by Doug Kraft
This three-part talk is a 3-way conversation between our direct experience, the Buddha’s comments on experience, and science. It explores the components of phenomena (khanda), how to work with them, and ways to skillfully alleviate suffering.
Meet your Teacher
Sacramento, CA, USA
Transcript
My father was a marine engineer. During the middle segment of his career, He worked with a team of engineers designing oil tankers. He worked for Esso International out of an office in New York City, But he frequently flew to Phoenix and to Geneva. He had become an expert on these huge steam turbines that they used to propel these crafts. And the two places in the world where these steam turbines were assembled were in Phoenix and Geneva. Yes, And I was endlessly amused as a child, You know, Of all the places in the world you couldn't get further from an ocean to assemble an engine for an ocean-going ship in the middle of the Arizona desert or up in the Swiss Alps, But there it is. The technical papers and specifications and schematics and things that came out of Geneva were all in German. And this was at a time when computers were just starting to be used for a wider and variety of tasks. So somebody in his office wrote this program to translate this technical German into English. And in their first pass, They were really delighted at it. The syntax was sometimes a little strange in English, But I couldn't understand it. I was just talking with Jens about Germans, And he was saying that as a child, I used to, I don't know, Experiment, Play around and see how many words you could put together to make a single word, You know, And German has this sometimes very long sentences. But it was very understandable, Except there was one term that showed up over and over again in the translations that nobody could figure out what it was. It was water goat. These technical papers kept on talking about these water goats. What was a water goat? And nobody could figure it out, So they finally found this engineer who was fluent in German and English to go and read the German, And he came back and said, A water goat was hydraulic ram. Words have no inherent meaning. They're just fingers pointing to a moon. They're just verbal and graphic symbols that are pointing to an experience. And Jens and I have the same experience, And we talk about it and they agree to call it a guac, You know, Then I can say, You know, How's your guac, You know, And we know what we're talking about. If I say it to anybody else, They'll just, They'll take it as an affirmation that I'm crazy. But the point is that words have no meaning of their own. And even within a single language, Words have all kinds of clusters of both meanings and connotations that go with them. So the bark of a tree has nothing to do with the bark of a dog. And neither of those have very much to do with just a superficial relationship to the drill sergeant's orders. And none of those have any relationship at all to the peppermint bark I used to get around Christmas. Still, If we understand all the different meanings a word has, Then we can usually pick the right meaning out from the context. But when we try to go from one language to another, The problem just gets vastly more complicated. When my father first told me about water goats, It's like I really got it that you can't actually translate a word directly from one language to another. Because in different languages there are different clusters of meaning and connotations around it. As far as I know, I don't think there's any word in German that means both skin of a tree, Yelp of a dog, Sharp orders, And a piece of candy. There are just whole different clusters of meanings. So we can't translate directly from German to English just by looking up words in a table. The bark of a tree is a cow in German. Oh, Bark of a tree is a cow. There you go. So that would be really helpful. Sort of like a water goat. So you can't translate that simply because what you do with a water goat is very different than what you do with a hydraulic ram. And if you try to call the drill sergeant's words candy, You know, It's going to be confusing at best. And even if you get a meaning that's kind of close, Just the subtle nuances from one language to the next can have a huge difference. For example, In English, The phrase come alive, It's almost always used metaphorically. Ah, You know, Come alive. In Chinese, The same words are usually taken literally. So when Pepsi-Cola first opened their markets in China, They took their slogan that had been very successful in the West, Come alive with the Pepsi generation, And they translated it into Chinese and put it up on billboards and in magazines and all over the place until somebody came in and said, You know, You have to understand that in Chinese, This phrase actually means Pepsi brings your ancestors back from the dead. I don't think that was very helpful in selling soda. So we have come here on this retreat to deepen our lives, Lots of different things. Let's say deepen our lives using mental techniques called meditation. And to help us learn the stuff we are looking for guidance and support from a man who arguably may have been the greatest meditation teacher the world has ever known, That we know as Siddhartha Gautama of the Sakya clan, Who lived and died 2600 years ago on a different continent, On a different land, In a different class structure, In a different economic structure, In a different world view, And in speaking a very different language. The language he spoke is further from English than English is from Chinese or German. And I don't know if you know this, But the earliest records of his talks are all recorded in Pali. The Buddha did not speak Pali. He didn't. So all his teachings were recorded in a language that even he didn't speak. He spoke a language which is dead now, It was called Pukrit, In a particular dialect as far as we know, Which is called Magadhi Pukrit. Pukrit in Pali don't have a word for meditation. It's simply not in the lexicon. And as I think I mentioned the other night, The Pali word that they used to translate the Pukrit word was Bhavana. And Bhavana is, I think as I mentioned, Is an agricultural term. It refers to what farmers do, You know, Till the soil, Plant crops, Tend the crops. And it might better be translated as cultivation in an English that retains some of the hints of agricultural roots. But Bhavana was a common term that was known by peasants and farmers and everybody. It was very earthy. It had this connotation of taking something that's there and kind of nurturing it along in a natural way. While in English, You know, The word meditate just has a slightly esoteric tone. You know, It's something that special meditator type people do. And so it has a whole different flavor. So I'm saying all this not to discourage you, But simply to say that, Well, For one thing, It's amazing. It's just amazing how much we can actually learn from the Buddha despite all these limitations. But to really understand what he was saying, It helps certainly not to get caught in the nuances of the English words because he didn't speak English. He didn't speak Pali and that sometimes the nuances are really not relevant. It helps to remember that we are talking about states of consciousness and qualities of awareness that are far, Far subtler than water goats or hydraulic rams or candies or skins on trees or yelps of dogs or dead relatives, For that matter. Very subtle things. And it helps to understand something of the context of his life so that how the people he was speaking to would hear what he was saying. He wasn't speaking to us. As much as we might like to believe that, He really was not talking to us. He wasn't thinking about 21st century people speaking a language that didn't even exist. And so the more we can understand some of the context of his life, It helps to kind of bring it alive. And then what you have to do, I hate to say this, But it's actually just let your mind go loose and actually feel your way through all the nuances and stuff to get a sense of what he was talking about. So this is not what I'm going to talk about tonight. What I want to talk about tonight is the inner landscape. I think we've got the outer landscape to take care of out here these days between the brothers and the weather and stuff. I want to talk about the inner landscape of when we're meditating or just look inside. What is it that we see there? What is it that we experience? What's going on there? And to talk about this inner landscape, I'm going to do it kind of in the form of a three-way conversation. So one of the voices, One of the aspects we're going to be looking at is just our own intuitive inner experience. And then the second voice we want to bring to this is actually the Buddha's commentary on what he had to say about it. And the third voice I'm going to bring into it, Wish me luck, The third voice I want to bring into it is actually science, What science has to say about this. The Buddha said that to see clearly what's going on, We have to see things objectively and impersonally. And for us today, Oftentimes the scientific language and scientifically endeavor are the ones that most convey that sense of at least trying to see objectively and trying to see them personally. So we would like, I just want to see if we can weave these all together. So this will be a three-way conversation between our direct experience, The Buddha's commentary, And science, And particularly what we're learning from evolutionary psychology and the neurology of consciousness. So where to begin? To help keep us on track a little bit with this, I'd like to start with what the Buddha thought was most important, Which was? The end of suffering. The alleviation of suffering. Actually, What the texts say is that, As the Buddha is saying, I teach one thing and one thing only, Suffering and the relief of suffering, Which to me sounds like two things. So right away you know we've got a translation problem, Just right from the get-go. I think what he was saying was that, As Miriam says, That alleviation of suffering was really what he's after, But with this one caveat, Is that we have to understand what suffering is before we can really alleviate it. So, What is suffering? Non-acceptance of what is. Incessant thinking. Tension. What is satisfaction? Pain. Worry. So it's hard, Isn't it? It's like something we think we all know, But we try to say what it actually is. And most often when I've asked this, And I've seen it, These are the kinds of responses people give, Which is not actually describing what suffering is, But kind of giving examples of it, And also giving, Talking about what some of the causes, Without actually saying what it actually is. And I think this is really important because when you look at the text, By the way, You're in good company. This is exactly what the Buddha does. It's hardly any place that he defines what suffering is. What he does is he gives examples of it. And I think of it, It's sort of like if somebody asks you what green is, I mean, What are you going to say? Green is yellowish blue. I don't know, For me that doesn't give me much, Actually what comes to mind is a Cub Scout uniform. Is blue with this yellow neckerchief. But if you say, Well, Green is the color of grass in the spring, It's the color of leaves in the summer, The color of bell peppers, The go light on the street light. You give a bunch of examples, It's sort of like saying, No, You know what green is and you just point to them. And this is what the Buddha does as well in Samadhi-suta, Majjhima-gaya number 9. He says birth is suffering, Aging is suffering, Sickness is suffering, Death is suffering, Sorrow, Lamentation, Pain, Grief and despair are suffering. He's not defining what it is. He's basically saying, You know what it is, These are just some examples. Not to obtain what one wants is suffering. In short, The five aggregates affected by clinging are suffering. This is called suffering. He's saying you already know what it is. And this is the word, This is the gawk, This is the word, We're using to point to it. So part of the difficulty, Of course, Is that suffering is intangible. It doesn't have simple location, You can't actually point to it, It's subjective, It's real, It's something we can experience, But it can only be experienced inside. So this brings us to another question, What is experience? Okay, Experience is intangible. What else could you say? Phenomena? What we feel? So, You know, Another way you can come at the question, Which is a little sideways, But is to ask, Who has experiences? Does the gray and white cat out there have experiences? Yeah. We actually don't really know. You can't really know, But it looks like it does, Right? You know, He likes things, Just scratching me, Purrs, He seemed to respond, It seems there must be experiences going on underneath there. I was thinking about this, This is a harder place, But I think even fish probably have experiences. You know, I remember I had one of those little round fish bowls when I was growing up, My fish kept dying because it wouldn't change the water and didn't have a pump in it, But while they were alive, You know, I'd come and I'd sprinkle some of the fish food onto it, And the fish would see it and they would come swimming in the top, You know, God dropping manna from the sky and they would swim. So they seemed to recognize stimulus and move and respond to them. So, Let's bring science into the conversation. So when neuroscientists were, Started to explore consciousness, The first thing they ran up against was they had to define, You know, Science, You had to get things nailed down. What is it we're talking about when we're talking about experience? And they have a very interesting definition of consciousness, Of experience that I never would have thought of, But it's kind of provocative. They say that what experience is the tip of the iceberg, It's the upper level of all the information that flows through our system. Okay, So what do they mean by flow of information? Let me give you a relatively simple example. Jellyfish. Okay. Jellyfish are thousands and thousands of cells. We think of them as pretty simple, But 500 million years ago they were the most complex creatures on the planet. And jellyfish have specialized cells in them. They don't have eyes, But they have, They call them eye spots, They're places on the bell of the body of the jellyfish that's more sensitive to light. And they have these tentacles that have cells that are very sensitive to picking up chemical information, What we would say would taste good and what would be nutritious and what might be poisonous for it. And they have other cells that specialize in muscle movements, Moving the bell of the jellyfish. So somehow, For the organism to operate, It has to get the information about what's in the water and the light and stuff, Have to get that information to the muscle cells to get them to operate. So jellyfish have the beginning of neural tissue. Pass information from one place to the other. We are a lot more complex than jellyfish. And there is just hundreds, Thousands, Millions of pieces of information that are flowing through our body every moment. To just give one little example is every second there are about two million cells in your body that die. Every second. So somehow the body has to know to recognize those dead cells, What to do with them, How to get them out of the system, How to replace them, Etc. , Etc. So there's a vast amount of information that is being transmitted around there. 99% of it is completely below our conscious awareness. But there's all this information flowing through there. So what they're saying—hang in with me, This all makes sense in a while, Let's see where I'm going—what they are saying is that what we call experience is just the top level of all this information flowing through our system. You understand whether it makes sense to you or not? So it's hard to know if a jellyfish actually has experiences. But if you get to slightly more complex creatures like fish, Crayfish and shrimp can be conditioned to move towards or away from light so they pick up stimulus and must have some way of storing memory and they have the underlying physiological structures, The basic physiological structures that we see that underlie experience for us. So what are some examples of the type of information that flows through our system that we notice? Visual, Light, Yeah. Pardon? Dharma talks? That just flows over the system. Yeah, So there are the four senses. There are thoughts, You know, Which is actually processing stuff internally. We can experience those. Verbal? Yeah, So there's sounds. Sound is coming and those get translated into meaning inside. Metabolic? Yeah, Hunger, Thirst, Itchiness, Sometimes you need Bandrel. So we've probably gone as far as we can go with that one. So let's bring the Buddha back into the Khanda section. So the Buddha recognized that there's lots of different types of information that flows through our system and that we experience different types of information in different ways. And so he divided experience up into five, What he calls Khandas. Khanda is usually translated as aggregate. I like the word cluster better. So he says there are five different kinds of experiences, There are five different clusters of kinds of experience and among those five Khanda is everything that we experience falls into one of those five Khanda. So what I'd like to do is to run you through all these and since we are getting into Pali and stuff like that, I don't want people to worry too much about the language. So this is just a few Pali terms. So what I want to do is I want to go through the five Khandas and just quickly give you the Pali term and then we'll try to break it down a little bit to what he was actually referring to because none of these terms translate smoothly into English. So the first, And there are some other terms on there that we're not talking about tonight, But I thought I would just throw some on there that might be useful for you. So the first Khanda is called Rupa and we're going to play some games with these, We'll have some fun with these. The first one is called Rupa and Rupa is usually translated as body which is actually a little confusing. But if you look deeper into the language, Pali has another word for body which is Kaya and Kaya refers to just the physical substance of the body but Rupa refers to the physical substance of a body that is animated and alive and operating. So a dead Rupa is an oxymoron. So what Rupa really refers to are the senses. That's how we experience the body, So there's one whole area of experience that we would call raw sensation which is just uninterpreted information coming into our system. The second Khanda is called Vedna and Vedna is usually translated as feeling or feeling tone but it is definitely, It's not emotion, It just refers to whether something is painful, Is pleasant or is another type of feeling that is neither painful nor pleasant. And Vedna, The Buddha says that Vedna is very important and he says almost nothing about it. And I have in the last year or so have found that being able to recognize Vedna is really extraordinarily helpful in a meditation practice. So we're going to spend tomorrow night talking about Vedna and having some fun and games with it. The third Khanda is Sanya which means perception and in Buddhism perception is the process of actually putting a label on something. So it's actually capturing it. That's what it is. So here is handout number two for the night. Yes, Yes. So chair is a concept. It's a pointer and it's not a raw sensation but it's a label that we put on it. And so we're going to play with labels for a minute as soon as you get these. So these are a bunch of optical illusions. Okay, So let's just go through them for a moment and then we'll bring them back to what they tell us about the Khandas. So in the upper left corner, What's that all about? Can you see what all those blocks are? Here, I tell you what, Just read it off my page. Okay, So you see what happens is in this one they take all the spaces between the letters and they give you all these visual cues that these are actually blocks and solid materials so it brings all your awareness to that and you miss it. But from a distance you can't see all that. Is this the same as that? Yes. Your paper and mine are the same? Okay, Just watch it very closely. Let's look at it up close. Oh yeah, Yeah, Yeah, I see it. I got it. Amazing. You can see what I was concerned about. There's a way in which you start talking about the Khandas. It starts out really dry so it's important to have some fun with this. So you understand how that one works. So when you're up close you see all kinds of cues you can't see at a distance and that just scrambles things. Okay, And the second one you have these two lines. One has feathers and one has points on it. And so you've probably all seen this and the question is which line is longer? And you probably know what the answer is, Right? They're the same length. But let me just say which line looks longer? Yeah. And do you know why that is? So one of the clues they found with this is they take this diagram and take it to, You know, Bushmen are people who have never lived around buildings with straight lines on them. They look at it and they say, Oh, It's the same length. And so what's amazing about it is what it is is those lines are cues to distance and perspective. So the one that you say longest looks like you're looking into the corner of a room and it's far away while this looks more like you're seeing the edge of a building coming towards you. So this unconsciously looks like it's closer and the one looks further away. And what I think is amazing about that is you think that's got to be really wired in but it's actually conditioned into us. But when you look at it, It just looks that way even without knowing that there's perspective that gives you that. Okay, So the middle one on the left. The trick here is you have a pencil or if you take your finger and put it on one place on the spiral and then very carefully trace the spiral down into the center. Yeah. Well if you have a pen, Just actually draw all the way around on it and then you'll see what's actually happening. So it's not a spiral at all. It's a series of concentric circles but it gives a slanted line on all of this. And I kept on looking at it and I realized the places that I see that are spiraling down are outside of the center of my focus of attention. You know, So if you focus on one place it looks round but then off slightly edge of it it looks like it curves in because we're not those Q's. Okay, Ready for the next? So in the next one are there black dots? Yeah. So when we're talking about tandas, You know, It's the difference between raw sensation and perception. There are no black dots on the page but you certainly perceive them. Everybody but Erica. It helps to have a really bright light. I don't remember the exact science of what happens on this but there are, It has to do with two things. One is, You know, If you look at an object in a very bright light and then look away there will be an after image. And the other is that the eye does not send raw pixels to the brain. What it actually does is it processes it and it looks at lines and it looks at shapes. That's why, You know, If you look, Like it's harder to focus on a blank wall than it is along an edge and that's because the eye has actually naturally donned the edges. And so that, It just, Somebody cleverly put this together in a way that it just, We think we're just seeing objectively what's there but there's all this interpretation that just goes thrown right in. Okay, And the next three I think are more obvious what the illusions are. So is the guy down there on the bottom left, Is he looking towards you or is he looking to your right? And the interesting question is if you can see both at once, Or does what happen is it flip back and forth really quickly? And then there's the elephant and the question is how many legs does the elephant have? Yes. And if you put your finger over to just cover up his feet it's very obvious that he has four. And then if you put your finger up higher, You know, To cover the bottom of his body it's obvious that he has five. But obviously what happens is he has cues to space. No, Those are just the dots that you weren't seeing on the other one. Okay, And then the bottom left. I've been the bottom right. Yeah, I turned around so it was on my left, But bottom right. So does somebody always want to describe quickly what they see there? There's an old man with no teeth. Okay. Looks like he might have no teeth. Yeah. There's another person in there. That's right. So this is oftentimes called a father and son. So there's an old man that looks like he may not have any teeth and he's looking off a little bit towards us to the right. And then there's a young man who is turned around like this. He's kind of looking away and you see the back of his face. The nose of the old man is the jaw of the young man. Yes. Oh yeah, Yeah, Yeah. Okay. I saw the younger man first. It took me a little bit to find him. I knew there was two, But. It's just funny because I think there's a woman. Pardon? I think there's a woman. You think there are women? Women. Okay. Yeah, Yeah, I can see that. I can see that. Okay. And does somebody want to read out loud the paragraph at the bottom? Most people are able to read words as long as each word has all the right letters and the first and last letters are in the right places. Everything else can be mixed up. The mind easily puts the rest into familiar patterns and image? Meaning. Meaning. Raw sensations? Rupa, Kav, Khanda and perception. Sanja, Khanda are not the same. Yeah. So all this is on spelling that it really is true. You know for most people if you get the first and the last letter in the right place and have all the correct letters in there, Most people can actually scan through three quarters, Eighty percent of it anyway and just read it. So the mind is just almost unconsciously rearranges what's there. So the point of all this is, Well it's in that last sentence. How did you get spell check to leave it alone? Yeah, You should just see what it looks like in spell check. I have a special spell check that just assumes every word is correct. Is it called the typewriter? Yes, The typewriter. Okay, So what do you get from all this? Your mind plays tricks. Mind plays tricks. You can't trust what you have. Perception is one thing is constructed. So we think of perception as something that just goes straight in but it's something that's built. So Winslow was asking, I don't know if anybody's here, Asking if it was chair a concept. It is. I mean it seems really solid but if you didn't know the word chair and knew what it would refer to, You know the word chair would be meaningless. But we do this really automatically. So in meditation, You know the mind is interpreting what's going on there all the time. And it can put things together in all kinds of strange and interesting ways. I've heard another variation. So everybody has seen this and one looks longer but they're the same except somebody carefully makes one longer but does the same thing because you've seen it before. You think, Oh no, They're the same size except they're really not. Yeah, Yeah. I have this thing that's fun on my website called 181, I don't remember the number, 170 but it's over 100 cognitive distortions. And they are different types of distortions that have been deeply researched and documented such that if you like somebody you're more likely to trust them. And it just goes down. And it's fun, I didn't bring it, But it's fun just to read down the list of cognitive distortions and it's amazing that we either perceive anything anywhere near to correct. Help me with some of these people. Talking in absolutes is a cognitive distortion and it's a perception. Yeah. It's perception is also personal. Yes. Because everybody can see something, Anybody can see something different. Right. Police know that eyewitnesses to car accidents are notoriously bad evidence. It's very, Very tricky because people will see what they want and not even realize it. It's not like they're deliberately trying to do it. And so this is some of what we're up against when we're meditating and looking and trying to see what's going on inside. And it can help sometimes to actually get back down to the particular pieces of data and then you can see this process of interpretation. And particularly when you get to complex emotions and stuff like that, They're always constructed. Do you know the story about the bird in the basement? Yeah. Some of us do, Some of us don't. Okay. Well, The ones who don't know it will just have to feel out of it. I think I heard this from Joseph Goldstein. There was this couple that had bought a house and they were very excited and the first day they were there and they moved everything in just to get everything in. And when they woke up the next morning they heard this bird chirping down in the basement. And they were charmed that it was out in the woods, That this woodland creature would come inside. So they were very careful not to go down in the basement because they didn't want to disturb it, They didn't want to scare it off and get it to fly away or something like that. But after a couple of days they had to go down there and do something. So the husband tiptoed down the stairs very carefully and he looked around and looked around and he couldn't see the bird and couldn't see any sign of it. He looked and then he was looking off in one direction and suddenly the bird chirped right behind him and he turned around and it was a fire alarm. The smoke alarm. The smoke alarm that was defective. And after that the two found the chirping so annoying that they called an electrician to come out right away and cut the thing off. So the whole affect and everything can be changed by this. Okay, So we've got Rupacanda, We've talked about Veda and then there's Sanya which is perception. And so this is just to kind of illustrate that perception has a great deal of construction involved in it. What we see and what the world that we walk around is mostly a whole collection of thoughts with very little, I mean there's direct sensory information that comes in. Mostly it's constructed. The fourth Khanda is called Sankara. And Sankara are our thoughts, Beliefs, Ideas, Mental constructs. We talked about this a little bit before that evolution, We are descended from scavengers and the way that scavengers survive is actually to draw mental maps and sort of catalog all the stuff that's around there because they can't depend as much on just raw instincts to find food. And so let's do a little exercise. So what I'd like you to do is to close your eyes for a moment. And so imagine that you are standing in a room, You're off to the side of the room and off to your right there is a door and off to the left is a door. So you're standing kind of in the middle of the room off to the side and there are two doors, One on either end. And both doors are open. And what comes in those doors are your thoughts. So just imagine what your thoughts might look like as they come in the door and they come in on the right and they move through the room and they go out on the left. So just imagine you can see those thoughts and see how they move, What they look like. And then maybe one of these thoughts stops right in front of you and you just examine it for a moment and then it moves on. And now the thoughts keep coming in but the doors on the left close so the thoughts are coming into the room but now they can't get out. Just see what that does to the scene. And now the door on the right closes too so thoughts can't come in but the ones that are there can't get out. And just see what happens to them. And now the door on the left opens, The door on the right stays closed so thoughts can leave but no new ones can come in. See how that affects the scene. And now both doors are open again so thoughts can come in and move through and go out the other side and just see how different thoughts move or travel. Okay, Now you can open your eyes. What are some of the things that you experienced? A marching band of clowns. A marching band of clowns. A lot of space when they leave. And you smile when you say that. A lot of space when they leave. They kind of ping pong around when both doors are closed. It became very much quieter. Very loud. Cacophony sometimes. When they couldn't get out? Yeah. Yeah. Chaos. I think I've heard that. I think that's more personal than the others. Like what? If they were critical thoughts. If those are hard and others are neutral. When they couldn't get out, They started interacting with each other much more rather than just marching through. They egg each other on. They egg each other on. Yeah. Do you have thoughts that egg each other on? I'm not that stifling when they couldn't get out. Ah, They're stifling. Yes. Suffocating in your own thoughts. It's a terrible kind of death. Once all of them got out, The ones which were stuck, The second time around, Going second time around and passing through, It was much easier for them to pass through. Ah. It was easier after you had had all that. So what's important to me about this, So the fourth khandhas in kara, Thoughts, Beliefs, Ideas, Thought constructs, Is that we very easily get caught up in the content of them. And this is just a fun little mind game of actually looking at the thoughts and seeing something other than just the content of them. Seeing their motion, Their color, Their mood, Their flavor, Etc. And in meditation that's actually very important. That actually seeing the mood and texture and movement of the thoughts is vastly more important and more helpful than the content. As I like to say, If the content of our thoughts could liberate us, We would be living in a different world. Because most of us have milked the content of our thoughts for as much as we're going to get out of them, Pretty much. And so living with them and working with them in part of this inner landscape is learning to see the texture and the feel and those other types of qualities of the thinking process itself. And then the fifth khandha, The last one, Is vinayana. And vinayana actually has two different meanings, At least in English, And I've heard different people talk about it, Both of them. One is, Well it's oftentimes translated as consciousness and it's consciousness that has two different meanings. One is the way that we interpret what we experience and assign meaning to it. Okay? So a political progressive and a tea party person can look at the same political data and come up with whole different understanding of what's going on because they're looking at it through a different consciousness. Or as I like to say, A five-year-old, Let's say a fifteen-year-old and a fifty-year-old walk down the street together. They see all the same sounds, See all the same sights, Hear all the same sounds, All the same smells, But they are in a different world because how they interpret those are different. So the other meaning, And I think it's closer to what this is about, Is not so much how you interpret meaning but is the awareness itself. And this is critically important in meditation. So for example, Some of you have done this with me so we'll do it quickly, But right now be aware of your feet. Now be aware of your hand. Now be aware of my voice. Now be aware of hearing. Now be aware of seeing. Just know that you are seeing. Not so much the content, Not what you see, But just know that sights are registering. Now be aware of the sounds that are coming from outside. And now see if you can just be aware of the fact of hearing. The sounds outside you kind of go out and sort of label them a little bit. See if you can hear. Just be aware that this process called hearing is going on. So, Kind of experiment. Comments? Right. Right. Good. Good. Anything else? Yeah, You can notice how it shifts. What did you notice about the shifting? Right. So in awareness there are always two aspects to it. One is the awareness itself and the other is the object. So the object was there but there was no awareness of it. So probably the same thing with your feet. My guess is that most of you were not particularly aware of your feet until I told you to. But your feet were probably here before. So when you wake up in the morning, One of the first things that happens is that you open your eyes and seeing begins. And how often are we aware that we are actually seeing, That there is this process called seeing? That's where we get pulled to the objects, Right? The clock. So meditation is about the awareness itself, Not the object. But you can see how much we get pulled to the objects. And so the trick is to become aware of the awareness. To be aware that right now you are, Most of you anyway, Are hearing the sound of my voice. That there is hearing happening. That there is seeing. Not so much what you see but that there is seeing. If you want to know what miracles are, It's right there. The fact that we can see. Just the process. And you know it's that old thing they say all the time, Most people don't appreciate until they go blind or something like that. We just take it for granted. But it's just knowing that. So, Yeah. How is awareness of awareness going to help us end suffering? So suffering, We'll talk about this a lot more tomorrow night. But suffering has to do with resistance to experience. So if you are just aware of something, There actually is no suffering in that. It's actually in the resistance to it. But often times we don't see the resistance. So you probably know this experiment that it's very easy to do. They used to do it back in the 60s a lot. You get a bucket of ice water and then they have somebody to stand in it and they sort of time them. You know how long they can stand in that. And at first it may be two seconds. And then every day they do it again. And after about a week or so people can stand there for 15, 20, 30 seconds. And it's just as you become used to seeing the rupa, The raw sensation, There's less of pain associated with it. It's also true, I've heard this a long time ago, I hope it's true, That with babies, If you look at the amount of medication it takes to alleviate a pain, Sometimes you need a massive amount for an older person, A slightly smaller amount for a middle age and for a child, Very little bit and sometimes the baby is hardly anything because they haven't learned to be scared of the pain yet. But it's also the body mass, Isn't it? Yeah I think these dosages were taking body mass into account. Nice try. One more exercise. So to have a clear what the five khanda are. So there are raw sensations that are completely uninterpreted. There is a feeling tone of whether it's painful or pleasant or neither. There is the perception sort of label you put on something, That's a tree, That's a dove, That's something like that. There is the sankara, The thoughts, This is the one we love the most, That we live in the most, All these thoughts and ideas about what's going on. And then there's the awareness itself. So what I would like you to do is to put your things down and stand up. And without looking in anybody's face, So have your eyes down a little bit, I want you to just start walking around the room and see if you can just identify various khanda. If you can notice again just what the sensations are and if you can notice the feeling tone, Whether it's painful or pleasant or neither. And notice the perception, Which is the labels you put on things, That's a chair, That's my foot, That's the rug, That's the sound, That's Doug's voice. And then see if you can be aware of the thoughts that are going on. This is cool, This is weird, What's he talking about? What's happening next? All kinds of thoughts. What's going on out in the world? Now, Again, Without looking at people's faces, As you walk around, You can see other bodies walking around the room and see what happens inside as you perceive those different people without looking them in the face. And then sensations, Pleasant, Unpleasant, Neutral, Labels, Thoughts and awareness itself. Now keep milling around, But now what I'd like you to do is to look into people's faces as you walk by them and just see what that does to your consciousness and awareness and your feelings and sensations. And just see if you can identify the khandhas. And then just walk back to your chair. And sit down. And as you sit down, Again, Just notice, See if you can notice the various khandhas, The different clusters of experience, Raw sensation, Feeling tone, Perception, Thought and awareness. Awareness itself. And now close your eyes and keep noticing those khandhas. J Lungers. And to see what happened when I rang the bell there. There was a sensation, Right? Was it pleasant, Painful? Was there a perception label on top of that? Is that a signal for me to come back? Is there a story about that? Some ideas and thoughts? And what about the awareness itself? Bring your awareness to yourself, To your body, To your form. Raw sensations. Pleasant sensations, Painful sensations, Neutral sensations. Perceptions, Labels, Thoughts, Stories, Sankara, Ideas. Awareness itself. Awareness itself. That one was intended as a signal. Observations, Comments, Questions. It's very hard to distinguish the Khandhas when you're in motion. There's just so much information coming in. It's hard to, I understand why things still makes it so much easier. So much of what goes on is automatic pilot. But feeling tone, That seems to be, To me, That speaks more, That says more than somebody in the other world. So feeling tone is tricky. I don't know if I explained it enough. It's actually pleasant, Unpleasant, And neutral. It's not emotion. What we call emotion has feeling tone in it. It can feel good, It can feel bad, And has ideas and thoughts and beliefs and histories and memories and all kinds of stuff. But the feeling tone itself is simple. That's vedna. And I'm glad you're seeing it because I think it's actually critically important. And we're going to talk about that more tomorrow night. It's the motivator that gets stuff going, For good or for ill. It feels like an experience. It's just an experience of moving through and my body and my mind feel they've been affected by this experience. It's sort of widened a little bit. I think my understanding of this. To me it's almost like you're outside looking into yourself. Yes, And part of the reason for that is that we unconsciously identify with it. And so when you stop identifying it just feels like you're outside yourself. Which ones take more effort for you? Yes. That's right. Yes, And vedna is the one that drives that. Because there is a deep wired in, They're called anousia. An anousia is like a deeply wired in hindrance that we don't see until it's activated. And so the most obvious anousia is a tendency to prefer what's pleasant and to dislike what's unpleasant. And we don't see that so much until it gets activated. And then it's just obvious. So it's hard to see the anousia itself, But we see the effect of it all the time. So you're going around and we'll both all be loving and kind and take everybody in equally, Etc. , Etc. But the system will have some, We'll see some people as more pleasant and some as less and that can all be very embarrassing. But it actually goes on. And it's not that we're necessarily deciding to do that or we can condition ourselves. But if you can't see that tendency to be pulled one way or another, Then you'll just be driven by it. What do you spell that word? Anousia? No. I'm a terrible speller. It's translated from Pali and so they're always translated phonetically, Thank you. You know, Phonetically. So A-N-N. And in the translations there are no silent letters, So A-N-U. So it would be A-N-N-U-S-Y-A. Alright, I thought you were saying a word I should recognize. Oh, A nuisance? No. Movement actually, I think, I'm thinking of children that have disabling or handicapping conditions and you want to develop their vocabulary, Their awareness there. And movement exercises of varying kinds can be very helpful to wake them up and to grow them. So did you find when you're looking at people's faces that that have a strong effect? I was just going to say it's probably very important, But when we were looking at each other's faces, The sankara just kind of, You know, So many more stories came into it. Right, Right. So it's just to understand, And this is human wiring, You know, About spindle neurons, Etc. , Etc. , We are wired for empathy. And when we look at somebody it just triggers all kinds of brain activity. And if you're paying attention to it and as you're walking around in silence you can do this quietly and just notice, You know, Where your awareness, Where your attention goes and what you're drawn to and away from. It's a very, Very strong stimulation for us to be able to see. Okay, That's what I had to share with you tonight. So are there questions? Do you have the, Do you see the implications of this? And you know, I would say because what happens, So one of the things the Buddha said about that, This is from Madhyamad-gītā, Number ten, The Saṭṭha-patana-sūta, A person abides contemplating the body as body, The feelings as feelings, The mind as mind, Mind-objects as mind-objects. And what he means by that is what's really important is to see things in their own terms. Because what happens very often is, Let's say you feel an emotion and somebody says, What are you feeling? And they say, Well, I'm feeling as you don't like me. That's actually not a feeling at all, It's a concept, It's a construct, Right? And so there is a tendency to substitute one for the other. And so the Buddha is talking about, It's really important to see vedna as, To actually see the feeling tone as the feeling tone. Something is pleasant, So what do you see? Oh, That's something I like. You actually miss the pleasant part of the experience. And part of the reason it's important, I'll talk about this more tomorrow night, But particularly when there is pleasant vedna there, I think that it's really important to actually let it soak in a little bit. We live in a pretty jagged culture. And so when the naturally soothing qualities are there to allow them to kind of seep into our bones a little bit, To savor them. What it does is it builds a kind of resilience so that when I get thrown by something there's a little more equanimity behind it. Okay. Did you ever sit on a Goenka retreat? Did I ever sit on a Goenka retreat? No. Well, He goes on about evaporating all the sankaras, And from the definition here I don't understand why you would want to do that or why you would even function if you did do that. So I think I'm assuming that what he means by that is if you see sankara as sankara. So in other words, If you see, It's like watching the thoughts go through the room. If you don't get caught in the content but just see the sankara as sankara, Then the content actually evaporates. I think sankara has other means of the root. So sankara is, The root is kara, Which is the same as karma, Which means action. And the san puts some extra emphasis on it. So what sankara actually means is something that has been put into form. And if you look up sankara in Pali dictionaries, Probably it has more different meanings than just about any other term. So the root of it is that something has been pushed into form, But sankara is used to describe all kinds of different concepts from mind objects, Etc. , Etc. The important part about, At least the derivation of the term, My understanding is that sankara gets translated as formations. And you can see it comes from the root of things being formed, But in English formation sounds like rock strata, Something that's really solid and almost eternal. But in Pali the implication is something has been put together, It means it can fall apart quite easily. So it actually means, You know, It's got a fragility to it. But yeah, It's a very complicated word. At the time I took it to me, You were talking about some sort of like deconditioning process to like get us out of our conditioned habitual tendencies. But I'm not totally sure if that was the breath or the detail that you want somebody to see. One of the sort of 24 popular meanings to sankara is defilements. Meaning the defilements are constructed, They've got resistance, All kinds, So it's a complicated structure. Are you saying defilements or defilements? Defilements. It's another word that kind of means hindrance, Some type of things, It's stuff that disrupts. Pardon? The feeling tone can be very subtle, Is that correct? Can be very, Very subtle. I had trouble trying to not have images and things that I knew I liked and disliked, So conceptually I knew that I couldn't. I tried to be aware of the feeling tone to avail mutual. I just had no awareness of the feeling tone. But I knew I didn't like it, Or I liked it, But the tone just wasn't so subtle, It just wasn't, There was no awareness of it whatsoever. Now I'll give you a little tool, A little mental app that you can use to help recognize it, And it's fairly simple, But it's like it had a profound impact on me to just actually begin to see it directly. Because you're right, It is subtle and we miss it, But when you can see it directly it just has a huge impact. That's a teaser. Yeah, It's a taser. Then you were thinking of leaving. So, Again the Buddha's instructions were to be aware of sensations as sensations, To be aware of feeling tone as feeling tone, To be aware of perceptions as perceptions, To be aware of sankara, And you can think of that as stories and mental constructs in this case, As sankara, And to notice awareness as awareness, And to not cross them, As we do all the time, To just be aware of them in their own terms. And that's one of the foundations of freedom. After that it's a snap. No, It's not. I can just feel that go through the room. So, Let's take a moment. And if there is anything that's been valuable or useful here for you tonight or throughout this day, There's this sense of understanding that that is supportive not only of you but the people around you and the other people in your life. So, Knowing that we spend just a few moments here just sending out that wish, Well-being, For freedom, For clarity, Peacefulness, Ease, To all of us yogis in this, Our little sangha here together. Just send out that wish for their well-being. And if you feel any of those wishes coming in from other yogis, Just let it soak in. Just let it soak in. And then sending it out to the people and creatures in wider and wider circles out around the St. Francis Center, Out into the surrounding area, Out around the nation, Around the planet. May all beings see clearly. May all beings know kindness. May all beings have courage. May all beings trust in their deepest nature. May all beings be free. May it be so. Thank you all for your practice. It's really delightful to speak to you all individually today and see how well you're doing. If you've got good energy, Take a little walk, Come back and sit, Or if you just want to sit when you get tired, Take care of your body.
5.0 (21)
Vanessa
December 27, 2020
Thank you. Very interesting. Will return 🙏
