Wisdom Wide and Deep

by Shaila Catherine

  With Contact as Condition, Feeling Tone Comes to Be

  Inherent in contact is a quality of feeling. Feeling tone refers to the pleasantness, unpleasantness, or neutrality experienced in every sensory contact. This is a subjective experience that describes the way that we experience our encounter with the world. Classically, feeling is described as bearing the characteristic of experiencing an object; its function is to exploit the stimulus of the object, and its manifestation is pleasure, pain, bliss, or grief.

  The feeling tone is largely conditioned by how we have reacted to past experiences. Wise attention encourages a balanced and equanimous response to feeling, accepting the present-moment occurrence as the natural manifestation of past or present conditions. The Buddha taught a wise response to feeling born of sensory contact: “On seeing a form with the eye, he does not lust after it if it is pleasing; he does not dislike it if it is unpleasant. He abides with mindfulness of the body established, with an immeasurable mind, and he understands as it actually is.”236 If you notice a reaction that causes stress, consider what some contributing factors might be—are there opinions, fears, desires, or prejudices that perpetuate stressful reactions? What might you do to cultivate healthier conditions for the future? We don’t try to avoid or suppress feelings; feelings are inevitably produced by contact. A mindful experience of contact will not stop feelings that naturally arise with each sensory encounter, but wisdom and clarity purifies the experience of any ignorance that could generate causes for further suffering.

  With Feeling Tone as Condition, Craving Comes to Be

  All craving is based on a feeling. Craving cannot exist without the support of a feeling, yet feeling does not invariably lead to craving. Craving is not inherent in external objects; it is generated through an ignorant relationship to the feelings that arise on contact with the sixfold senses. Craving has the characteristic of being a cause of suffering. It functions through delight and manifests as insatiability.

  Feel the Feeling

  Practice bringing mindful attention to the experience of contact and noticing the associated feeling tone. Scan your body for sensations. Try to discern the present-moment expression of feeling rather than assuming that sensations will carry a predictable feeling quality. Sometimes painful aching muscles also contain moments of pleasant feeling, and sometimes pleasurable activities include painful or irritating moments. If you notice pressure where your buttocks touch the seat, focus on the feeling tone by examining if it is a pleasant or unpleasant quality of pressure. If you notice heat in your palms, recognize if that heat feels pleasant or unpleasant. If you can taste the saliva in your mouth, observe if it is a pleasant or unpleasant experience of taste. If you can hear the sounds from traffic on the street, a barking dog, music from a nearby stereo, the hum of a refrigerator, or the twitter of birds, recognize if the experience of hearing is felt as pleasant or unpleasant. Many times the feeling quality will be neither distinctly pleasant nor unpleasant, but it might fall in a category generally felt as neutral.

  Notice craving any time that you seek pleasure or avoid pain. Craving fuels the search for happiness in ways and places where satisfaction can never be found. No matter how many chocolate bars you consume, how much money you have in the bank, how beautiful you look, or how much power you wield, craving creates an unquenchable thirst that cannot be satisfied, like the thirst of a person who drinks salt water.237 As people struggling to maintain sobriety or overcome addictive behaviors work diligently to bring mindfulness to craving, every meditator who wishes to free the mind from ignorance must face deeply entrenched patterns of reaching toward gratification that never fully arrives.

  Drawing Out Desire

  When you sit down for your next meal, look at your plate before you eat. Notice the colors. Smell the odors. Observe the mind. Is there craving to take a bite? Have you started salivating yet? Consider if you are presently feeling hungry. What is the feeling quality of hunger? If you do not feel hungry, what is the motivation that causes you to reach for the food? As you take your first bite, chew it, and swallow it mindfully. Taste it fully. Observe the physical sensations, notice the pleasant and unpleasant qualities, and observe your mental response. Notice if and when a desire arises for another bite. If your hand reaches for another forkful even before you have swallowed the quantity that is in your mouth, notice what motivated the movement for more. Enjoy a mindful meal by teasing out the distinctions between the physical sensations that come with the impact of taste, smell, and sight, and the distinctly mental processes of desire, repulsion, fear, and craving.

  With Craving as Condition, Clinging Comes to Be

  We often recognize clinging after we have become obsessed or fixated upon a desired object, attainment, belief, or experience. Clinging can manifest as a strong form of craving or as false views. The characteristic of clinging is seizing or grasping. It functions by not releasing its hold. Consciousness becomes narrowed to a compelling quest that pleads, “I need that to be happy.” This imperative causes the mind to become obsessed with the object of desire. However, since all things in this world are impermanent, it is not possible to hold on to the things that we desire. Whether or not we temporarily attain the object that we seek, inevitably the quest for pleasure and security remains unfulfilled.

  Investigating Attachments

  Identify an obvious attachment in your life and reflect:

  What feeling or emotion surrounds the attachment?

  Are there emotional cravings, habitual routines, social expectations, material needs, or ideological constructs that sustain the attachment?

  Can you feel the force of clinging itself, without the elaboration of story—just the raw, visceral experience of wanting?

  What does clinging feel like? Do you feel off balance, disconnected, insecure, stiff, threatened, confused, closed off, angry, impulsive, irrational, desperate, hollow, entitled? Notice the specific quality of this suffering state.

  With Clinging as Condition, Becoming Comes to Be

  As a cause for rebirth, grasping for existence is likened to a fish that is clinging to the hook through greed for the bait.238 Becoming, also referred to as being, identifies the process of coming into existence. Shaped by grasping, becoming describes the stage where I am has formed: I am happy, I am depressed, I am a woman, I am the witness, and so on. This is the point in the cycle when identification manifests. The Abhidhamma defines becoming’s function as “to make become” and “to become.” Its characteristic is being kamma and kamma-result, that is, the cause or the result of action; and it manifests as having kammically wholesome, unwholesome, or indeterminate qualities.

  Observing the Constructions of Self

  Observe your speech. Notice when the primary communication is merely your own existence. Sometimes what is said is not very important; what we are really saying is, “notice me, I’m here, I’m special, I am like this—I am.” Become sensitive to the tendency to seek respect, appreciation, confirmation, praise, or recognition. You don’t need to squelch these desires should they arise, but notice how they contribute to the development of self-formations. Are you in a phase in your life when self-formations are valuable, or are you ready to deconstruct these processes?

  Also observe your internal dialog, ruminations, and daydreams. Make a note of moments when the thought “I am” forms. How much of your thinking is recreating and reinforcing the story of being you? What would the experience of your life be like without the burden of incessant becoming?

  With Becoming as Condition, Birth Comes to Be

  Propelled by the forces of ignorance, craving, and clinging, and following upon the impetus of becoming, existence is born. The phase of birth in the cycle is characterized by the first genesis in any sphere of becoming; its function is to consign the formation to a sphere of becoming, and it manifests as the result that emerges out of previous conditions. From the viewpoint of multiple lifetimes, this poignant moment of birth occurs at conception when past causes r
ipen to give rise to consciousness in any realm of existence; for example, as a human embryo or a celestial being. When this cycle is applied to the moment-to-moment events of our lives, birth describes the uncountable momentary occurrences that arise from the continuously changing dynamic of potentials, conditions, and tendencies.

  With Birth a Condition, Aging and Death Come to Be

  Everything born will inevitably die. Aging and death refers to the demise of every sentient being, including humans, other animals, celestial beings, insects, fish, and so on. It also refers to the momentary maturing and passing of elemental phenomena, the ending of any particular form of identity, and the cessation of each experiential event. In the traditional language, aging points to the characteristic maturing of the aggregates; its function is to lead on to death, and it manifests as the vanishing of youth. Death is defined as bearing the characteristic of falling, shifting, or passing; it functions to disjoin, and it manifests by a departure from the destiny in which one took birth.

  In an untrained mind, resistance toward the process of aging and death may be expressed by sorrow, lamentation, pain, grief, and despair. When ignorance affects the dependently arising chain of phenomenal events, we suffer. But suffering is optional. When we are mindful in contact with sensory phenomena, and unaffected by ignorance, suffering is not produced.

  The Scope of Suffering

  Notice the frequency of unsatisfactoriness in your day-to-day activities. Begin from the very first moment of waking and tune in to any experience, subtle or gross, that is unsatisfactory, disagreeable, or unwanted during your day. Take note of the little things—the unpleasant taste in the mouth upon waking; hunger and thirst; distress while rushing to an appointment; disappointment with the result of a project; impatience when the email you have been hoping for does not arrive; an aching hip; irritation with traffic; the harsh sensation of winter wind; a concern about being judged; the fear of loss; and so on. Notice the pervasive scope of suffering. How willingly do you observe the unsatisfactory nature of life?

  DISCERNING PAST CAUSES

  The discernments that we practice in conjunction with the examination of dependent arising will tease out causal relationships that arise within the cognitive process when we see, hear, smell, taste, touch, and think. They also illuminate the determining forces that condition a succession of rebirths. The instructions that follow describe specific methods to contemplate our own existence as configurations of the five aggregates and to discern the various causes that condition this existence.

  It is important to be honest regarding your own aspiration. What are you willing to give up to be free? You are engaged in a process, an evolution of sorts, and you may not be ready to relinquish all attachments right now. This practice invites an actual examination of reality. It is not about just adopting beliefs about kamma and rebirth. The essence of this practice is to honestly investigate the deep roots of ignorance and craving in the present moment, in the past, and in the future. Learn how suffering forms in attachment.239 See for yourself how causes produce effects. Consider what would be truly satisfying in a conditioned world, and how strongly you desire further experiences in this life and in future existences. Do you really want more and more sensual experiences? Do you want to be reborn again? If so, what experience are you seeking? What do you really want?

  The discernment of the causes from previous lifetimes that produced this existence may require strong concentration, but not psychic powers. While knowing very specific past and future life cycles of oneself and other people may require certain specialized powers, the ability to discern the various formations of mental and material aggregates internally and externally is a natural outcome of concentration and insight and it is within the scope of what a contemporary meditator can attain. Speculation about the specifics of kamma could, however, become a distraction, and inferential and intellectual knowledge is insufficient. The Buddha said that the complete details of kamma were incomprehensible and warned that excessive conjecture could bring vexation or even madness.240 This study will not predict how a particular past or present event will affect a particular future result; rather, our approach examines the forces that sustain the psychophysical process, stopping short of interpreting a future that will arise from specific causes.

  This system, in other words, does not dictate that a specific cause x must produce the specific effect y, but rather it reveals that because there is an effect y, there invariably must have been a cause x to support it.241 This logical relationship is illustrated with the example of fruit trees. If there is an apple, we can deduce that there must be an apple tree. Although an apple cannot come into existence without an apple tree, it is possible to have a tree without a fruit. An apple seed, however, can only produce future apples. It can never produce mangos, grapefruit, or peaches. Its potential is limited to the production of apples.242

  In the remainder of this chapter, I will explain the procedures for discerning your own past kamma and your future potentials. The instructions may appear dubious to some readers; they may not fit neatly into your worldview. When I first received these meditation instructions I was skeptical. I left the interview shaking my head, assailed by doubting thoughts, “Does my teacher seriously expect me to see into past lives? This is too weird! This is impossible …” Fortunately, by this point in the training, I had enough confidence in my teacher and the training that I could set aside the doubt-filled thoughts before they disabled me. I tried to retain an open mind and just see what there might be to discover.

  Proficiency in discerning ultimate mental and material components (as in chapters 12 and 13) is a prerequisite to practicing these meditation instructions. By discerning the ultimate material and mental phenomena as discussed in the previous chapters, you have metaphorically laid out all the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle on the table. Now, with the discernment of causal relationships, you are, so to speak, putting the pieces together and seeing how each piece fits together with the other units and functions to give rise to conscious experience and life. If the constituents of mind and matter are clear, you will be able to analyze their interactions and recognize the past, present, and future forces exerted by ignorance, craving, clinging, and kamma potency (kammasatti) that sustain the cycle of existence. This meditation also invites you to contemplate the ignorance, craving, clinging, and kamma potency that are accruing through your intentional actions during this present lifetime and consider how they will impact future existence.

  The process is analogous to a tracking dog that follows the trace of scent left by a person who has passed by. A meditator can follow her line of mental and material factors back through time by tracing the causal connections through successive lifetimes. As you trace the stream of mentality and materiality back through past lives and into future lives, be wary of the seductive potential of personal stories. This process is not concerned with personal identities, social status, previous careers, or family ties, which are the field of psychic powers. Remain focused on the ultimate and impersonal realities of material and mental phenomena and their causal relationships.

  Through a sequence of meditative discernments you can see the subtle processes that function within your own stream of conditioning and gain the direct knowledge that because of the cause of suffering in the past, suffering in the present continues; that as long as there is a cause for suffering in the present, suffering will continue in the future. Although you will not fathom all the subtle workings of kamma, this is a fascinating exploration of causality that may confront you with stark questions. What do you really want? What is the cost of that desire? Are your desires leading to a noble aspiration? What aspects of experience are the results of previous actions, and what aspects of your experience are creating the causes for future effects? Can we choose to change our tendencies? How much of your perception is determined by past causes and how much is affected by present events?

  MULTIPLICITY OF CAUSES

  The model of the twelve links prov
ides a methodology for examining the causal relationships of mind and matter to describe how experience comes to be. But just as many conditions must come together for a ceramic tea cup to be found on my desk—the presence of clay and water, the previous pressure of the potter’s skilled hands, the heat of the kiln, the nutrition that provided strength to the potter, the truck driver who transported the cup to the store, and so on—there are always innumerable complementary aspects that support every existence. There is an ancient Indian story of a king who hears beautiful lute music and demands that his minister bring him the sound. When the minister returns and presents the lute to the king, the king is enraged—he wanted the sound, not a wooden instrument. The minister explains that the sound cannot exist apart from the wood, strings, bow, and musician. Music is the effect produced by a combination of conditions.