Guided Meditation: Inconstancy of Feeling Tones; Dharmette: Satipaṭṭhāna (49) Five Heaps: Arising and Passing of Feelings

This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Inconstancy of Feeling Tones ; Satipatthana (49) Arising and Passing of Feelings. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

The following talk was given by Gil Fronsdal at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on March 29, 2022. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Guided Meditation: Inconstancy of Feeling Tones

Hello everyone, warm greetings from Redwood City at IMC.

We are discussing the discourse on the Four Foundations of Mindfulness (Satipaṭṭhāna)^[1], and developing awareness in different areas of our life. The topic for today is developing awareness on the feeling tones of our experience—the ways in which things can be experienced as pleasant, unpleasant, or neither pleasant nor unpleasant.

At this point in the Satipaṭṭhāna text we're following, the emphasis is not on the pleasure or the pain of pleasant and unpleasant, but rather the inconstant nature in which these sensations appear. How they come, they persist, they go, they appear, they disappear. And it's not just the sensations, but also the dance of this inconstancy has to do with how we perceive them. Our perception is not constant. We're aware of the pain in the knee, and then we hear a sound outside, and our attention for a moment is not with the pain, or reduced with the pain. Then we have a thought of something, and then we're back to the pain. It might seem like whenever we're paying attention to it, the pain is there in the knee, but in fact, the perception of it is varied and changing.

If the attention is very close to the pain, we might see that it itself is made up of component sensations that are dancing. It may be intense. Same thing with joy. So it isn't that we have to understand these pleasant and unpleasant experiences we have as only being inconstant, but it's the inconstant nature of them, the way in which they come and go, that becomes a foundation for awakening awareness in the present moment as an alternative to being reactive to them, or caught in them, or distracted and away from them.

So maybe that can be a little bit of the meditation this morning.

Assume an upright, alert meditation posture. Lower the gaze of your eyes 45 degrees to the floor and relax the gaze, looking at nothing in particular, with a loose focus. Gently, if it's nice, close the eyes.

Have the attention in your torso, your chest, and rib cage, taking a few long, slow, deep breaths. Take deep in-breaths and have an extended relaxation as you exhale. A relaxation where you settle into your body and your seat. Breathe deeply a couple more times, and as you exhale, relax into the contact of your body against the chair, your cushion, your bed, wherever you are.

Let the breathing return to normal. Maybe also relax further on the exhale. The normal exhale softening in the body, relaxing into your body more.

Center yourself on the body breathing. Wherever it's easiest or nicest for you to be aware of the breathing in the body, enter into that part of your body to feel and sense the experience of breathing.

If there's any experience, any feeling, or sense of peace or calm as you breathe, let that register in your body. Maybe there's a part of the exhale that feels peaceful or calm, or the end of the exhale. Or maybe it's the beginning of the inhale.

Relaxing the thinking muscle, relaxing the thinking mind. The thinking mind moves towards greater peace or calm, tapping into the mind's ability to be at ease.

As you feel your body breathing, notice if there are any pleasant or unpleasant sensations, maybe at different parts of the cycle of breathing. Allow those sensations to be felt and known peacefully, seeing their coming and going as you breathe in and as you breathe out.

The pleasantness might be very mild. The unpleasantness might be very mild. Maybe it's a feeling of comfort and discomfort in the breathing. See if you can be untroubled by pleasant and unpleasant, and rather breathe with it. Feel it in the breathing. Ride along with the rising and passing, the strengthening and weakening of pleasant and unpleasant as you breathe.

The ancient analogy for the sensations of pleasant and unpleasant, pleasure and discomfort, is a vast peaceful lake. Imagine being at a lake that's peaceful, calm, relaxed, with a very still surface. A gentle rain begins, and little drops fall on the surface of the lake. Those are likened to the sensations that come and go, rippling briefly in the calmness of the mind.

As we come to the end of the sitting, whatever degree of calm or peace, whatever degree of heightened awareness or clarity, or other benefits we received from this meditation, may it be a medium, a vehicle for goodwill into the world. May it help us connect to our well-wishing, our capacity for kindness, care, and compassion.

May our peace and our well-being carry these wishes out into the world.

May all beings be happy. May all beings be safe. May all beings be peaceful. And may all beings be free.

May these wishes spread out to lands across the world where there is war, hunger, people struggling with climate change and environmental deterioration, people who are sick. May our kindness and our goodwill spread out with our peace into the world for the welfare and the benefit of the whole world. As we live our life today, maybe we can think of practical ways, maybe small ways, that we can enact that goodwill in order to be friendly and kind to the people we encounter.

May all beings share in bringing forth happiness and peace.

Dharmette: Satipaṭṭhāna (49) Five Heaps: Arising and Passing of Feelings

So this week we're doing the second exercise in the Fourth Foundation of Awareness. The first three of the five exercises have to do with ways in which we select out of our environment things to cling to, or react to, or get caught in.

There's a vast sea of sensations, perceptions, and experiences in any given moment. When a human being is born, we slowly start a process of selection to zero in and pick up what's important to emphasize, gather together, and construct into the different things that we experience. We know that the brain is a constructing apparatus that takes in sense data and reconstructs it into reality, into how we experience and know it.

Mostly, there's a good enough relationship between what we see and what the mind constructs so we can find our way in the world. But it is a construction process, and sometimes you can see it go a little bit awry. It happens probably a couple of times a year when I go hiking on the trails in the mountains near here. For a moment, I see a little stake or a root of a tree that's half out of the ground snaking along, and I think it's a snake. My mind has somehow constructed a snake out of it. Or there's a particular tree that I go by where there's a gnarly side growth on the trunk, and it looks like the cutest little dog head sticking out. I always see that dog and smile. There's no dog there, but my mind somehow reconstructs it from the pieces so it looks like a dog.

So the mind constructs, and it's partly also a selection process. We select out of our environment the things that we want to prioritize, things that are important to us. Many years ago I was looking for a futon couch. I started looking as I was driving around, attentive to that, and back then I was surprised how many futon shops there were. I had no idea; they just kept popping up. I had never really paid attention to them, but now I was prioritizing it, it was on my mind, and I was noticing it. We tend to notice the things that interest us.

I go down the supermarket aisles, and there's a tremendous amount of stuff that is just a blur that I have no interest in and don't really take in. I can't tell you later what I passed by. I'm looking for things that I particularly want, and when I know where I am in the aisle, then I start looking and searching for it, and oh, there it is. There's a selection process.

This is all very normal, but then the selection process also becomes places we cling to. For the areas in which we cling to self, to our own experience, or a sense of who we are, the Buddha emphasizes five areas that we prioritize, preferentially pick up on, select, or project. These are the Five Heaps^[2], the five groupings, the five divisions—the five ways in which we group our experience into heaps of things, and then we might prioritize these over others.

The Buddha sometimes called this a burden. He also referred to it very explicitly as a constructing process of the mind, that the mind constructs to some degree our experience of each of these five domains.

The first one is appearances. It's usually translated into English as "form"—the appearance of the body, the physicality of the body, the way it appears to us.

The second one, which is today's topic, is vedanā^[3], the feeling tones of experience—whether they're pleasant, unpleasant, or neither pleasant nor unpleasant. There was a big exercise near the beginning of this text in the Second Foundation of Mindfulness on this as well. Then, it was just to know it: to know pleasant as pleasant, to know unpleasant as unpleasant. In the Fourth Foundation^[4], the instructions are to know the inconstancy of the experience, to know that the unpleasantness arises, that it appears, if it persists it persists, but then it passes away—the arising and passing of these feeling tones.

As I said in the meditation, the analogy for this is a peaceful lake surface and a gentle rain. Drops fall in the lake and make little ripples, concentric waves that go out, little splashes. Those little splashes are there for a moment, and then they're gone. The aftereffect might be the ripples that go out. These sensations are like the splash, and then there might be a ripple through us. If the rain is falling hard, it might just seem like it's a constant experience. But if we look very carefully, we see that actually, in fact, it's still just a moment of splash, and another one, and another one—just a lot of them are happening all around.

In terms of the construction or selection process, some of us will prioritize whether we're comfortable or uncomfortable. We navigate the world looking for what's pleasant and avoiding what's unpleasant, wanting the pleasant. That's how we give some priority to a sensual world, to comfort and being comforted by experience. We don't care that much, maybe, about our appearances or the appearance of other people; we're just interested in whether it's physically comfortable or pleasant. We don't care so much about our ideas, our opinions, our stories of things; we just want to be comfortable and pleasant. Of course, it's a matter of degree, but this is part of the grouping of our experiences that some people prioritize and select. For the Buddha, this is one of the areas of clinging.

These are the five groupings of clinging, and one of them is clinging to the feeling tones of experience. The antidote to that is not to avoid feeling, but rather to see that these sensations—which are the basis for the construction, the grouping, and the clinging—are constantly arising and passing away. It's not necessarily easy to see that. But as we follow these Four Foundations of Mindfulness as our path, it implies that as we settle down, get concentrated, and focus in this mindfulness practice, at some point we are settled enough. In that subtleness, we become the calm surface of the lake, and it becomes obvious that these sensations of pleasantness and unpleasantness are appearing and disappearing.

In seeing that, it's obvious that we are trying to hold on or cling to it. It's fascinating how clinging gets highlighted when things are coming and going, appearing and disappearing. It's almost as if clinging is not quite successful when things pass away. In deep meditation, it's possible to feel the mind go towards an object like, "I want that." By the time the mind gets there, in that fraction of a moment, the experience has gone away. There's a pleasant experience, and we think, "That's nice, I want that." But by the time we get there with it, you know, it's gone because it arises and passes so quickly.

In that process, not only are we beginning to let go of clinging, but we're also beginning to appreciate, hopefully, the mind's clarity to see that clearly. To see something very simply in and of itself: to see pleasant, unpleasant, and neither pleasant nor unpleasant in such a simple way that it's not connected to stories, not connected to the past and the future, not connected to the preferences we have, not connected to our fears of where it's going. There's a kind of clarity and simplicity. It's just pleasant, it's just unpleasant. It's coming and going, it appears and disappears. There's a rhythm to it; it pulses into existence and pulses out. The awareness of it, the perceiving of it, is moving and shifting around a little bit, one way or the other. We begin loosening up the grip of clinging to it and selecting that out of the wider field of experience that we have. At some point, as we do that, the attention becomes much more spacious, allowing, and more choiceless, or more available to whatever is happening without that selection process operating.

So it's great to learn not to cling so much, and this is one of the ways that the Buddha is talking about. The benefit of this is that as we cling less, we can love more. As we cling less, we can have more goodwill. Our hearts' care for the world can exist more. We care for ourselves more. That's the reward or the benefit from learning how not to cling.

For today, it's clinging to pleasant and unpleasant. You might, over these next 24 hours, see how much you prioritize or select out of your environment, and how important it is for how you orient yourself and the choices you make whether things are pleasant or unpleasant. Is this a neutral thing, an interesting thing for you? Is this particularly strong for you? If you can see how important this is, then can you also see the ways in which pleasant and unpleasant come and go through the day? What shifts for you when you see it's coming and going, and you realize, "Oh, this is the way it is just for now. It'll pass."

So thank you, and I look forward to being here with you tomorrow.