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Eightfold Path: Right Mindfulness (4 of 6)

Continuing these talks on the Four Foundations of Mindfulness, the word "foundation" can also mean the four applications of mindfulness: the four areas of applying or developing mindfulness and developing awareness. The second foundation is vedana^[1] (in Pali, v-e-d-a-n-a). It's a word which most generally just means "feeling." It could also mean experiencing or knowing. It has to do with how the present moment experience that we have is felt, known, and experienced in its directness and immediacy, before the interpretations and stories we make about it.

Of course, we have many feelings like this, and the Buddha's term vedana refers to all of them. There are many different kinds of feelings, for sure, but in the practice of mindfulness, the Buddha points out that there are three fundamental feelings. All feelings have these qualities and characteristics: we notice how feelings can be pleasant, how feelings can be unpleasant, and how feelings can be neither pleasant nor unpleasant.

Sometimes people in the Vipassana^[2] world will say vedana means pleasant, unpleasant, and neutral, but that's not quite right. Vedana is feelings more generally, and then we focus on how feelings are pleasant, unpleasant, and neutral. The reason for that is that these pleasant and unpleasant feelings are very much the trigger for being for or against, for wanting or pushing away, or for aversion.

It kind of works like this: maybe someone really, really likes candy. They just can't stop eating candy, eating lots of candy, and they get physically sick, bloated, and often feel tired. After a while, they realize that eating candy doesn't work, so they stop. That's great! But then they start eating cookies instead. Eating lots of cookies, the same thing happens, and they say, "I'll stop eating cookies." Then they eat cake, and they stop eating cake when they realize how terrible they feel. Then they just start drinking a lot of sugary sodas because the other things didn't work.

Eventually, they discover that the common denominator for all these things they're eating in an addictive way is sugar. They realize, "Oh, it's sugar that's making me feel so addictive, and it's sugar which is making me feel so bad. So why don't I just stop eating sugar?" That understanding then applies to all things that have sugar in them. It's seeing the common denominator, and that applies to all situations and all the cravings for these things that have their root in sugar.

In the same way, all kinds of things can be pleasant, and we can have all kinds of relationships with that pleasantness. We can have desires, wanting, and addictions. Sometimes we pursue a lot of pleasures, but it's not necessarily the activities themselves that we're pursuing; we're pursuing the feeling of pleasure, the feeling of comfort, the feeling of joy, exuberance, or whatever it might be. It's not really the thing we're doing; it's the pleasantness it provides us—the hit of pleasant sensations, hormones, and whatever else goes on.

The same thing happens with the unpleasant. We can react in unpleasant ways, which are not appropriate if we don't understand what it's about. When I was in my twenties, for seven years I had a wheat allergy. I'd never heard of wheat allergies before, and it wasn't well known back then. Before I realized there was a wheat allergy, I worked at a bakery. I had lots of bread to eat, and I was probably breathing in flour. I would feel really bad, and when I felt bad, I wanted to comfort myself. One of the comfort foods for me was baguettes. I had lots of access to baguettes, so I'd eat baguettes. I would feel worse, and since I felt bad, I would eat more baguettes. I didn't make the correlation.

At some point, it dawned on me that maybe it's all the wheat I'm eating. I read about it, and then I discovered there were allergies, and specifically wheat allergies. Then I stopped eating it, and I felt better. I didn't believe it, so then I would eat a little bit, and sure enough, I'd feel bad. I went back and forth for a while. It was the craving for pleasure again in reaction to feeling unpleasant. I thought I had to get better, I had to fix it, and I was doing the very thing that would make it worse for myself. Once I discovered the common denominator—the wheat—then I could find health.

This idea of looking at the pleasant and unpleasant aspects of experience is to look at that common denominator of many different things. If we can learn to identify how we generally react and respond to what's pleasant and how we react to what's unpleasant, we get a lot of overview and a lot of wisdom. It becomes a key for a lot of different areas of our life. We don't have to then do sophisticated analysis of situations; we just have to realize, "I'm reacting because of pleasant and unpleasant."

If you go to a crowded party—before COVID, you know—and you find that no one knows you, you don't know anyone there, everyone's having a good time with each other, and you're left out, it's kind of unpleasant. Maybe the music is unpleasant, maybe some of those conversations are unpleasant, and maybe there's a lot of cigarette smoke in the place. You realize you really feel off and feel bad. You start analyzing or interpreting it, and one popular way to do that is to blame oneself. You know, "I'm so unlikable. No one likes me, and everyone's avoiding me, and that's why I feel so bad." Or you think, "I need to understand what these people are all about," and you start analyzing them to understand how you can blame them for something about how you're feeling.

Then it dawns on you: these are just pleasant and unpleasant things. You say, "Oh, wait a minute, the whole situation is just unpleasant, and I don't have to understand exactly why it's unpleasant or what's triggering the unpleasantness in order to not react to it. It's just unpleasant, and I know how to be with the unpleasant." With the unpleasant, you just let it be. It's unpleasant. You don't pick it up, you don't push it away, you don't look for blame—whether it's self or^[3] others. It's possible just to be aware of it and hold it in a spacious mind, hold it in a relaxed mind.

It is the same thing with the pleasant. You might come to a situation that's really, really pleasant. Maybe it's a table full of pastries. I once taught a retreat at a monastery. Someone rented a space in a monastery in Missouri, and the meditation hall had a little room on the side. The meditators kept going into that room, back and forth, over and over again, and I had no idea what they were doing there. Finally, I went to check that room, and it was full of pastries! I couldn't believe how much pastry there was. It seemed like there was a different pastry culture in Missouri back then than there was in California, and the meditators were eating a lot of sweets. It was very pleasant, but I wondered how good it was for their meditation.

To see a pleasant thing and want that, but then saying, "I don't need to do that. I can be free," is a wonderful thing. Discovering freedom in relationship to pleasant and unpleasant is freedom. It is the freedom to be able to go into an unpleasant, uncomfortable place and be comfortable. It is the ability to go and approach something pleasant, or experience something pleasant, and certainly be comfortable—but comfortable enough that there's no addiction, no leaning, no grabbing, no wanting more. Just allowing it to be.

The reason why this is important for meditation is that if the mind is operating by chasing after pleasure, wanting comfort, reacting to it being there, holding on to it, or pushing it away, or being upset with the unpleasant and trying to fix it and push it away, the mind won't settle. And if it won't settle and calm down, you won't discover any freedom. The mind will live in its reactivity.

To start understanding this common denominator is kind of like a little key. It's very simple. Sometimes sophisticated people feel it's too simple, but the simplest simplicity sometimes is the key that brings you to the common denominator out of which so much reactivity arises. So much complicated behavior, complicated political philosophies, and religious philosophies can have their source in this simple thing: "This is pleasant, I want more of it. This is unpleasant, I want it to go away." It's a huge drive of human behavior.

To sit and be quiet, and to see the pleasant and unpleasant and our reaction to it, is to learn to be free. We can be free of reactivity, or free of picking it up and being involved in the reactivity. Eventually, we just see that with a pleasant experience, there's a gap before reactivity kicks in. We can then just dwell^[4] in that gap—to just leave the pleasant to be the pleasant, and leave the unpleasant to be the unpleasant. Then the mind can start discovering peace, freedom, calm, contentment, and well-being that is not dependent on the things of the world. It is a kind of deep inner pleasure, deep inner contentment and happiness, which is not of the skin, not of the world in the sense of how the world is, but something deep inside—maybe something of the heart.

Reflections

As for the second foundation of mindfulness, you might explore this today. Over the next 24 hours, as you go about your day, you might just notice clearly when something is pleasant and unpleasant. See if it's just that—pleasant and unpleasant—or whether you also have reactions to it. Does it prompt behavior, feelings, and all kinds of things? Thank you so much.

Announcements

As for announcements, I have two. One is on Friday at 7:45 or so, when we finish here, I'm going to set up a Zoom room, and we can have one of our community meetings that we have from time to time. I'll be sure to use the large Zoom account so there's room for everyone. That's a time maybe to ask some questions, do some Q&A, and have some discussion. I will also do one session of breaking you into breakout groups—maybe groups of five—so that you can meet some other people in our YouTube meditation community. I'll post the information and the Zoom link on the IMC "What's New" page maybe on Thursday, and on the IMC calendar. I will also post it in the chat here on Friday as well, so there will be different ways of getting it.

The second announcement is that this is a community, and I think of all of you on YouTube now as being part of the IMC community. One of the things I do every year is send out an end-of-the-year letter to the community. It's a fundraising letter. I don't know if that interests any of you, but as part of the community, maybe you're interested in reading the letter and so forth. That's also on the "What's New" page on IMC's website, and I think a link to it has been put underneath the video here in the YouTube description.

So thank you for this morning, and I look forward to continuing this series tomorrow.