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Guided Meditation: Pleasant, Unpleasant, and Neither Pleasant or Unpleasant

Good morning everyone, and welcome to 2/22/22. That's truly a "Twosday," and I am happy to be back here. I had a nice visit with my father.

To jump in, we're beginning with the topic of feelings, feeling tones. To be very simple about it, the theory in Buddhism is that all experiences have three tonalities, three feeling tones: they are pleasant, unpleasant, or neither pleasant nor unpleasant. One of the reasons this is significant is that one of the primary ways in which the mind gets activated—to be for and against things, to move towards things and move away from things—is whether they're pleasant or unpleasant.

Exactly our relationship to what is neither pleasant nor unpleasant is variable. So, if we bring attention to the pleasant, unpleasant, and neither pleasant nor unpleasant—and if everything has this quality, if everything is characterized in some way by this tonality—we have a big handle, a big perspective in noticing how we react.

So in this meditation, as we're sitting here, maybe notice as you do your regular meditation practice, your mindfulness practice, whether the experience is pleasant, unpleasant, or neither of those two. But more importantly, notice if there's even the slightest little movement for or against, moving towards or moving away from. Just that very simple observation: what is the response in our system, our somatic, our psychological system?

Can you notice this ever so slight, or very great, movement away from or towards? Moving away from the unpleasant, towards the pleasant. Or being in favor of the pleasant: "Oh yes, that's good." Or having an unfavorable reaction to the unpleasant: "Oh no, not that again." As I said, it can be very subtle. It can be just a slight shift in the texture, the size, or the strength of the awareness. It could shut down on one side and open up on the other. Or it could be quite strong: the whole body can move, or the mind can spin out into all kinds of thoughts and reactions one way or the other.

Let's begin with that, and then I'll talk more about it.

Taking a comfortable, alert posture and gently closing the eyes. Scan through your body to see—there are probably pleasant and unpleasant sensations in your body as you sit here. Scan through your body and just calmly recognize the pleasant and the unpleasant ones. As you do, do you notice any simple movement for and against? Wanting and not wanting, moving towards, moving away? What is the response to being aware of pleasant and unpleasant?

Scanning around your body for the pleasant and unpleasant, not lingering in any one place for long. Just like an inventory.

Then bringing your attention to your breathing. Taking some long, slow breaths, and if possible, breathe in a pleasant way. A long, slow, gentle, deep breath in. And a long exhale where you relax and let go.

Letting your breathing return to normal and continuing to inhale and exhale. Maybe breathing in normally, but ever so slightly exhaling longer than normal. In the exhale, letting go, relaxing the face, the shoulders, the belly, anywhere in the body.

Then letting your breathing return to normal completely. Tuning in now to the simple experience of breathing and noticing: are there parts of the breathing that are more pleasant? Maybe some that are unpleasant? Are you kind of equanimous either way, or is there in fact some very simple being for or against, wanting or not wanting, moving towards or moving away with what is pleasant and unpleasant in the experience of breathing?

If other things in your experience come into awareness besides the breathing, be mindful of whether it's a pleasant, an unpleasant, or a neither pleasant nor unpleasant experience. Also, see if you can notice if there are any ways in which you are responding or reacting to the pleasant or unpleasantness of it.

Rather than somehow subtly getting involved in the preferences, the wanting and not wanting of pleasant and unpleasant, see if you can abide, live in the knowing that this is happening. Just to see and recognize, it's like this. There is pleasant, and there's wanting. There's unpleasant, and there is not wanting.

Being aware of your reactions to pleasant and unpleasant. If you're aware of them clearly enough, you'll see that you are not your reactions. They're simply reactions, responses, desires, and aversions—being for or against—but not you. When you rest in awareness of it all, just knowing, it is as if awareness is larger, more peaceful than any reaction you have.

Then, in the last minutes before the ending, whatever seems pleasant or comfortable in your meditation—if there is such a thing—breathe with that, and let the mind settle into that. Supported by what is comfortable or pleasant in settling further into the present moment, thinking quieting down.

As we come to the end of the sitting, consider that our lives will always contain degrees of pleasant and degrees of unpleasantness, comfort and discomfort, ease and unease. It's part and parcel of the human life. And it's possible to be free. It's possible to be peaceful. In knowing pleasant and unpleasant, knowing our reactions, it's possible to feel peaceful, safe, and happy.

Our happiness does not need to depend on things being pleasant or unpleasant. Happiness belongs to something deeper in us, something that's related to our capacity for simple awareness, being present here in a full way.

So as we come to the end of the sitting, maybe we wish that people find their way with the pleasant and unpleasant challenges of this life, and find a freedom, a happiness, and a peacefulness that's not so dependent on whether there's pleasant or unpleasantness. May we dwell with an awareness that's independent, not dependent on the pleasant and unpleasant, and wish that for others. So that all beings may find a sustainable happiness, a sustainable safety, peace, and freedom.

May all beings be happy, and may our careful attention to this aspect of mindfulness—pleasant and unpleasant—be in the service of the welfare and happiness of all beings, including ourselves.

Dharmette: Satipaṭṭhāna (34) Introduction to the Second Foundation

Good morning everyone. I appreciated the comments about Paul Farmer^[1] and his unfortunate passing. I am thinking about him a lot today and yesterday. I was thinking I'm happy that we as a community raised over thirty thousand dollars last summer for his organization to aid their work^[2] in Haiti. I'm glad we could do it while he was still alive. May his work continue, and may our work caring for others continue as well, inspired by him.

The topic now for the Second Foundation of Mindfulness^[3] is quite a profound topic. The simple explanation of what it is doesn't clearly indicate how profound it is. But there's a building on, or continuing of, a theme that you find in the teachings of the Buddha around the idea of omniscience.

There were people who wanted spiritual leaders to be omniscient back in the time of the Buddha, and there were apparently some spiritual teachers who claimed a certain kind of omniscience. The Buddha was one who didn't so much push things away or deny things; he would accept them and then redefine them in his own terms. He didn't say it exactly the way I'm saying it, but I'm building on how he says it: that he is omniscient, and all of us can be omniscient in a particular way. We can know something about everything, and that something is we can know the feeling tone of every experience we have.

No matter what the experience is, it's either pleasant, unpleasant, or neither pleasant nor unpleasant. In terms of the hedonic tone, those are the three options. There might be many other features of our experience besides the hedonic tone, but that tonality has those three characteristics. So, you know something about everything if you know its feeling tone.

To get a handle and to recognize feeling tone as it arises in all kinds of situations—a situation can be very complicated, and then you realize, "Oh, this is a very unpleasant situation. It's just unpleasant." Recognizing the unpleasantness of it gives mindfulness a place to land, to settle, or to open. This allows the mind to not jump around, be confused, or chase after trying to understand it, analyze it, or track what's going on, and allows something to settle. The same thing happens with something that's pleasant: "Oh, this is really pleasant, and no wonder that I'm leaning forward so much."

To be able to recognize the reactions we have to pleasant and unpleasant is tremendously useful. It turns out a very high percentage of human reactivity, of wanting and not wanting, is not based on a sophisticated analysis of the situation, but rather on the very simple, almost amoeba-like idea of going towards what's pleasant and away from what's unpleasant. If we could watch that movement for and against, and see it clearly before we live in it or are pushed around by it, there's a lot of freedom that can be found. More than freedom, there can be a lot of deep understanding about ourselves. It opens a window, a door to a deeper understanding of ourselves.

This is what this Second Foundation is about. In my understanding and interpretation, there's a transition here in the Second Foundation from attention to the body, to attention to the mind. The mind being something—the citta^[4]—being something deep inside. There's a movement from what's a little bit more peripheral to what's deeper inside. In the First Foundation^[5], there's the breathing, the postures, and the activities which the body does. Then there's the use of the imagination or reflection to consider the parts of the body, the elements of the body, and to consider what it's like for the body to be there without any sensations at all.

Now we come to a kind of rebirth in the Second Foundation. Following the corpse meditation that we did last week, I think there can be a heightened sensitivity, a heightened interest now in the sensations that are evidence that we're alive. So there's an appreciation that this is something to value. As we go into the feeling tones, we're actually beginning to get into the deeper functioning of the mind, the deeper qualities of the mind. We'll see in a day or two that this very foundation of feeling tone makes a distinction between that which is of the flesh—that which is kind of surface—and that which is Dharmic. The Dharmic feelings, the deeper mind, are what's going on in a deeper way.

This transition from what's more surface, sensual feelings to what's more non-sensual, deeper in the mind and deeper in our inner life, is a phenomenal transition that happens in this Second Foundation. But at first, we just want to understand a little bit about these three tones: pleasant, unpleasant, and neutral.

The word for pleasant is sukha^[6], s-u-k-h-a. And unpleasant is dukkha^[7], d-u-k-k-h-a, which we often translate as suffering. The most literal meaning of dukkha is pain, and sukha is happiness. By application, because there is such a broad range of feeling tones, rather than making it strictly pain and happiness or pain and pleasure, it's pleasant and unpleasant to capture the subtlety. But you have to remember it also applies to the most intense versions of those.

At first, the focus is much more on sensual pleasant and unpleasantness. I guess you can have pleasure, but the difference between pleasant and pleasure probably has a lot to do with how much we lean into it, how much we get caught in it and involved in it. There's less involvement with just pleasant and unpleasant.

Pleasant and unpleasant is understood in Buddhism to be a quality of the mind; it's not purely physical. This was a confusion I had in my early years of studying Buddhism. I thought pleasant and unpleasant was purely a physical reaction to things that had nothing to do with my evaluation of it. But if I read deeper in the suttas, it's actually a little more complicated. We're not innocent bystanders of pleasant and unpleasant. There can be a subtle leaning into it, or formation, or prioritization of it. There is preference going on in the very idea of pleasant and unpleasant, and that is not completely only a physical phenomenon. The mind participates in the formation of pleasant and unpleasant.

This points to how we're now beginning to dip our toe into the deeper well of our inner life. The feeling tone is not just physical and mechanical. It involves a mutuality, a reaction, and a mental process as well, as we are touched and as we feel pleasant and unpleasant.

We don't have to understand how all this works, but we want to be able to start appreciating it. "Pleasant" and "unpleasant" comes off the tongue quite easily as something that seems hedonistic, or seems distant from the full sophisticated life we live or the full range of happiness and unhappiness that we might experience. But to begin keeping it that simple, and beginning to recognize how often and how much we're reacting to pleasant and unpleasant—and sometimes reacting to what is neither pleasant nor unpleasant—we begin finding we have more choice to not react, or to step back into a broader awareness where the awareness is not the reaction. The awareness just knows the reaction.

This develops and strengthens mindfulness a lot. This is the direction we're going in Satipaṭṭhāna^[8]: we're moving in the direction of cultivating an awareness that can observe the experience, or can be wide enough to hold the experience. Pleasant, unpleasant, liking and not liking, wanting and not wanting, can all be just seen through awareness, through mindfulness, and known. It makes a world of difference to see it and to know it.

Finally, I'll say that I suspect the way I'm teaching it today, maybe you don't get a sense of its full value. For the Buddha, this vedanā^[9]—the Pali word for feeling tone, v-e-d-a-n-a—is something he points to as being one of the most important pivot points for our experience. It's kind of like there's a funnel, an hourglass, and the neck is where the feeling tones are. Everything goes through that neck. There are all these different things that go through, but everything has to go through the neck of feeling tones before it fans out again in the hourglass.

The Buddha pointed to feeling tone as having this central, foundational role for mindfulness practice, for getting a handle on our experience and becoming free. He pointed to this as an alternative to getting wrapped up in the philosophical enterprises of his time: philosophies, interpretation, speculation about metaphysics and spirituality. He was pointing to direct experience. In particular, he pointed to this feeling tone as being so important to help us become free, to understand what's going on in a deeper way.

And then finally, in the structure of the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta, feeling tone is the seventh exercise. There are six before and six afterwards. So feeling tone is right in the middle. It is a pivot, and we'll see in the next few days this pivot that goes on as we get deeper into the feeling tone of our experience.

So here we go, the Second Foundation of Mindfulness. I hope that you'll appreciate how wonderfully significant it is to bring mindfulness to this part of our life. Thank you.