TRUST WISDOM Week of August 29, 2022

This week, let’s deepen our investigation of feeling tones, the subtle sensations the Buddha recommended we settle our attention on, as we search for the root of all suffering, and its end.

“All things converge on feeling tones,” the Buddha said, leaving no doubt that right here, with the feeling tones, we can see the very root of suffering.

This should inspire!

After so many years riding the ol’ emotional roller coaster, cycling through so many therapy regimes and pharmaceuticals, searching high and low to understand the source of our inner tightness and how to relieve it—the Buddha comes along and says very simply and directly, “Just look here.”

Then he points to wispy, almost-nothing but still very-noticeable sensations that flicker around each one of the six senses of sight, sound, taste, touch, smell and thought. If you want to see the root of suffering, the Buddha says, just look right here, where with every single experience of the senses we register one of three feeling tones in consciousness—that is with a pleasant feeling, an unpleasant feeling, or a neutral feeling.

If the eyes see a beautiful sunset, a pleasant feeling arises in the mind, and we can know it right now.

If the ears hear a blood-curdling scream, an unpleasant feeling hits the gut and we feel it instantly, and viscerally.

If our hand rests on a tabletop, a certain very tangible feeling arises but it has neither a pleasant nor an unpleasant feeling tone; it’s neutral.

The inspirational element of this teaching can cause gusts of confidence to flood the heart, the body, and the mind. Could it be true? That all suffering starts right here? Right at these three pinpoint spots, so easy to see and feel?

The mind feels hugely encouraged to hear that right now, all that you need to do, to deepen both in relaxation and insight, is to direct your attention to these three little ghostly-happenings at the senses—the “sense doors” as the Buddha calls them—and watch them, and learn how they behave. And then, you just keep watching and learning. There are more instructions to follow, but not too many. You’ve found the source of suffering now. From now on, it’s all about learning all you can, through direct experience, about how suffering is created here and how it can abate.

We’ve learned in recent weeks how pleasant, unpleasant and neutral feeling tones grow into suffering when we tighten around the pleasant ones, to try to grasp and keep and consume them; and we tighten against the unpleasant feeling tones, hoping either to guard ourselves against them, or to strike out at them to beat them back, or to injure them, or even to kill them. Either way, we are tensing our minds and bodies in response to pleasant or unpleasant feeling tones, and tension in the mind and body is the basis of all suffering.

In this way, we can see how “all things converge on feeling tones.” As for the neutral feeling tones, we just ignore them, because they bring us neither pleasure to grasp, nor pain to push away. But it’s a pity that we ignore the neutral feeling tones, because 99% of our experience is neutral and so, by ignoring those neutral feelings, we are ignoring 99% of our life. Next week, we’ll learn why ignoring the neutral feeling tones is doubly tragic: because by paying attention to them, they turn into pleasant feelings. And so, currently, we are missing the chance to feel joy at 99% of our life’s actual experience. But tune in next week, and we’ll learn how to feel joy under any and all conditions of daily life, by turning neutral feelings into joyful ones.

Last week, we learned how to think and relate to these two primary causes of suffering—that is, tensing the mind and body either to grasp at pleasure or to guard against pain—in the simple everyday terms of “liking and disliking.”

Through the Third Zen Patriarch, we saw how these two responses to the feeling tones—AKA “liking and disliking”—was literally the root of all suffering. “To be at peace is not difficult for those who have no preferences,” the Third Zen Patriarch wrote. “When likes and dislikes are not present, everything becomes clear and simple. Make the smallest distinction, however, and you will be exiled from the realm of eternal happiness which is your home.” The TZP even went on to say: “Seeing the world in terms of likes and dislikes is the disease of the mind.”

So far, so good. To some degree, then, we’ve now got a good guideline for how not to relate to the world and, especially, how not to make decisions from day to day. As Sayadaw U Tejaniya puts it, very plainly, “Never make a decision because you like or dislike something.” Clear enough!

But how, then, are we supposed to make even the tiniest decision in our lives, if not on the basis of likes or dislikes? When we give this a moment’s thought we come, once again, to the utter centrality of craving and aversion, “likes and dislikes,” in terms of our happiness and how to experience happiness.

We’ve seen, last week and just now above, the liking and disliking are both recipes for unhappiness, because by their very nature they create tension in the body and the mind. The normal mind, of course, doesn’t see this: it only sees and feels the temporary jolt of pleasure you get from eating chocolate cake; or from successfully barring the slightest unpleasant feelings in the body and mind. The normal mind doesn’t have the depth to notice what’s actually happening in the body and the mind as you eat chocolate cake, or as you brace yourself physically against unpleasant feelings. And that is, that you are tensing up over and over, just usually so subtly that you don’t see it right away. But surely, you will feel it over the years, as the accumulated tension from all of that grasping to own and consume, and hardening the body against unpleasant feelings, gradually turns the body into a block of pain.

The remedy is quite simple: to access a different and higher mind, than the one that sees the world in terms of grasping. This higher mind, when it notices pleasant feeling tones, will very happily enjoy the pleasant feeling tones when they come along—but the higher mind will never grasp at them, and therefore never create tension in the body and mind. Likewise, when unpleasant feeling tones come along, the higher mind will notice the unpleasantness but, knowing that the feeling tone won’t last for long, would never tense the body to guard against those feelings.

This is exactly the higher mind that we cultivate in meditation. It’s a mind that’s not always craving, grasping and tensing either to capture something pleasant, or to harden against something unpleasant.

Here is where things get really interesting.

We usually take almost every decision in our lives, based on whether that decision will bring us happiness. And yet, by using the “like/dislike” strategy for making decisions, we keep creating suffering for ourselves instead, as we discovered just above.

This is why getting to the bottom of liking and disliking, is getting to the bottom of what the Buddha said his whole life and teaching was about: suffering and the end of suffering.

One can ask: What kind of a mind is it, that isn’t always clenching up either to grab at pleasant sensations, or to fend off unpleasant ones?

In Buddhist terms, this mind is wisdom, or “panna.”

What is it that makes this wisdom “wise”? How does the wisdom mind always know not to contract the body, so that suffering isn’t constantly being created, even when we are trying to be happy?

The answer is, wisdom is wise because it sees reality as it really is.

We can recall where suffering comes from, most fundamentally, according to His Holiness the Dalai Lama: “All negative emotions are very much based on appearances. But nothing exists as it appears. So once you realize nothing exists as it appears, then wisdom is the antidote.”

In this way, we see that right there at the feeling tones, suffering happens, most fundamentally, not even because of craving and aversion.

More fundamentally, suffering happens because the mind isn’t seeing reality the way it really is, which is impermanent. When through meditation—which means looking really closely at our experience at the subtlest level—we finally see reality as it really is, we automatically stop suffering, because we automatically stop grasping and clinging and tensing up. And we’ll stop doing all those painful and harmful things because we will see that every object that we observe—from a piece of chocolate cake, to a beautiful sunrise, to a man or a woman we fall in love with—is impermanent. Seeing them as impermanent in this deep but simple way, we won’t crave and grasp at them, and in that way tense up in the attempt to capture them and consume them.

Likewise, seeing something ugly or fearful, we’ll never tense up iagainst that either, because we see that unpleasant feelings, too, are impermanent and so will dissolve away soon. Therefore, there’s no need to tense up against them or to protect ourselves against them, in any way. And just this, is the end of suffering. It’s the end of all craving, grasping and tensing up in the body and mind, out of ignorance of the way things are. Seeing the way things are, we automatically relax, allow, observe and learn about the true nature of everything we feel, think and perceive. From there we develop compassion and wisdom instead of craving and aversion, and we starting living from understanding, wisdom and love.

It’s a naturally unfolding process, there for us to experience if we just dive in. In this way, getting more familiar with the wisdom mind, AKA panna, is the sure way to happiness. That’s what we do when we look closely at the mind’s workings as we do here at Monday Friends, from week to week.

Day by day, we are learning more about how the mind works at the very most fundamental levels, where the Buddha tells us to train our attention, to observe, to see directly, and in this way to learn and educate the mind. It’s a master course in reality itself. There couldn’t be a greater topic. To master it or to get close, is to master life. The learning turns into happiness because a mind that sees the way things are, is wise in the way that nature itself is wise. In this way, our own minds, as nature, will work to perfection if we give it what it needs to flourish and thrive–the nourishment of insight.

Looking at feeling tones as we are doing now, is more powerful even than looking into the heart of an atom with a superconducting supercollider. After all, even after decades of looking, scientists have never found the ultimate physical particle upon which all material existence is supposedly based. But simply by looking into our own experience of the mind and body, at feeling tones, we can see right to the spot where suffering starts, and can permanently end. It can be a permanent end to suffering because, seeing reality at last as it truly is, the wisdom mind will never again grasp at reality to capture it, own it, consume it, exploit it, punish it, or kill it. Instead it will relax into reality’s impermanence, dissolving and becoming one with it.

In this way, the right decisions are naturally, automatically, made.

Sayadaw U Tejaniya puts it this way:

“When there is no greed or aversion in the mind, then you are able to make the right decisions. Continuity of awareness brings stability of mind and understanding of what is happening. This will enable the mind to automatically come up with the right decision or solution.

“If you can just stay with such a mind state and keep observing it, the mind will eventually settle down and make its own decision. Never try to force it. Just acknowledge, accept, and keep observing until things unfold naturally.”