is inherently not here to be satisfactory in the way that our little Ego would like for it to be.
However, when we encounter Restlessness, we refer people back to either 2nd, 4th or 5th Fetter, depending on the root of it. There is no place for Restlessness to exist when the self has been completely dissolved.
If you are feeling Restlessness due to an unconscious reaction to a current situation or thought, then the body is responding with a hormonal cocktail to urge you into some sort of evasive action. (ie. being in a large crowd, small elevator, or having ruminating thoughts about past situations or future concerns.) This restlessness is likely being caused by an old trauma or pattern of belief that is still calling out for acknowledgment, acceptance, and love. Employ 2nd Fetter tools.
If you are feeling Restless due to a resistance to this moment, that is a 5th Fetter investigation to check if we are still creating alternate universes where things are supposed to be better than they currently are, either in some specific, or undefined way. (ie. wanting to get up from meditating because of mild discomfort or “boredom”, impatience or irritation about the behavior of others, an inability to sit with no distractions, etc.)
There is also a very important inquiry opportunity here to see how exactly we are translating this series of typically subtle vibrations in the body into something called “Restlessness”. Does “Restlessness” exist?
The positive side of the 9th Fetter in the way that we work with it is the experience of Flow. Of life simply “life-ing” without any attachment to an outcome. It is here that we might see through the concepts of Synchronicity and Divine Intervention and other types of metaphysical conceptual world views, and instead feel that everything is an ocean of interconnectivity. Everything simply is in a way that precludes our needing to think about it. We simply move as one part of the whole. It is possible, however, to get locked into yet another belief here (ie. having gone from a belief in a self to a new belief in no-self) which leads us to the final fetter.
Finally The 10th Fetter is Ignorance. This may begin as a felt experience of discomfort when we have the clear recognition that we can’t know anything. It's like the ground has been pulled out from under our feet, and there is absolutely no place to land.
But work with this fetter ends with the visceral contentment that comes from fully understanding that we can never know anything at all, and that we don’t need to in order to be free from suffering. The intellect has never succeeded in making us thoroughly peaceful and content. And it never will. Instead, we need to let go. Release the striving to learn, to know, to understand with the rational mind, and instead float without struggling in the sea of ambiguity. In that way, this ambiguity is its own freedom. This is how common Ignorance transforms from a delusional hindrance into the liberating Wisdom of Ignorance: All we know is that we can never know anything for sure. And that’s just perfect.
