Transcription
Okay. So I'm going to introduce the second practice, the second approach that we're going to be using on this retreat. Just basically two approaches. Now, this may seem like quite a lot already, already introducing something else. But after this, that's pretty much it, pretty much, for this retreat. So it will seem like a lot, but I want to offer you possibilities, and I really want you to understand this.
So we have this focusing and tuning into impermanence that we were practising. And that will stay. We'll keep doing that. So that remains an option for you to play with. But adding another option. Some of you will be familiar with a teaching of the Buddha's called the four foundations of mindfulness. It's quite well-known in this kind of tradition, four foundations of mindfulness. Another translation -- the word is paṭṭhāna, Satipaṭṭhāna. Another translation is four stations of mindfulness or four stations of awareness. Sometimes it's quite helpful, I think, to use that second translation of 'station.' In other words, we station the awareness in a certain -- not spatial location, but a certain stratum of our experience. I'll explain what I mean.
We're stationing the awareness with the body, or we're stationing the awareness with the emotions, or what I'm talking about today, what I want to talk about today is stationing the awareness with what's called vedanā. It's an aspect, it's a level of experience that we keep tuning into. So this word, vedanā, it's a Pali word, which is the language that the Buddha's teachings were recorded in. Vedanā. It's actually the second foundation of mindfulness that the Buddha talked about. And it usually gets translated as something like 'feeling' or 'feeling-tone,' but this is a little bit misleading, because in English, usually when we say 'feeling' we mean 'emotion' -- "What are you feeling? How are you feeling? I'm feeling sad. I'm feeling depressed. I'm feeling happy." Vedanā is something actually more subtle than that, much simpler in a way and more basic. So it doesn't mean 'emotion.' It's rather the felt sense of any experience being felt as pleasant, or unpleasant, or kind of in between pleasant and unpleasant (sometimes what's called neutral, but you could say just kind of in between somewhere, or neither pleasant nor unpleasant).
So very, very simple. Very simple. Now, all moments of our experience, absolutely all moments of our experience have a vedanā-tone to them. They are either felt as pleasant or unpleasant or in between. All the moments. Every moment of actually both waking and sleeping consciousness. So sometimes this is very clear: we're walking barefoot or without shoes and we stub our toe -- very clearly unpleasant. Interesting, if we're not doing it much -- and we're not doing it at all on this retreat -- but if you're familiar with watching the breath as a meditation, sometimes the breath can feel very lovely. It feels very pleasant coming into the body, feels very smooth or silky or subtle, very open. Other times, the breath feels unpleasant. A lot of the time the breath feels like it's just coming in and out, it's neither here nor there. Taste. We put something delicious in the mouth and there's a sort of explosion of pleasant sensation in the mouth, or we put something in and there's not much there at all, or unpleasant.
Sound as well -- sometimes there are lovely sounds. If I had a chalkboard here, a blackboard and long nails, and I scraped down the blackboard, for a lot of people it's unpleasant. The birds, we get very beautiful songbirds sometimes, with just beautiful delicate notes of chirping. Other times these rooks -- they're quite quiet at the moment, but they go absolutely bananas arguing with each other in the trees all day long. "Rah rah rah rah rah rah!" [laughs] Can sound to some people unpleasant. When we go outside, the wind, the breeze on the face, on the body, the coolness of that. It's quite a cool day today. Sometimes might be felt as pleasant, other times might be felt as unpleasant. A hot shower on a cold day, usually felt as pleasant. Too hot, unpleasant. Here, saving water, we don't always flush the toilets. You go in, and if it's been collecting for a while, it doesn't smell that nice. It smells unpleasant. We're going to be doing walking meditation. Sometimes just how does the walking feel -- it can feel pleasant or unpleasant, in the whole body or in the foot.
But every aspect of our experience -- a thought, a thought of "I'm a failure" or "you're an idiot" or "I'm an idiot," this is unpleasant thought. It doesn't feel nice. It doesn't reverberate with pleasantness. But a thought of loving-kindness will reverberate with pleasantness. It's a pleasant feeling to that thought. Any emotion we have -- grief, sadness, peace, joy, depression, boredom, you name it, any emotion also has a vedanā-tone to it. Some emotions are pleasant to feel and some are unpleasant.
Now, so every moment of our experience, whatever sense realm or inner or outer experience, it has this pleasant, unpleasant, or in between. At one level, that is very reductionist. It's like just dividing life up into these three categories. When I first heard that twenty-odd years ago, I was furious. I thought, "This is absolutely cold and clinical and horribly reductionistic," and I stopped practising for four years. It was a little extreme reaction. But it's understandable that someone might have that reaction. Most people I think hearing this, the sense is, "Well, okay." Kind of, "So what? What's the big deal about that?" All right. And we actually teach this. When we teach insight meditation retreats, we tend to teach this every time we go through like a week retreat. It's actually very rare that someone picks it up as a meditation and stations the awareness, tunes the awareness into this level of experience ongoing, keep coming back to that, keep coming back. Most people hear it, maybe understand it, maybe not understand it, and then just kind of a little bit forget it. That seems to be quite normal.
It's a teaching that's very easily overlooked, and very easily not given much attention to. It's understandable when we hear it, because it sounds like, "So what? What's the big deal there?" A lot of times on retreat and a lot of times in our life, the consciousness is actually preoccupied. It's caught up in something. Something has become a big deal. It could be something in the mind or the heart, something emotionally that we're caught up in, a feeling, an emotion ... I shouldn't use that word 'feeling' because it will get confusing. An emotion. Could be something in the body that's going on that we're caught up in. Could be that we're preoccupied and caught up in a self-view. How much spinning we have as human beings in terms of, "Oh, I'm terrible. I'm a failure. I can't do it. I, I, I, I, I, me, me, me, me, me," and it just goes round and round on that level, on that level. Or of course we get preoccupied with a situation. "What should I do here? This, that? Oh, this terrible thing happening." All of this is very understandable. Not to judge that at all. It's very much, you could say, part of what consciousness does and part of the human condition. But, but, at that point, at that stage when we're already preoccupied, we have already reacted to something much simpler, and part of that 'something much simpler' is this vedanā.
We've already reacted to it, and we've already complicated it. By the time we're caught up in an emotion, preoccupied with a situation, with a self-view, and harassing ourself and judging ourself, we've already complicated something. We've already reacted and complicated something, almost always without realizing it, without realizing it. And we've sort of snowballed something very simple. We've spun off some basic unpleasantness or basic pleasantness, and it's snowballed, and we've created something with it, and we've spun something with it, we've built something with it. So an emotional state is actually something that's built, it's gathered, it's compounded from simpler elements. We do that. It can feel to us like, "No, I'm just here and my emotions are just coming and going," and to a certain extent that's true, but there's a level that we build. We compound our emotional life.
Now, this is a practice. And what I really want to encourage is a practice. So there's a practice here with vedanā. Can we keep tuning in, keep attending, tuning in the attention to this simpler, more basic level of experience, just over and over again? It's a much simpler level. And what that does, first of all, it simplifies. It simplifies. We get so used to complexity and the whirlwind of complexity. It's actually just simplifying. A peace comes with just that simplifying. And there's something here to understand that's absolutely crucial for us as human beings to understand. Out of that understanding, out of the simplicity, and out of the peace comes freedom, comes equanimity. Now, again, I touched on this last night, but it's absolutely not to say that the other levels of our experience, the levels of the complexity of a situation we find ourself in or the levels of emotionality, it's not saying that they're not important. Okay? They are important, and we need, as human beings, to be able to work and address and meet things on that level. But just what would it be, as a practice sometimes, to develop the ability to sometimes tune into something much simpler?
So this really is a practice, and I want to emphasize that word, 'practice,' that we practise our sensitivity at that level. Sometimes, like I said, you stub your toe, it's very clearly unpleasant. A lot of experience is not that clearly at one extreme or the other. So right now, my right -- both feet are touching the floor, and if I just tune into the feeling-tone of the soles of the feet, it's actually just subtly pleasant. It's just subtly pleasant. Sometimes, for many people, it actually takes a little time hanging out at this level of experience to actually develop the sensitivity. Really, really worth it. But that's the first kind of stage of this, really just practising a sensitivity.
Now, the Buddha adds something very important. He says, "See the vedanā as vedanā," or "See the vedanā in the vedanā," or "See the vedanā as the vedanā." So what tends to happen is we can be sitting in meditation or in our day, and we feel, I don't know, a constriction in the heart area, and it's unpleasant, and then how quickly we interpret that block, that constriction: "Ah, I haven't sorted out my relationship with my mother. I haven't ..." whatever it is. Some self-view comes in. And it's added something on the top of it. Or because there's an unpleasant feeling, "I'm a failure as a meditator. I'm no good at this. I should just go home." Or there's something unpleasant or whatever, and we paint a picture of life: "Life is pretty grim." Very quickly the mind spins off the basic level and wants to make conclusions about a much more general, abstract level. Or if it's pleasant: "Ah, here I am, almost enlightened," or whatever. Or if it's pleasant: "I need to have more. I need to have more of this. I need to have more." Or if it's unpleasant: "I need to get away from this. I need to leave. I need to get out." So this is just normal. The Buddha says, can we see the feeling in the feeling, the vedanā in the vedanā?
All consciousnesses, human or otherwise, have a typical reaction to this vedanā. It's important that we become aware of that. There's absolutely no judgment here. There's no judgment here. This is just what happens with consciousness. When there is a pleasant feeling, we want to keep it. We want more of it. We want to extend it in time. It's what we call craving. We crave more of it. That's just very normal. But we can be aware of that. When there's unpleasant vedanā, we want to get rid of it, we want to reject it, we want to destroy it or wipe it out; there's aversion. When there's neutral feeling, it's interesting -- because it's not so charged, it doesn't seem to have so much in it for me, for the self, and oftentimes we just get bored. Something in the mind just turns off and gets disinterested. So these are our typical reactions to vedanā, typical reaction of consciousness. There's no judgment in that at all. It's just a very normal part of the human condition.
Sometimes that reaction will be very obvious. The mind is screaming, "Stop! Get out! This is horrible! Enough!" Other times, it's much, much more subtle. There's just a slight retraction or pulling away or rejection of something; it's much more subtly energetic. Is it possible to stay, to keep tuned into this vedanā level of experience and just be aware of the reaction? So it's really important to point out we're not trying to get rid of these vedanā. For the most part right now, you can't get rid of them. They're part of life. They're part of actually the flow of experience, changing all the time. But we want to see two things. The first is that change. So we've touched on this already. We want to tune into the fact of their impermanence, their arising, passing. If you sit in meditation, if you have a pain in the back or the knee or whatever, you just tune in there. You see: unpleasant, unpleasant. It flickers in and out of the experience. And then nothing. And then unpleasant. Changing, changing all the time. When we see change, the mind begins to let go. It realizes there's nothing to grasp here.
So there's a lot here. The piece I really want to emphasize this morning is being aware of the reaction to vedanā, being aware of this reaction, this pulling towards ourselves what's pleasant, what we call craving, and pushing away from ourselves what's unpleasant, even if it's just subtly energetic. Really being aware of that. And can we learn, can we learn to relax those reactions, to be aware of them and learn to relax those reactions? This is a skill, an art that we can develop as meditators. What we begin to notice if we can do this is that as we relax the reaction, suffering begins to drain from experience. So here's something unpleasant, and we're suffering because of that unpleasantness, but as I learn to relax my relationship to it the suffering tends to drain from the experience. You can also relax some of the fraughtness with craving, and the suffering drains. You begin to see that the vedanā itself, the pleasantness or the unpleasantness is actually not a problem. That's not the problem in our life. For the most part we suffer because of our relationship, because of our reaction of being pushed and pulled, of pushing and pulling.
There's a lot here to play with, but what I really want to do is -- the day is focused on these two meditations, the impermanence we've already introduced and this playing with this vedanā, and really just tuning into that. So we have these two approaches, the impermanence and this kind of allowing the vedanā. So you're really just, if it's unpleasant or pleasant, it's just allowing it to be there, allowing it to be whatever it needs to be, and seeing if it's possible to relax the relationship, to relax the reaction. Sometimes we relax our relationship just by relaxing the body. You'll notice if something's unpleasant the rest of the body tenses up a little bit. If it's an unpleasant emotion, an unpleasant body sensation, whatever it is, the rest of the body tenses up. Sometimes just relaxing the rest of the body actually relaxes the relationship with the vedanā. And sometimes one just becomes aware that there's pushing and pulling going on and that relaxes it. Sometimes just one finds other ways to relax it.
Okay. So that may be a lot of information. We've got two practices now to play with. Later on this morning, and in fact a couple of times peppered through the retreat, there will be an opportunity to ask questions and have some feedback and share a little bit how it's going, but I really encourage you to play with it and see -- make it your own, make this practice your own, and do ask questions if it's not clear. Okay. So let's do a sitting meditation now.
