6. Day 2, afternoon

We are going to have a look at the mental aspect of our experience. We are going to look at what is known as vedana or feeling. It plays a very important role in the Buddha’s teaching. Vedana or feeling is one of the four satipatthanas. It’s the second satipatthana, the second foundation of mindfulness.

We use the analogy of the Shwedagon pagoda in Yangon, Myanmar. There is 100 meter tall pagoda on top of a huge platform. In order to get to that platform, you need to walk up one of four gigantic staircases. You can use any of the stairways to walk up to the platform, to walk up and see the pagoda.

Here we are using the pagoda as an analogy for our present moment experience and we’re using the four staircases for the four foundations of mindfulness. We can establish awareness in the present moment using one of the four foundations. You can use the body door, that we have been looking at already – the physical sensations and postures of the body. We can also use feeling – pleasantness and unpleasantness. We can use our mind state in that present moment experience as a foundation for mindfulness. And we can also use thoughts or reactions, that come in the present moment experience as a foundation for mindfulness. Depending on your skill, you can use anyone of the four foundations of mindfulness to establish awareness and 100 wisdom in the present moment. You can choose. All four are available. Just like the stairways that lead to the pagoda platform, they are all available for us. We can use the body, feelings, emotions or thoughts to establish our awareness in the present moment.

6.1. Feeling

So feeling is one of the four foundations of mindfulness. Feeling has been isolated because of importance of it’s role in the Buddha’s teaching. Feeling is also one of the five aggregates. Again it’s isolated from the other mental aggregates of perception and sankharas, conditional formations. It’s part of nama, the mind, but it’s separated. Feeling also plays an important role in the paticca samuppada, dependent origination, as feeling is the cause and condition for craving. Craving is the cause and condition for dukkha. So feeling plays a very important role in the teachings of the Buddha. So we need to understand precisely what feeling is.

Feeling or vedana is the cause and condition for delight and lust. It’s based on feeling, particularly pleasant feeling, that we start liking things, we start delighting in things. Lust arises in the mind. Lust for being, craving for being arises.

Feeling is simply the affective tone, or affective component of our experience. It’s the flavor of our experience. Feeling is either pleasant, unpleasant or neutral. There are three types of feeling: pleasant, unpleasant, neutral. Structurally one type of feeling will be arising in the present moment, continuously, with the other of the five aggregates, and passing away. Arises and passes away. It is just the flavor. It’s not the physical sensations in the body – they are the four elements, they are physical – it is not the emotional state, that we find ourselves in sometimes, that is a mind state. Feeling is something different. Feeling is just the unpleasantness of an experience or pleasantness of an experience, just that. Yet it plays an enormous role, because feeling is known as the citta sankhara. Or the mind conditioner. Our minds have been conditioned by feeling. We are going to need to understand feeling, not only on a general level, but on an intuitional level, on a meditational level. We are going to have to see for ourselves how pleasant feeling conditions liking and craving that leads to dukkha, and unpleasant 101 feeling conditions disliking and aversion which also leads to dukkha, if feeling is not noted and known. Then it will be appropriated and identified with, it will be subjectified, it will be for me. As it’s arising in nature, it’s just pleasantness or unpleasantness arising and passing away. It doesn’t belong to anybody. It’s just a feature of the mind and body process. It is just one part, the tone or the flavor of the experience whether it’s pleasant or unpleasant.

We need to really note it quickly, when it starts to arise, before it starts to condition the mind and before we loose our awareness and wisdom in the present moment, before we get taken away by a pleasant story or an unpleasant experience. We need to be able to note this in the present moment clearly. Feelings are impermanent, they arise and pass away, extremely rapidly, they are conditioned, they are dependently arisen. They are the subject to fading away and ceasing.

There are six types of feeling: feeling born of eye contact, of ear contact, of nose contact, of tongue contact, of body contact, and feeling born of mind contact. Contact is that type of state where our internal base and the external objects, that relate to that base, contact each other and consciousness arises. Consciousness arises joined with feeling. They arise and pass away. Mind and matter and consciousness arise and pass away together at the six sense doors. So there is feeling which can be pleasant, unpleasant or neutral at the eye door, that can be pleasant, unpleasant or neutral at the ear door, mind door and so on.

If you feel a pleasant feeling, you won’t feel an unpleasant or neutral feeling at that moment. Feeling is mutually exclusive to the moment. It is either pleasant, unpleasant or neutral. And then it passes away. Of course, you can have all kinds of thoughts or emotional states towards a feeling. Feeling will arise and pass away, rapidly replacing one another.

The Buddha was asked by the wanderer Pataliputta: «Why does feeling arise in the present moment? Why in every single moment is it pleasant, unpleasant, neutral? Why is that part of the structure of our experience, the structure, the nature that we’re subjected to?» – «Having done an intentional action through body, speech and mind whose resultant is pleasant, one feels pleasure. Having done an intentional action through body, speech and mind – that’s karma, having created some karma, some intentional action, some 102 cetana; cetana, intention, is karma – whose resultant is unpleasant, one feels unpleasantness.» So the feelings that we experience in the present moment are the resultants of old intentional structures. Old karma, that we have created. That remains latent. Kama sati, karmic energy, as a potentiality, only has an opportunity to arise when its conditions are in place. If there is some condition in place for it to hatch and manifest, to bloom, then it will! And it will give its fruit. Either pleasant or unpleasant or neutral. If the karma that was created was wholesome or unwholesome than the resultant will be experienced as pleasant or unpleasant feeling, respectively.

When they bubble up, they don’t belong to anybody. It’s not you, you didn’t create an intentional structure. There is nobody here that is creating karma. Karma is creating itself. Reaction. The five aggregates are creating themselves every moment. And when that resultant bubbles up, if we are unmindful, if we fail to activate our awareness and wisdom in the present moment and note and know it, see it clearly and let go of it, so that it is not a base for the arising of self, then that feeling will simply be appropriated and identified with. The feeling will happen to me, it will be mine, the feeling will be subjectified. Then we just react to it with liking if it’s pleasant or with disliking if it’s unpleasant. Of course that reaction is new karma. That’s a new intentional structure through body, speech and mind which will give a resultant to be experienced as pleasant or unpleasant feeling. So it keeps looping. Around and around like this. This is what ignorance is. That is the nature of ignorance. Unawareness in the present moment. If we are unable to see this structure happening in real-time in our mediation practice, we won’t fully understand what it is to be stuck in samsara. This is a very tight and concrete structure. It fits together very well. It has been operating successfully and managing itself for a very long time. This is its latest manifestation sitting here on the meditation mat.

Receiving resultants, reacting towards them, creating new karma, receiving resultants, reacting towards them, creating new karma, receiving resultants, reacting, creating new karma – moment after moment. Each of these moments giving us a little taste of me or mine. When these little moments are added up together they produce a sense of I, a self, a me, an identity. They give this mind and body process, which is flowing on in nature, 103 to believe it is somebody. It’s alive. It’s calling itself something. In fact, our parents called it something. We started to maintain that name as well.

We need to be very careful about pleasantness or unpleasantness. Pleasantness and unpleasantness is the trigger. Whenever you find this triggering you, whenever you find yourself reacting, if you feel you’re about to explode in anger, or you can feel an addiction urge arising, a liking and a disliking, a pushing and pulling away, have a look at the feeling. Start to note the pleasantness or unpleasantness of the situation and you will be able to free your mind from those states. The most important thing is not to appropriate feeling or identify with it. The Buddha tells us, that the way leading to the origination of identity view, to the arising of identity view, we regard the internal base, the external base, the consciousness that arises when these two meet together, and the feeling born from those bases touching together. When we take these things as mine, this I am, this is myself, that’s when identity view arises. Identity view ceases when we stop appropriating and identifying the internal base, the external object, the consciousness that arises in that moment (the knowing), the contact of that base and the feeling of that base. These five things. If we can stop appropriating and identifying with them at the six sense bases, then we are free. We are free of identity view. Identity view is the large leash that keeps us bound to samsara. It’s the view that the mind and body process comes to believe that it is someone. The Buddha’s teaching is to remove that sense of I from the picture. Remove the sense of me from our experience so that we can go back to nature. The Buddha says, that all the conditioned phenomena, all the mental and physical phenomena, that we are identifying with are dukkha. The whole lot. All the physical sensations, all the mental sensations, the thoughts, the emotions, the pleasant, the unpleasant, all of them. It’s all conditioned nonsense arising and passing away. It doesn’t belong to anybody. We need to be able to see this if we want to breakthrough. If you want to evolve as a spiritual being and remove the sense of self, remove the ego, remove the duality, that we have put into the moment, where there is a me and a world. That’s how we are operating. With separation. When we remove the sense of self, there is no separation at all. There is a knowing. And it’s blissful.

We need to understand and see these feelings as impermanent, as suffering 104 and as non-self. Of course pleasantness is going to arise. The Buddha still calls it dukkha. It’s important to understand here, what the Buddha is asking us to let go of, is not the pleasant feeling but the attachment and identification that we developed towards pleasant feeling. Pleasant feelings will arise, it is their nature to arise, old karma is unfolding. You will experience some pleasantness and some unpleasantness in your life. And there is nothing wrong with that. That is nature. What the Buddha’s teaching is all about, is stopping the identification with the feelings. That gives us the problem. When we start identifying with something unpleasant, than it is dukkha right away. When we start identifying with something pleasant, then it is dukkha when that object passes away, when we loose it. Dukkha arises through attachment. Freedom arises through non-attachment.

But don’t think that you have to give up all those special activities that you like to do. You don’t have to give up your life to practice the Buddha’s teaching. Pleasantness, pleasant activities, friends who are nice, these are all ok things. You can still eat, go on holidays, listen to music but don’t get attached to the pleasantness. Stop identifying with it and free yourself from it. Then you will be able to enjoy the world without an ego getting in the way. It’s a much higher, more fulfilling sense of enjoyment. There is a bliss that arises when you can let go of the pleasure that’s created through sensuality. At the moment we don’t see anything higher than the pleasures that arise through the five physical sense doors. They give us so much pleasure! Or we pleasure ourselves through our own thinking, our own rumination.

In the dependent origination, between the six sense bases and feeling is what is known as contact or phassa. Phassa is the point in the sense perception process, where we activate our awareness and note, know and let go right at the point where consciousness is arising. When there is an internal base and an object, consciousness arises. Ear consciousness arises when there is an ear and a sound. Body consciousness arises when there is a body and something touching the body. Sight consciousness arises when you have an eye ball and there is sufficient light and visible forms available. When these two touch together, it is called contact. They cause the arising of consciousness in the present moment. We need to be able to note right at that point of contact. Right at the six sense bases where they’re arising and 105 passing away. It’s right at that point of contact, if it’s unnoted and unknown, that craving enters the sense perception process. Craving for being gets in there. This very strong desire to be something, to become somebody. Unfortunately it’s rife in our society. Our whole education system is pushing us to become something. The subjects we have to choose. The society, our family, friends all are pushing us to become something. This craving for being is defilement. It is the cause of dukkha. The Buddha told us to note it, know it and let it go. Free our mind from it. Craving for being has an opportunity to enter the sense perception process right at the point of contact. It’s conditioned by the feeling that’s arising there.

In the Madupindika sutta, the Buddha gives a very succinct description of the sense perception process. «When there is eye and physical forms, eye consciousness arises, the meeting of the three is contact, with contact as condition feeling. (The grammar then changes in the Pali text.) What one feels, that one perceives. What one perceives that one thinks about. What one thinks about that one mentally proliferates.» Mental proliferation means appropriation and identification. It means taking things as mine, this I am, this is myself. Up to the point of feeling, the sense perception process is objective. There is no subjectivity in there. Eye, plus form, eye consciousness arises, the meeting of the three is contact, with contact as condition, feeling. This is an impersonal process that is happening to nobody. If there is no awareness and wisdom in that moment, when this contact is taking place, then craving sneaks in. What one feels, that one perceives. What one perceives, that one thinks about. It is already starting happening to somebody. The feelings and the perceptions and the thoughts are for somebody, happening to somebody. They are mine. So subjectification has taken place. And then mental proliferation besets a person with respect to past, present and future visible forms cognized through the eye. It happens extremely rapidly. You will need to be continuous in your meditation practice to be able to catch it. You won’t catch it quickly or easily. But if you are diligent, if you are practicing correctly, moment after moment, without any desire to try and get any results – we need to drop that desire, we need to check our attitude – if you are just practicing continuously, «bum», and you will drop into the present moment, and you will see things as they are. The mental and 106 physical phenomena will become quite clear to you. You will be able to see them arising and passing in the moment, you will be able to see mental and physical phenomena, that have been subjectified and are under the control of craving, and you will be able to see mental and physical phenomena, that have escaped the subjectification process, that are free data, that pass away, that are no longer useful or able to continue the illusion that there is somebody here. It is only because we are not looking that we think we are someone. As soon as you start looking, you won’t be able to find anyone there. It is impersonal. It’s just a natural process unfolding, like a tree growing in the forest! It starts small, then grows up, then gives fruit, and then it gets old and falls over. Nothing much different than this body here. It gets born, it grows old, it gets sick and dies. All the time we’re holding on to it preciously thinking it’s me. Actually it’s a huge burden.

It is a real hassle to have a body. You have to take it everywhere, you have to feed it, you have to wash it, clean it and cloth it, make it look fancy sometimes. It is like a 30 kg backpack. You have to take it all over the place with you. It’s got six radars out there collecting information through the sense doors. We spend most of our lives taking care of this body. We think it is really important. It is just earth, water, fire and air. It’s just the four elements arising and passing away. Because it has got a nice conceptual structure around it, we have come to think it is me. We are willing to work for 50 years, to borrow large amounts of money from the bank to buy a concrete room to keep it at night. Why are we doing that? We need a fancy room to keep it, this rotten log of festeringness. If we don’t see it clearly we’ll take it very seriously, we take our life very seriously. We’ll take ourselves very seriously. We get upset when people challenge it. When we start to see it more clearly though, it starts to loose its importance to us.

So the six sense bases of contact are impermanent and are subject to change. A pleasant feeling or an unpleasant feeling that arises from impermanent bases, do you think that such a feeling can possibly be permanent? No! It is also impermanent. It also passes away very, very rapidly.

Notice when the dog barks. It takes half a second. It’s just a quick amount of noise and then it’s gone. Finished, it’s passed away. But our mind takes this fraction of a second of noise and starts to spin. «What’s that dog 107 doing here? Why is there a dog here? Which dog is it? I don’t like dogs. My dog at home…» – and then you get into a fantasy about dog walking. You’re gone for five minutes…bring yourself back to the present and start again. The early days on the meditation retreat are very much like that. We need to activate our awareness continuously. Keep activating, keep pulling yourself back inside. Use the ear door to pull you back in. Sound is always there. We are not listening to sounds. That means we have gone out if we are listening. We are holding our awareness inside the body, just noting that hearing is occurring. If you can do that, you’ll find that you can come back to the present very rapidly. Hold it there for a bit. Bring your mind into the body. Start to pay attention to the rise and fall. Get a few in, and then, wooop, it’s gone again. Activate your awareness, come back to the present, keep doing it. We are just training. We are training the mind as it runs out. We bring it back. Like when we’re fishing. Bring it back. Than it runs out. Bring it back. Finally, it is so tired, that we can just bring it in. It won’t find any interest in going out anymore and we can hold it inside. That’s when our meditation really starts to stabilize, when we can develop awareness of the body. Full awareness of the body is what we want to develop.

The importance of feeling and its place in the Buddha’s teaching is also shown to us by the Bramachalla sutta (first discourse in the large collection Diga Nikaya). Brama means the highest, challa is a net. The Buddha throws a net across 62 views. In the Buddha’s time, he identified 62 different views. There were various philosophers, recluses and meditators and priests and brahmins. All of them had their own ideas how the world was functioning, they all had their philosophical standpoint. They all had their different views on how the sense of self arises and what it is. All the monks and nuns in Burma have to study it for their exams. It is an important sutta.

It goes something like this: «When those ascetics and brahmins, who are speculators about the self in the past, who are speculators about self in the future, who have fixed views about the self, who put forward views about the self in these 62 ways, it is merely the feeling of those who do not know and do not see, the delight, worry and vacillation of those immersed in craving.» These 62 views are all conditioned by contact. Present moment, contact, contact arising at the physical doors. «That all these speculators 108 should experience feeling without contact that is impossible. They experienced the feelings, pleasant, unpleasant and neutral by repeated contact through the six sense basis. With feeling as condition craving arises.» Luckily the Buddha gives us some instruction. «When a monk understands as they really are, the arising and passing away of these six sense bases, when he understands the satisfaction of the six sense bases, when he understands the danger of the six sense bases, and the escape from them, then he knows that which goes beyond all these views of self.»

So when we understand the point of contact, where feeling is arising, we understand the arising and passing away of feeling, when we know it to be an impermanent, dependently arisen, conditioned phenomena. We see it arising, we see it passing. We see the satisfaction that we get from feeling, the pleasantness, the joy, the delight and lust we get from feeling, and also see the danger that feeling presents to us. In fact, that feeling is the cause and condition to delight and lust and craving. If we see the danger of feeling, than we are able to let it go. We move beyond feeling. We see the escape from feeling. So these five things are to be seen and understood. We know the arising of feeling, we make a note when it’s arising, when it’s there. We make a note when it’s passed away. Pleasantness there. Now it’s gone. We know the arising and passing. We know the satisfaction. We know the danger. And then we see the escape from it. When we have completely let go of feeling, in that moment, we’re free. No self arises in that moment. That’s a moment of freedom.

Our job as meditators is to just extend that moment out indefinitely as much as we can. In the beginning stages we only get a fraction of a second as a look but then the curtain opens and stays open for a little bit longer, for seconds or minutes, maybe for hours where we’re experiencing the mind and body process without a sense of self. And it’s gone when we are right there in the present moment. We are free from dukkha.

«That one shall here and now make an end of suffering, without abandoning the underlying tendency to lust or pleasant feeling, without abolishing the underlying tendency to aversion for painful feeling, without removing the underlying tendency to ignorance with regard to neutral feeling, without abandoning ignorance and arousing true knowledge, this is impossible.

109 When one is touched by a pleasant feeling, if one delights in it, welcomes it, remains holding to it, then the underlying tendency to lust lies within one.

When one is touched by a painful feeling, if one sorrows and grieves and laments, weeps, beating ones breast and becoming distraught, then the underlying tendency to aversion still lies within one.

When one is touched by a neutral feeling, if one doesn’t understand as it actually is, the arising, passing, the satisfaction, the danger and the escape in regard to that feeling, then the underlying tendency to ignorance lies within one.»

So you see that coming to understand feeling, noting the pleasantness or unpleasantness of a particular situation is very important if we’re to remove ourselves from these defilements. If we are to let go of lust, aversion and ignorance. Greed, hatred and delusion. When we can remove these from our present moment experience, then we see that which is beyond, when our Vipassana insight becomes strong. Phassa or contact does not yield a self. This is the point where the knowledge of arising and passing away is observed. The Buddha called it the deathless state. He called it the amata dathu. Amata, there is no death occurring in that present moment experience because there is nobody there who dies. It’s the deathless because we moved beyond the realm of birth and death. Birth and death are concepts that relate to a person, that relate to an individual. There needs to be somebody before there can be birth and death. If the mind and body process are not thinking of themselves as somebody, if they have escaped that delusion, if they have uprooted that ignorance in that present moment, if they have developed awareness and wisdom in that present moment, then they can escape feeling and they escape dukkha. And they realize the deathless, the arising and passing away of phenomena.

When we are considering feeling, it is important that we don’t get confused between feelings and sensations in the body or mind states in the mind. To give you a little example, the four foundations of mindfulness, the four walkways to the pagoda platform, are always available for us to use. We can walk to the present moment using anyone of the staircases. For example a mosquito comes and bites you on the arm:

• 110 In that present moment experience there can be some tingling, or itching, maybe a little bit of heat occurring. That is a physical sensation. That’s the first foundation, mindfulness of the body or kaya-nupassana. We can direct our awareness and wisdom in the present moment on that physical sensation. We have established mindfulness on the body, on a physical sensation.

• If we choose to, we can establish our awareness on the unpleasantness of that situation. There is also an experience of unpleasantness. We can establish our awareness just on the unpleasantness. It’s called mindfulness on feeling, vedana-nupassana. Just on the unpleasantness, not the physical sensation on what our mind is complaining and whinging about, just the unpleasantness. You can establish awareness on feeling.

• If we want to have another look at this situation, we can look at our mind, the third foundation of mindfulness. The citta-nupassana. We can establish our awareness on the mind state, which is most probably aversion. Aversion is that type of dissatisfied mind. We are bitten by a mosquito, the mind is full of aversion. That’s the third foundation. We can use that to establish our awareness on, to note and know that present moment experience. To blow it apart with our awareness and wisdom so that it is not used as the base for the arising of me, mine or I. We don’t go into it and start to think, «Oh, my itchy arm. Why does it happen to me all the time?»

• We can establish our awareness on the fourth foundation of mindfulness, dhamma-nupassana, which is the reaction process, the thought process, the karmically active process. That’s the actively pushing away, that kind of energy of disliking, pushing. It’s also available to us as a foundation for mindfulness.

The physical sensation – the itchiness, or feeling – the pleasantness, or the mind state – the aversion in the mind, or mind objects – our reaction of disliking towards it. So in four ways we can become mindful of a present moment experience. This is a very simple example. It happens moment after moment, after moment. That is what our experience is. The five aggregates arising together and ceasing together, in every moment of our conscious experience, there will be a physical sensation, there will be some feeling, 111 there will be some mind state and there will be some reaction going on.

We are establishing our awareness stepping back from what is going on. We are establishing awareness in the present moment so that we can see things as they really are. When we can see things as they really are, we can begin to let go of them. We do let go of them. If we are unable to do this, then we’re just subjected to sensuality. If we’re unable to note and know in the present moment, if we can’t activate our awareness and be aware of our own mind states, then we have nothing else to do but simply follow along the flow of craving wherever it takes us. We become the slave of craving. The slave of our own mind. And the only way we know to escape from dukkha, is through sensuality looking for something pleasant, something enjoyable, forms cognizable by the eye, or sounds cognizable by the ear, sent cognized through the nose, tastes cognized through the tongue, sensations cognized through the body. That will be our only escape to our dukkha when it’s arising. Seeking out one of these things. The pleasure and joy that arises, dependent on the cords of sensual pleasure is simply called sensual pleasure. The Buddha regarded it as a filthy pleasure, a false pleasure, an ignoble pleasure. «I say this kind of pleasure that it should not be pursued, that it should not be developed, that it should not be cultivated, that it should be feared.» He knew the danger this sensual pleasure leads to. It certainly doesn’t lead to awakening. It leads to burying deep into samsara. We are delighting in the cause of dukkha.

So controlling our reactions to these three feelings, the pleasant, unpleasant and the neutral. Neutral feeling probably takes up 98% of our time. There is maybe 1% pleasantness and 1% unpleasantness. But those little 1% are what we live for. Desiring something delightful and pleasant. Trying to escape from the unpleasantness. If it’s slightly unpleasant we try to change it, try to get rid of it, searching for something pleasant.

When we are in stress or a difficult situation such as an emotional break-down, we go for a snack, chocolate, ice cream, or some other kind of snack, just to try to distract ourselves from the dukkha that we got ourselves in. But the correct strategy is to use awareness and wisdom, to note and know and let go. Don’t go looking for outside options to cure yourself. The best cure we have, is right here, the mind and body process itself, awareness 112 and wisdom.

So controlling our reactions to these three feelings through attention and observation at the very point where defilement arises, is the heart of mind training. That’s what we are doing here. We are training the mind in non-reaction. This does not mean that we become boring or a rock in the forest, sitting there completely unmoved and unchallenged by anything. Of course, you can still have some fun in your life. The Buddha is not advocating the death of all fun, just don’t get attached to it. Or as Ajahn Chah says, «you can enjoy as much salt as you like as long as you don’t find it salty».

So we restrain our senses. We keep an observation on our six sense doors. We are watching, we are noting, knowing and letting go each moment activating our awareness and seeing what’s there. When we have activated our awareness, there is always going to be an object. Either a physical object or a mental object – we can choose. All we have to do is to maintain our awareness and wisdom. Awareness will take us to the object and penetrate it clearly. Wisdom allows us to disengage from it and step out of the identification process. In that case it is let go of. Dukkha ceases. Dukkha ceases when wisdom removes ignorance. When wisdom is unable to uproot ignorance, then the flow of paticca samuppada, dependent orientation, must result in dukkha. Awareness and wisdom do have the power over ignorance. If they didn’t have the power, no-one would be able to get enlightened. Because they do have the power, it is possible that we can break free of this mind and body process. We can allow it to do just what it does and we can enjoy the space and freedom of consciousness, which is not addicted to the mind and body process.