Meditation: Sensations' Flow & Feeling Tone (Vedana); The Five Aggregates (2/5) Phenomenology of the Four Elements Practice & Vedana's impersonality

This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Sensations' Flow & Vedana; 5 Aggregates (2/5) Phenomenology of 4 Elements & Vedana's Impersonality. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

The following talk was given by Nikki Mirghafori at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on September 26, 2023. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Meditation: Sensations' Flow & Feeling Tone (Vedana)

Greetings friends. Good morning, afternoon, evening, whatever your time zone might be. Wonderful to be with you and to practice together as we all join from different places in the world.

So this week we are exploring the five aggregates, the five khandhas^[1], which is one of the important teachings of the Buddha and a way for us to consider the constituents of our experience of reality to be experienced with the gestalt of these five aggregates, these five heaps. That's really the way the word aggregates can make sense, because they come and they can join together. So yesterday we started with form, the body, form internal and external. Today we are touching into form a bit and then continuing with the second one, being vedanā^[2] or feeling tone.

So let us meditate together and I'll share reflections afterwards.

Let's arrive now. Let's arrive in this body, in this moment in time. Coming together from different parts of this planet, this precious planet. Coming together with wholeheartedness.

Feeling this body. This sitting, breathing human body, connected to the earth.

Feeling our sit bones, sensations of contact.

And becoming curious about sensations of hardness, heaviness, pressure. Heat and cold. It's often hard to tell where our sit bones or bottom begins and the chair, and vice versa, where the cushion begins. However, we can have this sensation spread, these vibrations. Where the concept of the bottom and the cushion breaks down, it's just sensations. Raw sensations.

So many sensations in our feet and our legs. Vibrations, pressure. Do you notice heat? The entire lower body, feet, the legs, sit bones awash in sensations.

And including the upper body, the face, chest, neck, shoulders. Relaxing, relaxing and receiving this flow, this waterfall of sensations. Quite awesome.

Pausing, taking a break to notice, to receive this miracle. Flow of sensations here, there, everywhere. Wherever they call your attention. Resting, enjoying the sea of sensations. Rest in it.

And the sensations of this thing called the breath or breathing included, known, experienced as a flow of sensations. And allowing awareness to know, to be tethered in the flow of sensations. Both to better see, perceive, understand, and also for this stream of thoughts to settle a bit so the heart, the mind, can become more stable in our learning, in our observation.

Let the flow of sensations throughout the body, knowing this, having permission^[3] to relax and receive. Vibrations, pressure, heat, coolness.

Just for this period of the in-breath, can we make the sensations of the body primary, really receiving this, giving it our complete attention just during this in-breath.

And then renewing our resolve for just this out-breath. Completely dedicated, devoted to knowing the sensations of the body throughout during this out-breath. Just this. And then renewing our intention, our dedication again. One in-breath, out-breath at a time.

Heroic dedication, but just for a tiny bit of time. And then renewing, and then renewing. Tiny packets of heroic dedication strung together. Just this in-breath, just this out-breath. Just for the duration of this in-breath, or the out-breath.

As awareness perceives the flow of sensations, let us now open to knowing whether a sensation is known as pleasant or unpleasant. And if it's neither, then it's neither pleasant nor unpleasant—the third category. Become aware, become sensitive to how the mind is labeling, is perceiving given sensations. And don't let it be so effortful trying to categorize every sensation. Let it be relaxed. As your knowing sensations still come to you, you'll all of a sudden see, "Oh yeah, that's pleasant," "That's unpleasant," "It's neither."

Becoming sensitive, sensitized to know in this way. To know your experience, your human experience in this particular way: pleasant, unpleasant, neither.

There may also be sounds that are known, and whether they're pleasant, unpleasant, or neither. As well as mental objects, thoughts streaming through: are they pleasant, unpleasant, or neither? Notice how the mind is relating to them, labeling them, their vedanā, their feeling: pleasant, unpleasant, neutral.

Really tuning into this overlay of pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral for the flow of experience, and how it impacts, colors our experience, these labelings.

As we keep tuning into knowing feeling tone, vedanā—pleasant, unpleasant, or neither—starting to notice it everywhere. It starts to pop up, deconstructing^[4] the nature of our experience.

And as we bring this meditation to a close together, bowing and releasing whatever it was or wasn't, without judgment, and only with appreciation that we have brought ourselves with wholeheartedness to plant seeds, and trusting that they will come to fruition in their own time, not our time.

May our practice together be of benefit to all beings everywhere, including myself. May all beings be happy and free. Thank you for your practice everyone.

The Five Aggregates (2/5) Phenomenology of the Four Elements Practice & Vedana's impersonality

Greetings all. Lovely to be with you in this moment in time. It always makes my heart just so happy that technology allows us to come together from so many different places, and yet we come together. It's so sweet, so sweet.

So this week as we are exploring the five aggregates, the five khandhas, these five constituents of our experience, the gestalt of which really creates our reality. What we consider our human experience or human reality is made up of these five, nothing else. It is quite profound what the Buddha has included in the five. And it's not just what the Buddha has included, but really as you, as a human being yourself, it's not so much a teaching to take on faith by any stretch at all. It's not to take these five khandhas on faith, but just to experience for yourself: "Yeah, these are the five constituents of my experience." It's pretty wild when you really pay attention. It's just this. It's just this.

So we started yesterday with an introduction and we had some time also to talk about form, rūpa^[5]. And there was a piece left over that I wanted to cover today before talking more about vedanā.

With the discussions and teachings on rūpa and form, often it is relayed through the four elements. I talked about four elements inside, four elements outside. So there's one way that this teaching is relayed, in terms of elements inside, elements outside, and I talked about that, and that we are stardust, remember.

And there is a second way that this teaching can be related to these four elements, and that is in a phenomenological way, which is through the first-person experience. Not in terms of what's inside, what's outside—this physical science conception of the world—but through the phenomenological lens of our experience, which is our first-person experience of being human, because that's really all we know. We can assert what's in the world, but it's really through our lens; it's through our conception and perception.

So another way to relate to form—for example, for the body—is through our sensations, through the flow of our sensations that we sense our experience of the world. And of course, if we were another animal, another being, our sensation of the world, our perception of the world would be very, very different. There's this wonderful book that came out last year, I believe, by Ed Yong, and it's called An Immense World. Maybe one of you is familiar and can put it in chat. This book beautifully talks about different animals having a different umwelt^[6] of the world, given their perception, given their sensory system, their sensory apparatus.

Given that we're human, our phenomenological experience of the world is a particular way. For us, for example, in our bodies there are mechanoreceptors, the receptors that detect stimuli such as touch, pressure, and vibration. That's our experience. There's really no experience of hand or leg or breath; it's really these mechanoreceptors, as well as the nociceptors, which are receptors specializing in detecting pain and noxious stimuli throughout the body, including the skin, muscles, and organs. As well as thermoreceptors, of course, the cold receptors and warm receptors that we have throughout our bodies, and proprioceptors that inform us what the position of our body and body parts are, and baroreceptors that detect changes in blood pressure, etc.

So through many, many receptors that we have, the phenomenological experience of this world—this is really the four elements practice. It is also taught through what's called the 12 characteristics method. And the 12 characteristics method is just sensing these raw sensations: pushing, heat, cold, heaviness, lightness. These are the characteristics that I'm naming. There are 12 characteristics. They're in the Visuddhimagga^[7], the Path of Purification teaching, a thousand-page book. I think somewhere behind me, it's that middle one, the thickest one.

It's another way to experience or practice the four elements, through this phenomenological way of knowing the world. I wanted to bring that in because sometimes the four elements practice is only taught as inside/outside and the elements. But actually, these 12 characteristics through the phenomenology of our experience is a very important way. It's also taught through these 12 characteristics and just the raw sensations that we have.

We can tune into the constitution of our experience. Again, the concept of body and leg and arm all of that drops away when we just experience it through these sensations. When the mind gets very concentrated, in fact, it starts to feel like just points in space. There's no location, it's just sensations in space.

Now, this other important constitution of our experience, which is vedanā, feeling tone, which I invited you to turn towards today, is a fundamentally important aspect of our experience. And we often miss it. It's so important, yet we often miss it. We actually miss it in this way: something is pleasant or unpleasant, and we just take it to be that. Then the mind develops a preference for it: like it, don't like it, hate it, make it go away. And then narratives start. We get into these loops of thinking and thought. Whereas a very, very powerful tool is to simply notice that a stimulus, the mind is labeling it as pleasant, unpleasant, or neither.

And this neither, this third category—by the way, some people try to keep looking for the neutral: "Oh, is this neutral? Is it not neutral?" Well, if it's neither pleasant nor unpleasant, then it's just neither. It's that neither category. I've had some practitioners get a little wound up by this third category; it's simpler than you think. But when you tune into seeing how the mind is labeling a stimulus as either pleasant or unpleasant, it can lead to not getting wound up by it, not getting tripped by it.

There are many aspects to this practice, to the value of it. One is sometimes, for example, we hear a loud noise, and the mind labels that noise, that sound, as unpleasant. Okay, so these are happening very, very quickly in succession, every moment. A sound arises, there's contact with the sound—awareness makes contact with the sound—and this labeling of unpleasant arises. So phassa^[8], contact, arises, and then vedanā, which is this labeling. The mind labels in a particular way given the mood it's in, given all the previous history we have had, etc. So these labels, these vedanās, are kind of laden with causes and conditions.

The mind labels in a particular way, and we don't usually notice that so much. But then what happens after that labeling is like, "Oh, I don't like it." Then pushing starts. "I don't like this." Then we cling, we push it away, cling to not liking it and trying to make it go away, etc., etc.

So an amazing practice is, especially if you notice that you are in a doom loop, in a loop, just notice the vedanā of it. It's just unpleasant. It's just unpleasant. Maybe even, "Oh sweetheart, it's just unpleasant. Can I be with the unpleasant?" It's just unpleasant vedanā, just unpleasant feeling tone.

This practice is so powerful to completely unhook the selfing, the "me" mind, the mind getting all tied up like "It's awful, I don't like it, I hate it, make it go away." It's just unpleasant feeling tone, dear. Try this practice for yourself, it's really powerful. It can happen with anything, any stimulus, sounds, sensations, pain in the body. It's just unpleasant, dear. It's just unpleasant feeling tone. Even bring the word vedanā in, because it brings more specificity. It's just unpleasant vedanā. It's just unpleasant feeling tone, that's all. Unpleasant.

It's so powerful. It's really the way that the not-self teaching, anattā^[9], impersonality, can come in in a very subtle way. Not in this heady way of "It's impersonal," but it's like, "It's just unpleasant. That's all it is. It's just unpleasant." So this is one practical way that you can practice with vedanā.

Similarly, if it's pleasant, if you find yourself really wanting something more and more and more, notice, "Sweetheart, it's just pleasant vedanā. I'm just lusting after pleasant vedanā." Maybe if you're daydreaming and you're lost in thought and castles in the air: "Oh sweetheart, it's just pleasant. It's just pleasant feeling tone."

And also notice—this is the last thing I'll say as an invitation for you to practice with vedanā today, v-e-d-a-n-a, feeling tone: pleasant, unpleasant, and neither is malleable. It's not inherent to the stimulus. It's not inherent to the stimulus.

For example, a sound of a bell can sound really pleasant, or it can sound very unpleasant, and actually it can switch back and forth and back and forth. It's not inherent in the sound of the bell. It's really how our mind, given the state and expectations and all of that—that cluster of all these five khandhas, especially the mental phenomena—is labeling it, labeling in a particular way.

See how flexible it really is. It's not fixed, and that brings a sense of freedom. That also brings a sense of impersonality. It's not personal. It's just how this mind in this particular moment, given all these causes and conditions that keep changing and shifting and moving, labels this phenomenon in a particular way: "Oh, sound pleasant," "Sound unpleasant." I notice sounds, because sounds are one of the easiest ones to ascribe meaning to, to ascribe vedanā to. But sensations too. Sensations as well.

Maybe I'll just make one exception: nociceptors. When nociceptors in the body detect pain or noxious stimuli, there is a tendency, they tend to inherently feel unpleasant. But even then, even then, when the mind is really concentrated... I know I've had experiences where the sense of pain actually can even feel like, "Wow, this is like fireworks in the body." There's pain everywhere, but the sensation is so interesting, the mind is so concentrated, that even this quote-unquote unpleasant sensation can feel quote-unquote pleasant, because the mind is so concentrated and has so much peace and curiosity about it.

So thank you so much for your practice, for your interest, and we will continue with the five aggregates tomorrow. Please pay attention to vedanā today, and a whole world will reveal itself to you. Be well.