TRANSCENDING FEELINGS                                                                                                                   Week of August 15, 2022

The great puzzle that meditation solves is simple.

How can the human mind heal its own suffering? 

Especially if the mind is hurting from painful thoughts and emotions, how can it heal itself?  

Where does the suffering mind get the strength and wisdom it needs to self-heal? 

We can’t heal heartbreak with a scalpel, nor depression or anxiety with stitches. And we can’t keep the mind alive outside of the body for a little while, like a heart-lung machine does, just long enough to fix the suffering mind and then replace it back, as good as new. 

The Buddha solved this puzzle.

“Ehipassiko!” he said. 

It was a rallying cry to his followers: “Come and see!”

A fuller translation would be something like: “Go inside of yourself, to see how you create suffering in your own mind, and by seeing that process very clearly, learn how to stop!”

That is the self-healing of meditation.

Tonight and this week, we’ll continue practicing in this way, focusing on a very particular step in the process the Buddha laid out for going into the mind, to see and heal how it creates suffering. 

The Buddha’s compassion lay in the fact that he realized how hard it can be, to go inside the mind, to seek and find the source of suffering. It’s not a skill that most of us have learned, so it is new; and besides that, the mind has all kinds of tricks and defenses against the process of internal self-healing that is meditation. Because for one thing, the mind has been in charge of life for many years, and it doesn’t want to give up that position of control easily. So it fights back, and hard. 

For another thing, the mind is subtle and fickle. Surely, you’ve noticed. The mind is usually taken up with distractions and its completely unconscious reactions to reality. These unconscious reactions to reality tend to serve basic physical survival pretty well, but not much more than that—especially not spiritual growth, which means knowing ourselves beyond the limits and the destiny of the physical body and the nind. 

Addressing the mind’s subtle nature first, the Buddha begins by directing attention to very obvious objects in our experience—the breath and the body—and only going to subtler places after that.

The Buddha’s route map recommends that we aim our attention internally in four very specific places, which lead us closer and closer, progressively, to where we create suffering in our minds. 

Those four places were: 

1. The Body                                                                                                                                                       2. Feeling Tones                                                                                                                                                 3. The Mind                                                                                                                                                     4. Realities

 This week, and over the next four weeks, we will be practicing primarily with #2, the feeling tones. In many ways, these are the absolute linchpin to the entire process by which we create suffering for ourselves internally. Indeed, the Buddha said: “Everything converges on feeling tones.”  Right here, at the feeling tones, he was saying, is exactly where we can see where we begin to create suffering for ourselves. 

This should give us some inspiration and encouragement, that we’ve been given a target of attention that is so rich in the possibility of healing, and the end of suffering. Indeed, the feeling tones are like tiny threads that, if we spot them and pull on them, can unravel the whole complex of suffering competely within the mind. A worthy project!

When the Buddha said, “Everything converges on feeling tones,” he was talking about the experience of our six senses—sights, sounds, tastes, touch, smells, and thoughts. In other words, our entire experience of the world, always filtered through these six senses, converge on feeling tones, as the very place where suffering starts. 

And we can see this place very clearly. 

It’s strange, for sure, that in the literature of modern “mindfulness” practice, feeling tones—the word in the Pali language is vedana—don’t get much play, especially compared to such big and dramatic objects of attention as “the body” and “the mind,” much less the most momentous and of all objects, “realities.” And yet, when we read the Buddha’s teachings, he very specifically taught that these relatively small and fleeting experiences in the mind, which he compared to “bubbles,” were the very key to unlocking the mystery of how suffering is created in the human mind, and how it can end.

For example, one of the most famous of the Buddha’s sermons, called The Arrow, describes how a group of disciples once asked the Buddha to explain what was different between how ordinary people experience pain, and how an enlighten person experiences pain. Because the disciplines had noticed how the enlightened disciplines in the Buddha’s sangha, including the Buddha himself, often suffered physical pain and injury, but did not seem troubled at all by the experience. They never complained and always maintained a smiling, cheerful presence, with internal balance and equanimity. 

The Buddha answered simply, saying that when an ordinary person’s body is injured, that person will feel not just one type of pain but two types of pain: first, the physical pain, and second, the mental pain that usually accompanies the physical pain. Looking into our own lives, we can see how that happens. First, we break our leg, which hurts. But the longer-lasting pains are the regrets over how the injury happened, worries about the future, the medical bills, the impact of the broken leg on one’s job, relationships, and all the rest. While an ordinary person will suffer even more from these mental pains than the physical ones, the Buddha said, an enlightened person feels the physical pains, but his suffering ends there. They feel the “feeling tone” of the physical injury, but their mind doesn’t allow the unpleasantness of that feeling tone to trigger all the mental suffering that could follow. 

In another teaching called “The Bottomless Pit,” the Buddha made even more starkly clear, the high stakes involved in being able to notice very clearly in the mind, exactly where mental suffering could proliferate from physical suffering—but to stop suffering right there: 

Who cannot bear painful physical feelings that arise,                                                                          Endangering their lives, they tremble when afflicted.                                                                                      They wail and cry, being weak and feeble.                                                                                                  They can’t stand against the pit,                                                                                                                         Nor can they gain a foothold there.                                                                                                                 But those who can bear physical painful feelings as they arise,                                                                      Not trembling even when their lives are threatened,                                                                                       They truly can withstand the pit,                                                                                                                      And gain a foothold in its depth. 

These readings are meant as a kind of introduction to feeling tones, to give a sense of how absolutely critical they are in the process of looking inward, in order to see in our minds exactly where we so frequently—almost constantly at times—create suffering for ourselves, and how we can stop.

We want to have a keen sense of the high stakes involved, and of the very great payoff if we can master this skill, of seeing the feeling tones very clearly. Most of all, we want to learn how not to react to feeling tones in our usual compulsive way, but instead to respond to them consciously and with wisdom. In this way, we can learn how to bear whatever physical pain that comes, while not adding any more unnecessary pain as the result of a mind caught in habitual reactivity, mental proliferation, worries and speculations.

As another bright indication of just how important these small “bubbles” of feeling tones are, notice where they are placed in the order the Buddha suggests for directing our attention as we look deeper into consciousness.

The feeling tones are located smack between the body and the mind. 

What that location suggests is exactly the point: the tiny and usually subtle feeling tones create the very bridge between the body and the mind. More specifically, although the mind, being the most fickle and subtle of all of our experiences of life, is relatively hard to notice and carefully observe, the body is much less so. In fact, the body is relatively easy to notice and observe, and that’s why we begin our journey into the mind, by observing the body first. As we’ve practiced each week for several weeks now, we start by noticing the breath—the in-breath and the out-breath. Easy as pie! That’s step #1 and #2: 

1. Noticing the Long Breath                                                                                                                             2. Noticing the Short Breath                                                                                                                              3. Observing the Whole Body                                                                                                                             4. Calming the Whole Body 

From noticing the breath, we move to noticing the sensation of the whole body, from crown to toe. We fill up the whole body with breath, and with awareness of the breath. We bring that experience front and center, getting a very vivid experience of the whole body; and then we consciously calm the whole body, breath after breath. As we do this, we are not only calming the body, we are also honing the brightness and sharpness of awareness with each breath. That is, we are increasing the sharpness and stability of the mind, making it easier and easier for the mind to know itself more and more clearly. And then we flow naturally from knowing the body to knowing the feeling tones of all experience:

5. Enjoy feelings of joy                                                                                                                                     6. Enjoy feelings of happiness                                                                                                                          7. Observe painful feelings                                                                                                                              8. Calm all feelings

When we hone our ability to observe feeling tones, we simultaneously hone our ability to experience them without reacting to them. Honing these skills in meditation, hones our ability to take these same skills into daily life, where the ability to feel the whole range of feeling tones—without reacting to them in our habitual fearful, exaggerating and and proliferating ways—is hugely beneficial. 

In this, our first week working with feeling tones, our goals are, first, to learn exactly what feeling tones are; and second, to start to notice feeling tones and to observe how they arise and disappear like bubbles in meditation and in our daily life. Over time, we’ll see more and more how they interact with our thoughts, perceptions and emotions in ways that can get us all entangled in suffering if we aren’t skillful with them—or lead us directly out of suffering and into peace, if we are skillful. 

Our inspirational quote for today and this week, describe the six basic types of feeling tones. Getting to know them intimately, is a key step on our journey to liberation from suffering: 

     "In a guest house, Friends, people from the East may take lodgings, or people from the West, North or South. People from the warrior caste may come and lodge there, and also wealthy people, middle-class people, and poor people.

     "Similarly, Friends, there arise in this body various kinds of feelings: there are pleasant feelings, painful feelings and neutral feelings; worldly feelings that are pleasant, painful or neutral; and spiritual feelings that are pleasant, painful and neutral."

So here we see the three basic types of feeling tones to watch for in our experience of the senses: pleasant, unpleasant, and neutral. 

The pleasant and unpleasant feeling tones are easy enough to spot. A pleasant feeling tone arises whenever one of our six senses—the eyes, ears, nose, touch, tongue, or mind—contacts a sense object, namely a sight, a sound, a smell, a touch, a taste, or a thought, and we enjoy the feeling. Likewise, an unpleasant feeling tone is one thar arises when there is sense contact, and we don’t like the feeling. 

The goal this week is just to notice that when one of our sense organs contacts a sense object, a pleasant or unpleasant feeling arises. For most people, touching silk, or listening to Mozart, causes a pleasant feeling tone to arise; while a sudden explosion, or a toilet smell, would cause an unpleasant feeling tone to arise. We just want to notice this.

Then there are neutral feeling tones, which are definitely experienced but do not carry with them either a pleasant or an unpleasant feeling tone. For example, when one finger touches another, or when we hear the refrigerator hum, or when we see a white wall, we likely will not feeling either a pleasant or unpleasant feeling tone as a result. 

Today and this week, our practice goal is to notice as much as we can, the simple presence of these three feeling tones in our experience of life. Next week, we will go deeper with feeling tones, noticing how pleasant feeling tones usually cause craving to arise, and unpleasant feeling tones cause aversion to arise, and that we tend to ignore neutral feeling tones, even though they make up 99% of our life. 

That is to say, we devote 99% of our attention to only 1% of our experience, namely the objects that cause pleasant or unpleasant feeling tones to arise, and along with them, the internal reactivity of craving and aversion. In this way, we tend to experience our life in a constant state of unconscious reactivity to objects that cause craving and aversion to arise, while completely ignoring 99% of the objects that we encounter in life. 

After that, we’ll spend a week noticing how, again following the Buddha’s recommendations, we can turn the 99% of the objects that we encounter in our lives, into objects that create pleasant feeling tones, by simply becoming conscious of them, and in this way allowing them to give us joy. We’ll consider spiritual feeling tones after that. And all along, we will keep an eye on how the whole matter of feeling tones can be followed as simply the way we tend to categorize everything that we experience in life as “things we like” and “things we don’t like.” We usually think this is the best way to ensure happiness—by chasing all the things we like, and avoiding those we don’t. But this actually creates the very most limited and constrained life possible. 

By opening to all our feeling tones equally—the pleasant, the unpleasant, and the neutral—we actually open vastly to all of the possibilities of life, as long as we don’t do the normal thing and continue to react compulsively to each one by craving, aversion or ignorance. By putting aside those unconscious reactions, we open a vast new space in the mind that is full of awareness, bliss, and healing.