TRANSFORMING NEUTRAL FEELINGS INTO JOY Week of Sept. 5, 2022

A deeply empowering and healthy way to view our likes and dislikes in life—that is, our internalized list of “thumbs ups” and “thumbs downs” about things that guides so much of our decision-making— is that “likes and dislikes” are outright thieves.

They are thieves because they steal our attention away from objects that at first seem quite bland and neutral, with no particular charge to them one way or another, but in fact are monumental in transformative potential.

In fact it is just these types of experiences that hold the greatest potential, when we view them correctly, to settle and expand our minds into a relaxed, radiant and peaceful state. In a moment’s reflection, we realize this is exactly the inner experience of life that we have, mostly unsuccessfully, been chasing by using our likes and dislikes to filter our experience of life most of the time. That is, the mind state of happiness.

Take the experience of lightly touching a stairway railing a dozen or so times as you climb from one floor to another. The ordinary mind would take this as just about the most insignificant experience one could imagine spending one’s precious awareness on, wouldn’t you agree? Indeed, the dozen or so quick touches of the fingertips on the stairway railing in this example are so utterly unremarkable, they never even registered knowingly in consciousness in the first place. While the touches are actually happening in real time, the mind puts them completely out of mind. In this way, we miss them totally.

Bear with me, though. Because, by choosing to become aware of these fleeting sensations at the fingertips, we are absolutely sure to find that all sorts of gateways in the mind will open wide, and instantly, to profound inner qualities such as spaciousness, confidence, beauty, centeredness, safety, relaxation, a profound interest in life, and a very noticeably growing, loving sensitivity to ourselves and to all beings.

Needless to say, it’s not a matter of running to the nearest stairway, as if “stairways + fingers” is the magic formula for finding true happiness in this life. In reality, any and every simple perception at any of the six “sense doors” of sight, sound, taste, touch, smell and thoughts, can become just such an instant portal to the vastness of being that is your true nature.

Wherever you are right now, try directing your attention to any of these sense doors, and notice there, that perceptions are currently arising in abundance, that are entirely without a sensory charge, either pleasant or unpleasant. As a result, the mind quietly ignores them completely. Puts them out of mind.

To illustrate by example, put your attention now on the sense door of hearing.

Examples of sounds that you would probably have missed, had you not consciously put your attention on hearing, you might hear a car driving by; and your chair creaking; your refrigerator humming; your stomach rumbling; the subtle sounds that happen each time you swallow; a faint buzzing in the ears (everyone has a tiny bit of tinnitus); the sound of inhaling; the sound of exhaling; and so on and on. Seriously, try this for a minute or two, making a mental list of everything you can actually hear right now, that you would otherwise normally, unconsciously, have ignored. You’ll have to get quiet and still to do this; you might even write down your list.

After a minute or two of this, check in with how you are feeling.

Guaranteed, you will feel calmer, more settled and more mentally clear. In other words, you’ll be happier. Why? Because for those two or so minutes, you finally paid attention to reality instead of your thoughts, and this simple shift of attention is the very basis of health and healing, mental and physical.

This shift of awareness dwelling in concepts and imagination, and then alighting upon reality itself, is exactly what happens when we “watch the breath” in formal meditation. The breath is a neutral objects that usually is so lacking in any pronounced quality of pleasure or pain that we can go for days, weeks, months or an entire lifetime without ever noticing it. And this, even though the breath is in many ways the most noticeable feature of life itself as it enters the body, fills the body, and nourishes and heals the body.

Truly the most interesting, engaging and empowering thing to notice next, is that 99%, conservatively, of our life experience is made of just these so-called “neutral” feeling experiences, which are happening in great abundance at every one of our sense-doors, at all time. Once we notice that, we can see that even though these neutral feelings comprise the great bulk of our lived experience, the mind puts a thick and heavy filter of “likes and dislikes” around that majority of our lived experience, which perceptual filter screens most of our lived experience out of aware consciousness, putting in the category instead of “ignore.” Meanwhile, that same filter, at every one of the sense doors, lets through an extremely tiny percentage of our lived experience that comes with a strong “pleasant” or “unpleasant” feeling tone.

On the pleasant side, such experiences usually cluster around contact with delicious tastes, beautiful sights, alluring sounds and smells, sensuous touch, and so on. On the unpleasant side, such experiences arise on contact with substances that would make us sick if we ate them or imbibed too much of them by inhalation or touch; sounds that signaled the presence of danger from storms, natural predators and such; and so on through all of the sense doors.

From an evolutionary standpoint, one can easily see why reality would put such heavy “like and dislike” filters around everything we experiences at each of the sense doors. Because basically, these filters keep us focused on finding delicious substances to nourish our bodies; sexual partners to ensure that our healthy genes make it to the next generation; and on the types of thoughts that make these first two outcomes more likely than otherwise.

But notice the enormous cost we pay, for unconsciously following this evolutionary filtering of our live experience. First of all, it becomes clear at some point in al of our lives, that instead of being a surefire strategy for achieving happiness, the limiting of our experience to the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain, is radically limiting, joyless, and unhealthy.

If you define and live your life around the one dozen or so objects and activities that you most enjoy, what about the trillions of possible experiences that you will now inevitably miss completely, simply because you didn’t keep the mind open enough to experience something new? Likewise, if you stay focused on avoiding the one dozen objects and activities you intensely dislike, you will surely miss all of the experiences that at first seemed too boring, dangerous, or frankly impossible, but actually could shock you with just the new life energy that you really need. Likewise, you’ll miss all the people you initially label as different, difficult or disagreeable, but who could could actually offer just the wisdom that you most need in your life

Ultimately, it comes down to this: that the “like and dislike” strategy for achieving happiness is entirely focused on the physical part of our being, which wants to experience pleasure and to avoid pain. Up to a point, of course, our physical bodies needs just these experiences of pleasure and pain, as a device to locate those relatively scarce resources in nature that will ensure that the body’s survival and flourishing. But the physical body is by definition limited, and so after a certain point, once survival is assured, all additional pleasurable experience turns into addiction rather than nourishment. And, unpleasant experiences turn into neurotic fears and anxieties, instead of providing the natural danger alarms that all bodies need.

But here’s the thing: in our essence we are more than physical beings, and the essence that we are is limitless in its nature. It therefore doesn’t share the limits or the destiny of the body and the thinking mind. We may notice the limitless nature of our essence by simply noticing that everything that is physical in our experience—that is, everything that we experience via the six senses—is impermanent. All sensations of the body, thoughts of the mind, and perceptions of the world come and go, often with lightning speed.

Meanwhile, one and only one thing (which is not a thing) abides in experience (which is not a sensory experience but rather a pure knowing), and that is the awareness that knows all the objects of the senses as they arise, briefly live, and then pass away. This pure abiding awareness is thus the only thing (which is not a thing) in life that qualifies as our essence, insofar as it the only thing that abides while everything else arises and passes away.

Understanding our true nature as pure consciousness, beyond the limits of the body and thinking mind, is thus one of the best ways to understand the aim of meditation, whether the “on the cushion” type, or the daily life type we are mostly discussing today. Practicing in this way, is largely about shifting our sense of identity more and more, away from identification with the physical body and thinking mind, to the pure consciousness that we essentially are.

In this way, usually gradually, but sometimes very suddenly, we experience liberation from the body and the thinking mind.

What we are exploring today and this week, is first, to recognize that pleasant experiences which we “like, and unpleasant experiences that we “dislike,” are primarily ways that we are encoded as human beings to stay primarily grounded in our physicality, and thus keep us in limitation as beings.

But second, and directly to the point of this week’s practice, is that we are ready to explore how neutral feelings—which are neither pleasant nor unpleasant, and therefore trigger neither craving nor aversion—are ideal points of contact with the realm of our essence of beings.

Precisely because they carry neither a pleasant nor an unpleasant charge, and indeed make up 99% of our lived experience, neutral feelings, when we consciously experience them, leave us entirely free of the compulsions of craving and aversion that normally so limit our lives.

Put another way, mental freedom from craving and aversion, which the whole of meditation practice is aimed at, is at all times completely open and available for us to notice as a living reality—right now and without effort—through the experience of neutral feelings.

In this way, each tiny neutral experience—each touch on the stairway railing, each sensation of the breath, each knowing of a sound—carries along with it the direct and immediate potential for experiencing our true nature as liberated beings. Free in every moment to be without craving, and thus happy.

Any touch, sight, sound, taste, smell our thought that comes as neutral, naturally comes without any story of “like” or “dislike” behind it. No dropping of that story is necessary, because by the nature of neutral feelings there is no story present to drop. In this way, neutral feelings are nature’s way of handing us a free and clear opportunity to experience, right now and without effort or delay, the freedom from compulsion that is true happiness. Can we make the very most of this precious chance that every neutral feeling gives us, to drop into the free and open space of awareness and, in quiet bliss, simply be with what is?

You will notice that I just quietly added a new element into the equation of the full and true experience of neutral feelings.

And that is the element of “bliss.”

As we practice tonight and this week, let’s make it a special point to notice that whenever we notice a neutral feeling tone, that the very act of noticing turns that neutral feeling tone into a distinctly pleasurable one.

“In the case of neutral feeling, the pleasure comes from knowing it,” says Bhikkhu Analayo, a Buddhist monk who writes often about practicing with feeling-tones.

“In practical terms, simply being with feeling in the present moment can become a source of joy. This is a rather subtle form of joy that can be cultivated through the sustained practice of mindfulness,” Analayo writes.

“Far from being a somewhat irrelevant category of feelings that could be ignored, neutral feelings turn out to deserve meditative attention as a fertile ground of the cultivation of liberating insight,” he says.

The Buddha himself, in the Pali scriptures, endorsed the understanding of a devout layman, Carpenter Pancakanga, who practiced with neutral feeling tones intensively. When asked by a monk once about them, he answered: “Venerable sir, the Blessed One teaches neutral feelings as belonging to a peaceful and sublime kind of pleasure.”

So take just a moment then, when you experience the distinctly pleasurable feeling that arises when you consciously notice a neutral feeling, that this pleasurable feeling is nothing like the pleasure you get from sensual gratification.

It’s not like experiencing delicious food, or emotional music, or the touch of silk, or the smell of coffee, all of which are sense-based. Therefore, they are all capable of stimulating unconscious compulsion to craving, grasping or aversion, and thus addiction at one or another level of severity.

This new kind of pleasure is far subtler and deeper than sense-base pleasure.

It’s like if you see a gorgeous sunset full of layered pinks, oranges, yellows and reds, there is, on the one hand, a great thrill you get from the sheer brilliance of the colors, and the thrilling perfection of nature’s composition. These pleasures are deep in a sense-based and physical way, palpable, vivid, valuable, and real.

The deeper pleasure of the neutral feeling tone, when it is noticed, would be like a feeling you might get while watching this same beautiful sunset. However, this pleasure would come from a neutral feeling tone derived from a different quality of the same sunset, than the pleasurable tones derived from the sunset’s specifically physical qualities of form and color. This subtler and higher pleasure—higher because there would be no craving or aversion attached to its perception—would come from the sense of pure delight derived not from the sunset’s beauty, but from the fact of its pure and simple being. Its “isness” or “thusness,” as Buddhists might say. That is, it would come from the fact of the sunset’s miraculous manifestation, not of its visual appearance, but of the raw awareness that made the entire act of seeing possible, and the whole experience of “beauty” possible in the first place.

This week, see if you can notice neutral feeling tones in this way, as portals to the happiness of knowing pure being.

Try to see even the smallest of your experiences in this way, beyond the likes and dislikes that hover like thieves around the six senses.

Tune in to the joy that this pure knowing naturally brings.

When you can, remember too, to share this joy with others through your smile and through the always simple, pure and radiant love that you are.