SEE AND BE FREE Week of August 22, 2022

If I had to pick just three words to describe the nature of the mind of happiness that we all seek, those words would be “simple,” “clear,” and “experiential.”

Today, we’ll start with “simple.”

How much we need simplicity in our lives!

Especially, we need simplicity in our hearts and minds.

We don’t need to dwell for long on the complexity of the world that we live in today, and thus as well, the complexity of all the emotions that are constantly stirred up within us, from living in such a world.

Just the challenges of living in a human body, and of living in society with other human beings, is quite complex enough to require a deeply simplifying spiritual practice to stay balanced, loving, and wise.

But add to that the reality of today’s world, which is changing faster and more dramatically in so many dimensions—technological, economic, geopolitical, environmental, etc.—than it has ever before in history.

As a result, the human emotional and physiological systems are getting stressed more than ever, and are expressing that stress in patterns of illness and dysfunction never before experienced on a such a large scale. In such an environment, the need for a profoundly simple spiritual method—allowing every human being to resolve all such complexity into a solid internal peace—is urgently needed.

Luckily, all of the world’s great spiritual traditions have described just such a simple method to access internal peace effortlessly, and in less time than it takes to even light a candle, or say a mantra or prayer.

In the Buddhist tradition, which we are following in Monday Friends, these moments of instant inner simplicity are experienced over and over as we practice the Four Foundations of Awareness as the Buddha taught—that is, awareness of the body, of feelings, of the mind, and of reality itself. When the mind first looks at that list, it tends immediately to conclude that one must master every one of these four practices before peace comes. Only then, finally, at long last, one might get catch a glimpse of the inner freedom that one has been seeking all along.“Didn’t I hear that it may take lifetimes?” the doubting mind also usually asks, out of the habit of pessimism it has been honing for many years.

But it’s not like that at all. Peace and freedom are available “in the beginning, in the middle, and at the end,” the Buddha promises. As an example, the practice begins with relaxing. Do you know how to relax? If you do, it’s utterly simple, and you will touch inner peace instantly in this practice. It probably won’t last for long, but you’ll get an indelible taste and at least some relief, and over time you’ll learn how to spread that pure happiness more and more into your life.

Do you know how to enjoy? If you do, it’s utterly simple, and just as with relaxation you will touch inner peace instantly in this practice. It takes practice to acquire the knack of abiding enjoyably as peace for hours, days, or continuously in daily life. But that skill too will come, and not in lifetimes, either, if you stick with it.

What happens as we progress in the Four Foundations, is that the practice guides us successively through subtler and subtler, and more and more expanded domains of consciousness. The fleeting moments of peace that we experience begin to enlarge and connect, to coalesce and to expand, forming an ever-deeper, ever more peaceful, and ever-clearer and more radiant foundation for our lives.

It’s just this radiant presence that we build up over time that heals us, and that increasingly we can share with others just by remaining in that way. Because that radiant peace that we discover is actually our true nature, the unshakeable reality of life, and our firmest foundation.

This week, we are looking closely at the stage of practice where, the Buddha said, we can look directly at the ultimate root of all suffering, which are the “feeling tones” that we began to explore last week.

“All things converge on feeling tones,” the Buddha said. He meant that no matter what we are experiencing in our emotions, our perceptions, or our body at any given moment, we can discover exactly where our suffering always begins in the mind. It’s normally a very small and subtle place where suffering begins. Which is exactly why we meditate, to calm and relax the mind enough to bring this very tiny and subtle place into sharp relief, to see it clearly, and to respond to it wisely.

“Wisely” here means doing what we need to make sure that this tiny spark where suffering first begins, is never given a chance to blaze up into any of the larger forms of suffering, which is usually their form when we first become consciously aware of them—forms like anger, rage, sadness, grief, addiction, depression and so on.

So this is the utterly clear and simple tool the Buddha gives us, to see precisely where suffering begins in the mind: the feeling tones.

The feeling tones, again to review, are just these: pleasant feeling tones, unpleasant feeling tones, and neutral feeling tones.

Pleasant feeling tones are exactly as they sound, a pleasant feeling that arises when any of the six senses (eyes, ears, nose, mouth, body and mind) comes into contact with a sense object (a sight, a sound, a smell, a taste, a sensation, a thought). Unpleasant feeling tones are just the opposite—an unpleasant feeling that arises when one of the six senses contacts a sense object. And neutral feeling tones are felt but carry neither a pleasant nor an unpleasant feeling, such as how our clothes feel on the skin, or how a white wall feels to the eye.

Neutral feeling tones, which will be our main topic next week, are generally ignored by the mind, which devotes zero attention because these feeling tones carry neither a pleasant nor an unpleasant feeling.

But consider that neutral feeling tones comprise 99% of our life’s experience, which means that by ignoring them, we are ignoring 99% of our life. Next week, we’ll looking at how we can consciously start looking at the neutral feeling tones, comprising 99% of our life, in a way that imbues this great majority of our whole life experience with conscious gratitude, wisdom, balance and peace.

This week, our meditation theme is to look at how we spend 99% of our attention on the 1% of our life experiences that do come with a strong pleasant or unpleasant feelings attached to them. We’ll look at how these unconscious habits of grasping at pleasant feelings, and avoiding unpleasant ones, which is a strategy we think will bring us happiness, in fact only creates suffering. And we’ll look at how, by using a very simple method, we can avoid creating more suffering for ourselves in this way, and instead receive more peace, by grace.

As we delve into this meditation, let’s take a moment to realize that it is never the pleasant sensation, the unpleasant sensation, or the neutral sensation that causes the trouble we call “suffering.”

Rather, it is how we usually react to the pleasant, unpleasant and neutral feeing tones that leads on to suffering. Check your own experience to see if this is true, that when we experience a pleasant feeling tone, we tend to crave more of the pleasant feeling, and then we tend to grasp at the pleasant feeling, to keep the feeling going. But once we keep it going, by maintaining our effort to grasp the feeling, it only creates more of the tension caused by grasping, that is, suffering.

Delicious food is a good example. When we see a slice of chocolate cake, we tend to want to eat it, which is craving. So then we tend to grab the slice of cake and to take a bite, to enjoy the pleasurable taste. And we do all this because deep in our minds, we are equating pleasurable sensations as happiness. Therefore, since a pleasurable sensation seems to gives us happiness, at least temporarily, the mind concludes that more pleasurable sensations will give us more happiness. And indeed, the mind concludes that if we are able to keep the pleasant sensations going permanently, we’ll be happy forever. Deep down, this is the logic that the mind follows with all of the six senses. In other words, we are constantly craving and grasping at sights, sounds, tastes, smells, textures and thoughts that give us pleasurable sensation, trying to be happy through these sensations.

But consider now, the flaw in this mental logic.

In your experience, what happens when you extend craving and grasping beyond the first or second hit of a pleasant sensation?

The first slice of cake tastes great. The second taste is also good, but not quite as good as the first. By the time you are eating the third slice, you have cut the slice thinner because you feel guilty, and after all the taste just isn’t so great any more. Indeed, you are starting to feel a bit sick, and harshly judging yourself to boot. Notice that it’s the same with all the senses. The first hit is nice; the second still nice but less so; and finally you’re so full you feel sick, and you’re forced to quite.

A good night’s sleep hits the “reset button” on all your sensual appetites. But somehow as the months and years roll by, we never quite learn our lesson, that sensual pleasure is not the same as happiness whatsoever, and therefore pull back on our ceaseless craving and grasping. Instead, we keep craving, and suffering again.

The point we want to catch at this point, is that there is absolutely nothing wrong, in this or any other possible example, with the pleasant feeling tones in themselves. It’s only in how we automatically react to them by craving and grasping, where the suffering comes. Especially when we repeat our unconscious reactivity of grasping, over and over.

Note that the same thing could be said of the unpleasant feeling tones. If a certain substance generates an unpleasant feeling tone, we will develop an aversion to that substance, and do all that we can to avoid it. And this applies to any substance which, in fact, might actually help us if we ingested it or stayed in close contact with it. Certain foods or medicines, for instance, don’t taste good, but are healthy to ingest, such as bitter medicinal teas; and certain people we might mentally label as “mean” or “strange,” might in fact be quite wise or friendly, and could really help us, if only we let go of how we label them, and instead reach out to them in openness, vulnerability and friendship.

In this way, by simple reflection, we can see that instead of insuring our permanent happiness, living a life by the simple strategy of increasing the amount of pleasurable experience, and decreasing unpleasant experience, this strategy actually ensures we narrow our lives down in a way that can dangerously increase our vulnerability to over-indulgence in dangerous ways on the one hand, and to missing potentially healthy supports to our life, on the other. In other words, our simple likes and dislikes are potentially the basis of all suffering in our life, if we make the mistake of attaching to them.

Let me stress, following our theme today of simplicity, how very simple it is to notice what we like and what we dislike. It’s the simplest thing in the world to notice these, as they are habits of mind and body that are very well-known to us, and that we follow every day without a break.

At the same time, by spending just a little more time and attention to discover the nature of these likes and dislikes, in the subtler realms of consciousness that we can access easily within a few minutes of meditation or calm reflection, we open to that precise area of the mind, where the very origin of all suffering is found.

Once we are there, it follows that we can take steps right them, to start to think and act around out likes and dislikes, that start to release the hold they have our over behavior. In this way, we can start to replace our old and unconscious habits of mind, that generate suffering, with new and conscious mental habits, that generate true happiness—the happiness that is our true nature—beyond the crude, and in the long run unreliable happiness, that we gain by gratifying our six senses, over and over to the point of illness.

In Buddhism, craving, aversion and delusion—sometimes referred to as “greed, hatred and delusion”—are referred to as the “Three Root Poisons of the Mind.” They are are the three internal activities of the mind that, if they are blindly followed rather than simply observed and released, will lead us inevitably to suffering instead of true peace and happiness, again and again.

The Burmese monk and meditation teacher, Sayadaw U Tejaniya, says that his own awakening happened after his teacher, Shwe Oo Min Sayadaw, told him that by simply investigating the nature of craving, aversion and delusion, that his suffering over time would diminish and disappear.

“My teacher constantly reminded me that all the problems in the world originate from the trio of craving, aversion and delusion,” Sayadaw U Tejaniya said. “Keep an eye on them. Watching and keeping these unwholesome qualities at bay will allow all the wholesome qualities of mind to arise automatically.”

Since we are looking closely at simplicity this week, let’s take a further crucial step and realize, again only after just a few moments of reflection, that we can simplify all three of the “Root Poisons” down to only one.

In this way, after this week, no matter what your situation or type of stress you are experiencing, you’ll be able to look through this one lens to see right to the place where you are unconsciously creating suffering for yourself internally—and then just let go. This doesn’t mean that the physical pain will go away, at least not entirely. But a portion of it will, and then a much greater portion, and potentially all, of the emotions you are having around that pain may vanish in a flash. These would be the regrets and worries you have about the pain, the thoughts of victimhood and unfairness, the limitations the pain brings to your life, concerns about the future, and on and on. All of these can partially or wholly disappear, anywhere from brief moments at a time, which are themselves blessed, but then also for more moments all strung together, and then even for whole mornings, afternoons or days at a time—and more.

So, consider in this way, that although the phrase “Craving, Aversion and Delusion” makes it look like all of these three are equal in some way, like three different forces that all might each contribute 33.3% to stress, it’s not like that at all. In fact, you can simplifying in the following two ways.

First, craving and aversion are, in reality, two types of craving. Therefore, you can remember from now on, that the first and most important thing to keep your eye on, from moment to moment, is craving, and craving alone.

Craving, as we mentioned above, is the desire to experience a pleasant sensation, pure and simple. Another way to put this is that craving wants something that is not in your present experience, to be present. It feels that something is lacking in the present moment, and so it craves as the first step towards getting that missing thing, in order to enjoy it and to be happy.

But aversion is also a craving, in the sense that what it craves is for something that is present in the current experience, namely an unpleasant experience, not to be present. It craves for the unpleasant experience to be gone, and from this standpoint, aversion then leads to taking an action that the mind believes will make that unpleasant feeling disappear. You can imagine what those actions might be, such as distracting attention away from the unpleasant feeling, or taking some physical action that will make the apparent source of the unpleasant feeling disappear, such as by striking that thing to destroy it, including killing, if the apparent source is a living thing.

The important thing to remember is that when you have noticed that you are suffering mentally, no matter what that suffering is, including no matter how complex the physical sensations of the body, the perceptions of the senses, and the thoughts of the mind, you can simply all of this—and take the first all-important step to end the present suffering—by very simply looking for craving in the mind.

Behind this craving there is the thought, that the present reality is not acceptable, and that it craves to achieve one of two outcomes that the mind believes will solve the problem: either to bring into the present moment a missing pleasant sensation, or to eradicate from the present moment, an unpleasant sensation. Then, once this simple source of the suffering is observed, the next step is to simply allow everything in the present moment to be, just as it is. This very much includes the craving for the pleasant sensation, and/or the craving to end the unpleasant sensation.

This may seem like a paradox, that the way to end the current suffering is to allow everything to be, just as it is. But notice that in fact, what you are doing, by adopting this strategy of simply observing—as opposed to actually taking action to grasp something pleasant, or to eradicate what is unpleasant—you are stopping the activity that is actually causing the suffering. If you simply let everything be, you may still notice the craving, but you aren’t then responding to the craving by grasping. In not grasping, the suffering disappears partially or completely, as it is not the craving but the grasping—the acting on the craving—that is causing and perpetuating the suffering.

Which bring us to one last, enormously simplifying reflection for today.

Simple notice that the result of craving is always a tension in the body.

If you are craving to grasp a pleasant sensation, that grasping is causing a tension somewhere in the body. If you scan through the body, you will find the place where that tension is felt, and you can consciously relax it.

Likewise, if you are craving to get rid of an unpleasant sensation, you will feel a tension somewhere in the body. This won’t be the tension of, say, a hand that is clenching to grasp something pleasant, but rather a tightening, as if the mind wants to make the body into armor, to protect against a blow. If you feel fear, for example, there is a craving to avoid that feeling, which often is felt as a hardening of the muscles around around the heart, as if to protect the heart from a blow. Another way that aversion is felt as tension in the body, is the body hardening itself to land a blow on the object that the mind believes is the source of the pleasant feeling, whether that sources is an inanimate object, or an animal, or another person. That tension of the body in order to strike a blow, is another very simple and obvious thing to notice in the body, and then, once it is noticed, to consciously relax and let go of.

In these simple ways, no matter what form of stress you are experiencing, you can very simply 1) Scan the mind for the craving that is happening, whether to grasp a pleasant experience, or to expunge an unpleasant one. You then 2) Scan the body to see where that craving is manifesting as physical tension; and then you 3) Consciously relax that part of the body, or the whole body sometimes, that is storing all that tension and suffering as a result.

This three-step process of “See and Be Free,” can be used any time, anywhere, quickly and effectively to notice and dissolve any kind of stress you are feeling.

When we see very clearly how we are grasping in response to craving, we can let the craving go on, but consciously decide not to grasp to it in response, and in this way create unecessary stress and suffering four ourselves, internally.

In this way, we can “See and Be Free.”

And, one final note for today.

What about the third root poison, delusion?

Let’s recall what His Holiness the Dalai Lama defined as the ultimate source of all suffering (from last week’s practice): “All negative emotions are very much based on appearances,” he said. “Nothing exists as it appears.”

Delusion is simply believing in appearances, and acting on those appearances by craving, instead of cultivating our ability to see reality as it actually is, and then acting in line with that clear seeing of reality.

Delusion is the underlying mistake we make, by responding with either craving or aversion (two forms of craving), to the appearance of reality, as opposed to reality as it truly is.

When we don’t see reality just as it is, we tense up in craving as we described it above. That is, we either tense up to grasp at the illusory object that we thing will bring us a pleasant experience, or to strike out an illusory object that we think is giving us an unpleasant experience, trying to destroy it.

The objects that we think will bring us pleasure, though, are just the appearance of a deeper reality that is much different than how it appears.

We tense up our muscles to grasp at, or to destroy, objects that appear to be solid, and that therefore are graspable in the first place. But in reality, objects are not dense and solid; in fact they are impermanent and empty, and thus utterly ungraspable. When we grasp at any object, then, we are trying to do the impossible, which is to grasp something that is empty. In the process, all that we create is suffering, because we are keeping our bodies tense all the time, to no end whatsoever, except to needlessly continue our suffering.

Later, we’ll take up practices to see reality as it truly is, and in this way, to stop not only grasping, but also the craving that starts the grasping.

Once we stop craving, we get not only the temporary relief of stopping grasping, we get permanent relief, by stopping craving in the first place.

That’s where we are going.

Until then, if and when stress comes back after you’ve let it go, respond with patience, compassion, and love. We will reach the ultimate source of suffering—delusion—very soon, and let it go.