Notes from the
Bhavana Program:
Insight Into AggregatesThese remarks are excerpted from talks given on the third day of the program held at the study center in December, 1999.
The Bhavana Program at the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies is intended as a special way of integrating academic study and meditation practice for the investigation of the Buddha’s teachings.
The 7-day program is modeled on a traditional vipassana retreat, with alternating sessions of sitting and walking practice throughout extended periods of silence, including personal interviews and a dharma talk each evening from an experienced meditation teacher.
The program also incorporates a daily two-hour study period with a scholar of the Buddhist tradition, wherein the careful reading of selected passages from the classical literature and their detailed discussion, in the light of one’s meditative experience, is encouraged.
The Interdependent Arising of Feeling
The Experience of Feeling
The Interdependent Arising of Feeling
Andrew Olendzki
Today we are turning our attention to the second of the aggregates, the aggregate of feeling. Before we get very far, however, we will need to appreciate the fact that the Buddhists are using this word quite differently than we usually do in English.
Our understanding of the word “feeling” has been molded considerably by the Greek influence upon Western civilization. The Greek philosophers tended to divide the person into three parts. First there are the appetites, the raw drives like hunger, thirst and sex. Then there are emotions, which would include such feelings as love and kindness, hatred and jealousy. The third part of the soul was intellect, a clarified aspect of mind that could aspire to the sacred through the development of reason. So it is to the Greeks we owe the contemporary impulse to distinguish a rational, content-laden discriminating intellect from the emotive, affect-laden sentiments that is summed up by the colloquial division between “heart” and “mind.” Nothing in Asian civilization really mirrors this separation, and we have to keep that in mind as we use this word “feeling.” It does not refer to the complex emotional life of humans (most of which would be considered part of the aggregate of formations).
In the languages of ancient India, the word for feeling is vedana, which is ultimately a form of the root vid, which means “to know.” The word “Veda,” a name for the ancient revealed wisdom books of the Brahmanical tradition, comes from the same linguistic root, as does one element of the name for the ancient medical tradition Ayur-veda (which literally means “knowledge of life”). Another form of the root is reflected in words such as “vidya” which means knowledge, perhaps better known to you in its negative Pali equivalent “avijja,” or “ignorance.”
What all this tells us is that the Buddhists talk about feeling as a quality of knowledge, rather than as a kind of emotion. Moreover, it is a very special or precise kind of knowing, the knowing whether something in our experience is pleasant or unpleasant. It’s not knowing in the sense of cognitive content; it’s not knowing anything about something; its just knowing something to be pleasant, not pleasant, or a third category, neither pleasant nor unpleasant. It is therefore a word that is used to refer to direct experience. I don’t want to overemphasize this point, because we’re going to put this word “know” to better use when we get to the aggregate of consciousness. But it does point out how, in these early Indian models of psychology, feeling and knowing are so thoroughly intertwined with one another that the distinction between them is very nuanced—and it’s a nuance we cannot fully appreciate when we use the English language.
A modern term used by psychologists to indicate the feeling dimension of experience is “affect tone.” We are beginning to appreciate much more than formerly the importance of the role affect plays in guiding and molding our behavior and our beliefs. Everything we do or say or think comes packaged with a feeling tone—we either like it (a lot or very subtly), or dislike it (a lot or very subtly); in cases where the experience is not distinct enough or not clearly enough known, we may be unsure whether we like or dislike it. In this case we still have a feeling, but it is not resolved into the two poles of pleasant or unpleasant. The point of the Buddhist teaching of the aggregates is that this affect or feeling tone is not something we decide upon, based upon some sort of cognitive analysis of sense objects; rather it is built in to every moment of experience—whether we like it or not!
The Arising of Experience
The first text I would have us look at is one that points to a very important aspect of feeling and of all the aggregates—the fact that they are interdependently arisen. Paragraph 27 of the Maha Hannhipadopama Sutta (MN 28; Middle Length Sayings p. 283), The Greater Simile of the Elephant’s Footprint, describes the way the aggregates emerge from a moment’s unique, contextualized experience. Remember the point we emphasized yesterday: The aggregates are not substances that exist; they are terms referring to events that occur. They are conceptual categories we can use to describe episodes of interdependently arisen experience. This text shows us how this works.
No doubt you recall the chart of the sense bases or sense doors: the eye, ear, nose, tongue, body and mind are six sense organs that have evolved to be sensitive to the six corresponding classes of sense objects we call forms, sounds, odors, flavors, touches and mental phenomena. The passages we are looking at now are emphasizing the fact that experience can only occur when these sense organs and sense objects complete a circuit, as it were, with consciousness, which will also manifest in six different modes to correspond to the six internal and external sense spheres. Another way of saying this is to recognize that subjective human experience only occurs (remember it is an event!) when all three functions of a triangle are joined: the organ, the object and consciousness.
If, friends, internally the eye (ear, nose, etc.) is intact but no external forms (sounds, odors, etc.) come into its range, and there is not corresponding [conscious] engagement, then there is no manifestation of the corresponding class of consciousness.
This section describes a situation where the link between sense organ and sense object is insufficient. If your eye is working properly, but there is some environmental reason for your not being able to see forms (if your eyes are closed, for example, or the room is too dark) then you don’t see forms, even though you may be right in front of one. The eye can’t see the Eiffel Tower, which is on the other side of the globe, because it’s not in proximity. In either case the link between the perceptual organ and the perception object, the eye and the forms is not functioning. Also keep in mind that by eye they do not mean merely the eyeball, of course, but the entire visual system (cornea, retina, optic nerve, visual cortex, etc.); there is also the issue of the eye being sensitive to certain wavelengths of the light spectrum and not others. Other limitations apply to the other senses of hearing, smell, taste, touch and mental phenomena.
What would be an example of an insufficient link between the mind and mental phenomena? Perhaps it’s like the situation when you are trying to remember a friend’s phone number, or the name of an acquaintance, and you just cannot make the connection. You know the information is stored in memory someplace, but try as you might you can’t bring that particular mental object to mind in the moment. Here is another reason the system might not work:
If internally the eye is intact and external forms come into its range, but there is no corresponding [conscious] engagement, then there is no manifestation of the corresponding class of consciousness.
In this case the external factors are okay, but we are in some important way not attending to a particular object. You might be asleep, for example, or you’ve been knocked unconscious; or you might simply be thinking about something else. If you are so intent on what you’re listening to, for example, you may not be paying attention to what is passing before your eyes. In that case, then there is no corresponding conscious engagement, and there is no manifestation of the corresponding section of consciousness. The loop between the ear, sounds and auditory consciousness might be operative, but while it is so the loop between the eye, forms and visual consciousness is not complete, because consciousness is engaged at the other sense door. The system does not allow one to be conscious of two types of object at once.
This point is itself counter-intuitive, because it certainly seems to us that we can be aware of data coming through several of the sense doors simultaneously. According to this early Buddhist analysis, however, that sense of simultaneity is only the result of the rapidity with which we are able to cycle between the sense doors. Using some modern language from the cognitive sciences, we might say that our basic sensory apparatus is processing a huge amount of data in parallel systems that function independently and therefore simultaneously. While a nerve impulse is passing up my arm from the sensors on my fingers, another impulse can at the same time be racing up my optic nerve from the retina. And a mind-boggling number of other signals may also be surging though my nervous system shuttling their information from arrays of receivers to banks of processors.
But the subjectively-based science of human experience discovered by the ancient Buddhists through meditation is telling us that conscious awareness is something that can only happen by means of serial processing. Our short-term memory and forward and backward masking techniques are adequate to retrieve information from the senses that we had not been attending to, as when a teacher asks a day-dreaming pupil what was just said and the pupil somehow manages to repeat the teacher’s words. But this is not the same as conscious engagement with the present object of experience. You all know the difference between feeling really heard and attended to by someone who is focusing on what you say and being on the periphery of someone’s sensory range who may be only politely attentive.
But when internally the eye is intact and external forms come into its range and there is the corresponding [conscious] engagement, then there is the manifestation of the corresponding class of consciousness.
In the situation being described here the connection is made between these three functions of the system: the visual organ, the visual object and the process of conscious engagement. The Pali word for this connection is phasso which literally means “touching” and is usually translated as “contact.” I prefer the word “experience,” because that is really what emerges from the completion of the sensory systems—a moment’s unique experience.
Insight Into the Moment
There is something truly astonishing about this analysis of human experience, something that I think is unparalleled in world religions. Notice that with this use of language, it is not possible to talk about consciousness as a noun. It is not something that somebody or something either has or does not have; it is not something that somebody is or is not; it can only be understood as an event, an episode, a momentary occurrence. And this event is entirely contextualized—it arises in interdependence with an particular organ and a very specific object; and having arisen, it immediately passes away. Having passed away, it may immediately arise (or better, occur) again, but when it does it will be in interdependence with a different organ and a different object. Even if the eye is seeing the same form for several mind moments in a row, the truth of impermanence is such that the experience will not be exactly the same each time. Perhaps the light has changed subtly, or the angle of presentation is slightly different, or one is in a somewhat altered mood at the moment of awareness.
Furthermore, according to this model, consciousness alone will never be sufficient to generate experience. Consciousness can only manifest as consciousness of something, and it has to use one of the six sense organs to become conscious of one of the six types of sense object. Now I’m sure many of you have heard such phrases as “pure consciousness” or “consciousness that takes no object,” but these expressions come either from other traditions (such as Hinduism) or from strata of Buddhist tradition quite a bit more evolved historically and doctrinally than what is found in the Pali Canon. In the model being presented in this text, it becomes clear that consciousness is just one element of a larger system of cognition, which therefore becomes unintelligible if removed from its role in the system. A carburetor, for example, only does what a carburetor does when it is properly installed in an engine and cooperates with a fuel system and an ignition system in a very particular way. In the same way, human experience only occurs when all five aggregates are co-arising in a moment’s constructed cognition. None of the aggregates can be separated from the others and retain its intelligibility as a factor independent of the system of which it is a part.
Why is all this coming up in the context of feeling? Because we cannot really understand what is being referred to as feeling unless we grasp this fundamental aspect of the five aggregate model—feeling arises only in thorough interdependence with the other aggregates. As our text goes on to say:
The material form in what has thus come to be is included in the material form aggregate affected by clinging. The feeling… perception… formations… consciousness in what has thus come to be is included in the feeling… perception… formations… consciousness aggregate affected by clinging.
This is a very important phrase: “what has thus come to be.” Each of the aggregates is emerging, moment after moment, as the process of the construction of reality unfolds in a particular psycho-physical organism. Our entire experience as human beings is made up of moments of these constructed experiences. If we look closely enough—and mindfulness meditation gives us the tools for accomplishing this—we will see it unfold: a moment of visual experience (seeing the swirl of a pattern on your closed eyelid, for example); followed by a moment of auditory experience (the chirp of a bird outside the meditation hall); followed by a moment of tactile experience (that throb of pain in your knee, perhaps); followed by a moment of mental experience (“I wonder what’s for lunch?”)…
We string these moments of experience, these moments of sensory connection, together with the construction of subjective time, and a stream of consciousness appears to emerge: moment after moment after moment of knowing. Knowing this (the bird), then knowing that (the knee pain), then knowing the next thing (the thought of lunch). When you put a million or two of these together, you begin to build up a few moments of subjective experience. Then you can begin to discern patterns in the specific ways you go about constructing the experiential stream, certain habits or dispositions that effect the construction process. These patterns are called sankharas or formations. They are referred to in our colloquial language as personality, character, or self.
This is what is happening. This is what our lives, our worlds, our very selves are made up of. How much of it can you see? For most of us, most of the time, we are able to really notice only a fraction of this unfolding universe. Mindfulness practice is training ourselves to see more of it, and you can get a sense of more and more of the universe emerging as you pay closer and closer attention to the process. In the Anupada Sutta (M 111) the Buddha’s great disciple Sariputta is said to have had “insight into states one by one as they occurred” for days and even weeks at a time.
The last line we will look at in this particular text sort of sums it all up:
This, indeed, is how there comes to be the inclusion, gathering, and amassing of things into these five aggregates affected by clinging… And these five aggregates affected by clinging are dependently arisen.
Returning to the issue of feeling, we see from this model that feeling is something transient, arising and passing away moment after moment, and we see that it is content- and context-specific. A feeling can only be understood in relation to a particular object sensed by a particular organ in a particular moment of conscious experience. The affect tone of “liking this” or “not liking that” is as variable, and comes and goes as regularly, as experience itself.
The Construction of Reality
It is not the case that we have a “raw” experience, and then we examine the data to see what it is we “perceive;” then consult the archives to see how it is we “feel” about this experience. What the aggregate model is suggesting is that perception and feeling are bound up with every moment’s experience during the process of constructing that experience. As the experience arises from its specific conditions, as part of the construction process wrought by the mind, the aggregates of perception and feeling are “amassed.” The way this is put in the Madhupindika Sutta (The Honey Ball Discourse, M 18) is:
Dependent on the eye and forms, eye-consciousness arises. The meeting of the three is contact. With contact as condition there is feeling. What one feels, that one perceives.
This process, as I understand it, does not happen as an unfolding sequence. It is not that we have a moment’s experience, and then some how decide what it is and decide how we feel about it. Rather, the experience is presented to our awareness with the perception and feeling already woven in with the sense data and its cognition. We “know” how it feels, just like we “know” what it is (perception), at the very same moment we “know” a visual object is arising via the visual organ into the moment’s visual consciousness. This insight, by the way, parallels the modern scientific view that the brain is organized into separate cognitive and affective systems, through which we become aware of “what” we’re experiencing through a different channel than we become aware of “how we feel about” it.
So every moment of our experience has to do with the binding together of all kinds of interdependent relationships. Then, as soon as that moment has occurred, it’s gone—because it is, after all, only an event. All of “what has thus come to be” can be viewed as the enacting of an event—a flash, a spark—again and again and again. A cognitive, affect-laden system for constructing experience is enacting itself over and over, at sufficient levels of coherence and complexity that we regard it as a “self” and a “world.” But the self is not some sort of entity that is kind of underlying or overlying all these moments of experience. The self too is created and re-created every moment, following the patterns of its accumulated conditioning (also known as karma).
All this is understood in the Buddhist models of experience, and it is against this backdrop that feeling needs to be understood. When we hold on to feelings, relating to them as if they were somehow defining our very identity, then the conditions are present for the construction of suffering. But when, through mindfulness, we can simply observe the coming and the going of specific feeling tones—and see how this occurs in dependence on specific conditions—the entire process becomes more de-personalized. Freedom from suffering rests upon this intuition into the selflessness of the process.
The Experience of Feeling
Taraniya (Gloria Ambrosia)
We study and practice with the Buddha’s teaching on the five aggregates in order to take part in the liberating journey towards realizing that body, feeling, perception, intention and consciousness are impermanent, suffering and not self. I have found that the key to this breakthrough liberation has been in observing and discovering for myself how the second aggregate, vedana or feeling, operates.
In the Buddha’s teaching on dependent origination, vedana marks what some people call the bifurcation point. It is like a crossroad. At birth, we get issued this body and mind—with their capacity for sensory experience. Through the body and mind we see, hear, smell, taste, touch, think and feel. These experiences take place at what we call the six sense doors: the eye door, the ear door, the nose door, the tongue door, the sensing door, and the mind/heart door. And from the moment of our birth until our death there is constant contact at these physical and mental sense doors occurring at a rapid and frequent rate.
Our discussion of feeling begins here. When there is contact at one of the six sense doors, feeling occurs. We experience the feeling as: pleasant, unpleasant, or neither pleasant nor unpleasant. We say each moment of contact has a feeling tone.
If you are like me you might ask yourself, “How does feeling actually happen?” I spent many years reading books and trying to understand how it happens in a physiological way. In the end, no matter what I studied, no matter what questions I asked, I came to one simple conclusion. “Who knows how it happens?” I don’t know how it happens, do you? It may be beyond comprehension in a cognitive way.
The point is not so much how it happens or even that it happens, but what tends to follow on the heels of feeling moments. When feeling moments occur the tendency of the unawakened mind is to proliferate around them. We have highly conditioned tendencies to respond to pleasant sensations, feelings and thoughts with a certain longing for more. And we respond to unpleasant sensations, feelings and thoughts with a certain repulsion. Seemingly automatically, we long for more good feeling and try to get away from bad feeling. And we tend not to notice, to ignore, or space out around feeling that is neither pleasant nor unpleasant.
In short, there is a strong tendency for pleasant, unpleasant and neutral feeling to escalate into the more complex, karmically weighty, and suffering states of greed, hatred and delusion. And it is because of this tendency that vedana figures so strongly in the Buddha’s teachings about freedom from suffering.
Every thing up to this point—being born, having a body and mind, having sense organs with their sense doors, even the experiences of contact and feeling themselves—are conditions which have been set in place. There is nothing to be done about any of these. They are results, the outcome of past actions. However, the Buddha tells us in no uncertain terms that while there is a strong, conditioned tendency for good feeling to escalate into greed and for bad feeling to escalate into hatred or anger, we have the capacity either to go in the direction of our conditioning or not.
This capacity to choose, if you will, constitutes the crossroads, the bifurcation point. This means that greed, hatred and delusion are not fore-ordained. This is important because it points to a potential for freedom. In and of themselves these three are suffering states. And they cause us to act in ways that bring about even more suffering. If we can become aware of vedana, feeling, and have a direct experience of it—we can short-circuit the tendency to move into these states that lead to suffering, these states that are our suffering.
Buddha says, “Don’t go there”
Well, great. That’s all well and good. But that is quite a mouthful, isn’t it? Look at what we are saying here.
I am reminded of my junior year in high school—biology class. We put these little amoeba in petri dishes and observed their behaviors under our microscopes. When we put a drop of sugar in the corner of the dish all the little amoeba scrambled towards the sugar. Then we put a drop of vinegar in another petri dish of amoeba and the colony scrambled in the opposite direction. The significance of this laboratory experiment so many years ago escaped me until I began observing the tendencies of my own body and mind. I found that I am highly conditioned to behave in the same way as those cute little amoebae. I am made of the same biological stuff. This tendency to seek pleasure and avoid pain is deeply, deeply rooted in me—so highly conditioned, as to be instinctive. Everything in our being at a seemingly cellular level moves us in the direction of more pleasure and less pain. Can you feel that? And the Buddha is inviting us to look at this, to learn from it.
One year I did a solitary retreat in the early spring of the year. The seasons were changing, and as a result the temperature in the room kept changing. I couldn’t seem to regulate the thermostat such that it would keep the temperature relatively constant. As a consequence, I found I had to keep putting on blankets and socks and then taking them off again. This happened many times over a period of weeks. At one point when I was several weeks into the retreat I was getting quite childlike in my reactions. The usual defenses and niceties were gone. It was in such a state that I again felt the heat in my body—and quite automatically and violently I yanked off the blanket, tore off my socks and threw them across the room. I threw a tantrum! I was so tired of being uncomfortable, of not being able to control the good and bad feeling associated with the temperature of the room, that I became very angry and actually threw a tantrum!
This reaction really got my attention. I realized that this impulse to seek comfort and avoid pain goes very deep—deeper than a simple wish to feel good. We want to survive and that takes constant effort. I felt fatigued by it. I was sick and tired of being tossed about by it. But with this insight, I was able to surrender to the discomfort of too much or too little heat and learn to be with it.
The Buddha’s teaching on liberation is inviting us to tune into our experience right at such points, to examine and see for ourselves how easily we move into the states of greed, hatred and delusion and how opening to the direct experience of vedana, feeling, holds the key to short-circuiting that process.
Liberating insights
Do you see what we are saying here? If we are not following the tendency to go towards pleasant feeling and away from unpleasant feelings we are left with the hard, cold reality that pain and discomfort are our constant companions and that pleasure doesn’t last. We don’t take kindly to that reality. Of course we want more pleasure. Of course we want less pain. Is Buddha suggesting that we don’t seek that? People can get very confused around this.
Buddha is not suggesting that we take the attitude that “life’s a pain and pleasure doesn’t last so what’s the use?” If you follow that dismal line of thinking, you just want to commit suicide.
No, the teachings are far more subtle and significant than that. Buddha is trying to point us in the direction that self observation takes us—that is, to liberating insight. He wants us to see for ourselves the truth of suffering, impermanence and selflessness. There is suffering. And no matter how good we may feel in any moment, that good feeling will end. Everything born of the body and mind follows the laws of nature. It is not self. As meditators, we can see these truths directly by opening to feeling.
Seeing the truth of suffering
One summer I was house-sitting and animal-sitting for my friend Patty. Actually it was the first time I had done this for her. We were new friends and she asked me to stay at her home and watch her cat Cobbie for the weekend while she was away. Everything went fine the first day. On the second morning I couldn’t find Cobbie. I looked around but she was nowhere in sight. I have to say that I didn’t really worry, because Patty had told me that sometimes Cobbie stays out all night but finds her way home later in the day.
Well, Patty came home early and approached me with tears in her eyes. As she neared the driveway she saw Cobbie dead in the street. “Oh my God!” I said. And I went over and over my actions asking myself if I had been negligent, if I had been unconcerned, if I had understood Patty’s instructions correctly. I asked myself, “What did I do wrong? How could Cobbie have died?” In my mind I kept reviewing the events of the two days trying to figure out what I had done wrong. This is fine to do once, but I was obsessing. Patty was doing the same kind of thing. Had she instructed me correctly? Was it her fault that Cobbie had died?
Suddenly we caught each other’s eye and simultaneously realized what we were doing. We both just cried, “Cobbie’s dead!” Our hearts knew the simple truth. But our minds resisted the pain of that truth and kept trying to find things to go to—doing everything they could do to avoid feeling the pain of suffering and death. It was as if we thought we could have done something to prevent the truth of death. When we realized what we were doing, that was it. That was the end of it. Patty and I opened to the pain of losing Cobbie instead of moving away from it.
Until we meditate, until we understand that we can’t get away from what is happening in this moment, until we see directly that it is better to be with what is happening than to avoid it, until we train the mind to be with life in this way, we will tend to avoid direct contact with painful moments like this and miss the liberating insights that are our freedom.
Seeing the truth of impermanence
I spent the better part of two years meditating at IMS, and during that time I became quite attached to a certain cup and bowl. Every time I approached the rack of dishes I looked for my favorite cup and bowl. Whenever they were there, I would get really excited. One day I arrived at the rack of dishes in the dining hall and noticed that my favorite cup and bowl were right on top. And there were nice fresh, clean napkins, too. As I approached the food line thinking things couldn’t get any better, I discovered that the cooks had prepared my favorite dish—a potato and basil and Parmesan cheese casserole. And somebody had baked fresh bread, and there was plenty of it!
By now I was giddy with delight. I was thinking how nice it was and how I wish it could be like this all the time. Then I took my place at one of my favorite tables and began to enjoy my treasures—only to discover that the woman I sat next to made disgusting noises when she ate! It made me sick to my stomach. I sat there over my favorite bowl, eating my favorite food, wiping my tears and blowing my nose with my nice clean napkin. Sometimes the lessons of practice hit hard!
We can take comfort in the realization that while there is no guarantee that good feelings will happen or will last, it is also true that they are unavoidable. This, too, is a liberating insight. Pleasure is inherent in life. If we let it happen, it happens more fully. Remember that bumper sticker from a few years back that read, “[Poop] happens?” Well, I always thought we should have a complimentary bumper sticker that reads, “Pleasure happens.” That’s right, pleasure happens. Not only does it happen, you can’t avoid it. I find this thought very comforting, don’t you?
Did you see the film Babette’s Feast? There was a scene at the end of the movie that really brings home this point. The story involved a small, puritanical religious group which believed that pleasure was bad and should be avoided at all costs. They did everything they could to avoid the experience of pleasure. Well, Babette came along and offered to cook them a fabulous feast. Wanting to accept her generosity, they consented but then realized what they had done. They were frightened by the prospect of enjoying the meal. So they made an agreement among themselves not to comment on the pleasure so as not to indulge in it. They determined to receive Babette’s offering graciously, and try to suffer through the pleasure that it would bring.
Those of you who saw the film know what happened. The devoted members of the sect couldn’t avoid the fact that this was a most pleasant meal. While they remained true to their pact and did not comment on the food, their delight in it was unavoidable. And because they didn’t express it verbally, their pleasure overtook them in unexpected ways. As the meal progressed they found themselves delighting in each other’s company in ways that they had never felt before. They admitted transgressions, forgave past wounds, and toasted to each other’s good fortune. Pleasure was doing it’s magic whether they liked it or not.
See the truth of selflessness
Finally, by observing the workings of vedana, we come to know the truth of selflessness—that pleasure and pain arise out of conditions. This was a revolutionary awakening for me. I always thought I could make pleasure happen. Of course, I can make it happen. I set everything up and it happens, right? Well, we can do things to establish conditions for the arising of pleasure, but it may or may not happen.
I am reminded of a sad story wherein the protagonist wanted to propose to a woman he loved. He arranged for a special evening, brought out his best linens, best champaign and chocolates, had the parlor arranged with flowers, wore his neatly pressed tuxedo—in short, he did everything right to create a happy moment. But the woman refused his proposal of marriage. He established all the right conditions but the pleasure he expected didn’t happen.
There is never any guarantee that pleasure will happen. We can’t make pleasure happen any more than we can avoid pain. I think this is one of the things that plays into difficulties at the holidays. Families go to great extremes to prepare for the holidays, to make them happy occasions. “Oh everyone is going to be here and we are going to have such a great time!” or, “I bought this gift for that one and that gift for this one and they are going to be so happy.” And, yet, for many people the holidays turn out to be everything but happy. We so want to make everything right! Earlier in the day one of the class members asked about the dukkha of conditionality. This is it. Pleasure and pain arise out of conditions. They are not self. That’s just the way it is.
We become wise when we stop trying to manipulate the world so that it is always pleasant or convenient, when we stop expecting to be content and comfortable at all times. This is an amazing reflection. The world is an irritating place sometimes. Sometimes it is wonderful. Seeing that is wisdom. The wise person doesn’t create a problem out of either extreme. This is the middle way.
Change happens in small ways
I was talking recently to one of the former long-term yogis from IMS. She practiced there for about nine months [when I was the resident teacher], and at nearly every interview she expressed concern that nothing was happening in her practice. I’d say, “Let me be the judge of that. More is happening than you think.” But she wouldn’t believe me. She had a lot of anger and frustration and couldn’t imagine that she could ever be free of it.
Now she has stopped intensive practice and returned home. The other day she called me and said she couldn’t believe how much things had changed. I asked her to describe the change. And it was precisely this subtle change that comes about by opening to vedana. She said that people still irritate her but she sees the irritation and doesn’t get caught in it, so it doesn’t mushroom into a coarse state such as hatred or anger. She sees more of the feeling as it happens. Thus, she doesn’t get caught in it. And when she does, she quickly finds her way out. That was huge for her. She has had difficulty with certain family members, and the idea that she could begin to embrace them was the furthest thing from her mind prior to meditation.
How can we feel compassion for people who are irritating and difficult? How can we learn to be patient with ourselves when we get lost in reactive states of mind? Well, this is how it happens. We open to the unpleasantness of a moment’s experience and let it be the way it is. Then it is free to end, free to die.
Recently, when I was buying a computer I found myself getting irritated with the salesman who waited on me. He did and said a couple of things that I found abrasive and offensive. A few years ago I would have canceled my order and gone to another store. But this time I didn’t. I just let the moment be imperfect and let my distaste for it be. I was very happy to see this change in myself. It was an outcome of practice. I could genuinely accept that the salesman was not being considerate. I asked myself, “So what? Can I let the imperfection of the moment be, and not make such a big deal out of it? Sometimes I’m inconsiderate. Can I forgive that?”
It used to be the case that when people crossed me or did things I didn’t like, I just wrote them off. But as a result of practice, I am finding that it is easier to let things be. To me this is liberation. I don’t think much about stages of enlightenment and ultimate liberation. To me this kind of subtle change in my reactive patterns is liberating. This is what I call liberation.
In closing, let me just remind you to be gentle. Out of ignorance we have come to value thinking too much. And we think about, censor or ignore feeling precisely because we think so much. Thus, our hearts have become closed and obstructed. We have given too much power to the head when it is meant to be a support for the work of the heart. We have to feel our way to freedom. We have to allow feeling all the space it needs and let our hearts do what they are designed to do—take us all the way to freedom.
It might interest you to know: Buddha said human birth is the most fortunate, precisely because of the mix of pleasure and pain. These occur in just the right blend here to facilitate awakening to the truth. We must trust feeling, treasure it, learn from it — open to pleasure and pain and see them as our teachers.