Explaining the 10 Fetters Model
The entire Path To #Enlightenment is outlined by the 10 Fetters Model 101. I’ve added the corresponding path if you are familiar with the 4-path model. you drop all 10 fetters, you are liberated.
The root of all suffering comes down to believing three things that ultimately don't exist. Now when I say “things don’t exist”, what I mean is that they are empty of inherent existence, perceived to be mental constructs.
1. Substantiality - Believing anything to have an inherent existence. This includes the body, mind, space, time, feelings, objects in the world, thoughts, or even awareness itself. No self ultimate doesn’t exist either because the feeling of no self arises only through the feeling of a self.
2. Permanence - The belief that anything should be everlasting. But don’t reify impermanence into a truth either because permanence and impermanence can only exist through each other. Non-duality transcends both.
3. Satisfactoriness - believing that we should always feel good and life should always go our way. If not now, we cling to the fantasy that things will eventually get better in the future. The belief in a satisfactory future presupposes a dissatisfied present. Neither exists. As you take your inquiry or Vipassana practice to the extreme, the same way that you can never locate a self, substantiality, permanence, and satisfactoriness simply do not exist except for concepts and beliefs you made up in your mind.
I’m going to briefly describe the 10 Fetters Model.
Fetters simply means beliefs and identification, which creates solidity, and contractions in the body-mind.
The first 3 Fetters
They are about seeing through the separate self. You can find tons of information about this on YT, so I won’t go into the details here.
After the first 3 fetters are dropped, you have your first awakening. Some traditions call it “Stream Entry”. But this is only about 5 percent of the whole thing.
After the remainder 10 fetters are dropped, you reach Liberation and the end of suffering.
Now the reason why seeing through the self is Awakening 101 (the first three Fetters) is that the rest of the beliefs, identification, and perceptual filters are all attached to the mega belief of the “I”, and these latter fetters cannot fall away if the separate self hasn’t been seen through.
The first 3 fetters is about seeing through the separate self. You can find tons of information about this on Youtube and other popular blog, so I won’t go into the details here.
After the first 3 fetters are dropped, you have your first awakening. Some traditions call it “Stream Entry”. But this is only about 5 percent of the whole thing.
After the remainder 10 fetters are dropped, you reach Liberation and the end of suffering.
The 4th and 5th Fetters
Fetters 4 and 5 are Desire and Ill Will, which are the constant pushing and pulling you experience in daily life. The “I want this, I don’t want that” bs.
If you’re working with triggers, you’re working with fetters 4 and 5. (2nd Path).
The 6th Fetter
The 6th Fetter is the belief in subject/object duality. Believing in the existence of form or the notion that the physical world “out there” has an independent reality apart from the subject “in here”.
Dissolving fetters 6 to 8 is where things get really trippy and interesting.
It is during this phase that perceptual and physical shifts start to happen in a very direct and dramatic fashion. Your moment-to-moment, walking-around experience radically changes.
After the 6th fetter is dissolved, everything becomes holographic and without substance. The whole world is breathing and vibrating and everything is morphing into each other. When you walk it’s just the universe walking. Emptiness rolling on. And your own body would be indistinguishable from every other hologram moving around in the world all on its own. (3rd path)
Everything fundamental about the world you once thought to have an inherent existence, like distance, space, linear time, body, mind, and the physical world starts to dissolve. Things we take for granted that make up the world starts to collapse as we begin to perceive them as constructors of the mind.
Now we’re moving away from trauma and character work by dissolving perceptual filters and solidity at the “physical” and sensorial levels. So you’re going deeper into the subtler levels of the psyche to remove the fetters.
The 7th Fetter
The 7th fetter is the dissolution of the Form vs Formless duality. Even after the 6th fetter is dissolved, and the world becomes a boundless, limitless hologram, there is still a very subtle sense of subject in the center of experience that is piercing the formless.
After completely emptying out the subject, the distinction between emptiness and form completely collapses.
The world dissolves into formlessness while simultaneously bursting into form from moment to moment as they cancel each other out. Reality is neither something nor nothing.
There is no longer anything inside that you can point to and say “This is where perception occurs”, With the perceiver gone, so goes perception. Phenomena appear and disappear out of nowhere.
The 8th Fetter
The 8th Fetter is the attachment to the “I Am”. When you hear Rupert Spira talking about the “Godmind” or Ramana Maharshi talking about abiding in the “I Am-ness” of Awareness or recognizing the Big Self, that’s the 8th fetter, which is paired up with the first fetter of the small self. If the self hasn’t been completely seen through, it’s going to morph and latch itself onto anything, even higher states of consciousness or Awareness, and create a new Self out of it.
Before the 8th Fetter is dissolved, there is still a very subtle sense of “I exist”. Although by this point, it’s almost impossible to pinpoint where this self is, except to say that it’s kinda like the after smell of a shirt. Something like a sense of self still lingers like an itch you can’t find or scratch. It’s almost like experiencing a phantom limb.
After the 8th Fetter is dissolved, even the identification with Enlightenment or God Consciousness falls away.
You go beyond the “I Am” that Ramana Maharshi asked you to abide in. A lot of people who are very far into the Path are stuck here because they can’t let go of their spiritual egos.
And since some of your deepest conditionings cannot surface before the sense of existence is completely fallen away, people who choose to teach without dropping the 8th fetter can become very cheeky spiritual kunts! And they begin to buy into their own delusions as special beings. Creating missions like “waking up the world”.
This is why the 8th Fetter is also called “Conceit”. If you still think you are in any way better (or worse) than other people, more enlightened than other spiritual kunts, you haven’t reached the end.
It’s only after completely accepting the notion that you are absolutely indistinguishable from dogs and cats, tree branches, other humans and AI, or even God and demons can you truly be free.
This is when things truly start to get weird and a profound sense of peace takes place. Gone (or should I say, integrated) is the experience of Divine Consciousness and Universal Love. In a sense, these beautiful states are still there, but they are no longer part of your subjective experience anymore. After you erase the inside/outside, subject/object split, the whole notion that there is an “interior life” or a “subject experience” also stops making sense.
Eventually, you become disidentified with even the highest mystical states you read in spiritual texts. You go beyond even the notion of “infinity” and “eternity”. With the center gone, distance, borders, direction, the arrow of attention, space, and time collapse (4th path).
The 9th Fetter
The 9th Fetter is Restlessness. Even after the Self/self is completely gone, there remains the debris of old conditionings that are still operating, albeit mostly at the subconscious level now…manifesting themselves through very subtle beliefs, assumptions, and sensations that make you feel, in ways you can’t really point your fingers to, that things should somehow be different. And that there is something that you should be doing to course correct this misalignment.
Unable to cling onto a self, these sensations from time to time “rise up” against the flow of life, thus making you believe that there exist versions of realities other than whatever is happening right now. You can still experience a little bit of suffering here. Although by this time your suffering level has decreased by about 95 percent.
When things settle down even more, you will start to see very clearly that every particle in the universe is perfectly aligned as it is. Things can’t be any other way. There is truly nothing to do because there is no other version of Reality that could possibly exist other than the one that is happening right now.
THIS IS IT.
You can venture to say that all sources of suffering can be boiled down to just one thing - the desire for a version of Reality to exist other than the What Is.
After the 9th Fetter is dropped, you enter a permanent Flow State and realize it’s always been this way. Every moment is synchronicity. Every moment is the perfect manifestation created by no one. Interconnectedness and dependent origination becomes a visceral, lived experience. There’s only life, and life never makes mistakes.
With the sense of agency completely gone, decisions appear out of nowhere and they make themselves. And this could be very disorienting for some people because we never realize how much the self is dictating, predicting, planning, and programming your life until it’s gone. Life is completely unpredictable, and nothing will truly go according to plan.
Every single routine or ritual, big or small, from the time of day you brush your teeth to how much time you should be meditating is all conditioned by the separate self to maintain itself.
When the illusionary captain of this ship is dead, the ship continues to flow, to wherever the current is. But the loss of orientation and the dissolution of the sense of predictability is only temporary.
Eventually, it dawns on you that the captain never existed in the first place. Life simply goes on as it always has been and always will. You do things without effort at the exact moment that needed to be done and nothing more.
“Would have”, “could haves”, and “should haves” are erased from your mental landscape. You’re now sitting in the back seat of Reality, and everywhere this formless car takes you is so magical that it goes beyond your wildest imagination as a “planner” of things, and “the controller” of life.
The 10th Fetter
The 10th Fetter is the identification of Knowledge.
You drop away the delusion that you can know anything at all. You can’t even be certain what you are perceiving or thinking is “the way things really are”, let alone the Nature of Reality.
So in a way, the enlightened one is completely ignorant. But knowing nothing also means knowing everything.
“I gained nothing at all from Supreme Enlightenment, and for that very reason it is called Supreme Enlightenment”, - The Buddha.
You become completely ordinary, neither god nor human. When you look at the world, you no longer see “Consciousness”, and the best way to describe a cup is a “cup”. (Natural State).
So the last fetter is dropping the belief that you can know anything at all and be okay with not-knowing. Even the inclination to know this or that about Reality already creates a separation between ____ and ____. This is impossible because ultimately the _____ doesn’t exist either, so it can’t be extended, divided, or broken down.
In the seen, there is only the seen, in the heard, there is only the heard, in the sensed, there is only the sensed, in the cognized, there is only the cognized, indeed there is no thing here.
Last words.
Ultimately, the fetters are also empty. Like any model of enlightenment, they do not exist. They’re just tools you use to end suffering. Also, it’s easy to spiritually bypass. I see tons of people talking about the Isness and how everything is simply happening etc, when in fact the insights are still intellectual.
So perhaps these questions will take you back to direct moment-to-moment experience