Hello everybody. This is on the topic of contemplation of feelings and the four foundations of mindfulness. I took a lot of my research from Nyapa. a German Theraboden monk and found him really interesting. He had a little quote from a German poet saying, to feel is everything. And most people spend their day-to-day life trying to increase pleasure and minimize pain or what they don't like.

[01:14]

And we have built a world based on those two things. Our society is an expression of our effort to increase pleasant feelings and avoid unpleasant ones. Our ambitions and our strivings, our work, our careers are all aimed in that direction to succeed. We now have a modern world that looks the way it does because that is what has been motivating us. The definition of feelings in the Satipatthana Sutta is... It has three aspects.

[02:18]

Feelings are either pleasurable or dissatisfied, not pleasurable, or they're neutral. And they are expressed through the six modes of our consciousness, our five senses and our minds. And so I wanted to read this saying that So he says that the Buddha is terse saying that all things converge on feelings. The central position of feeling in human life also makes it clear why the Buddha included feelings as a separate category among the five aggregates of personality. The five aggregates are what make up our sense of self.

[03:19]

and then also included them as a separate mode of contemplation in the Four Foundations of Mindfulness. So just feeling is to become aware of whether an experience is pleasant or unpleasant or neutral is at that moment the coinciding of the organ of perception, its object, and consciousness in that moment. And that is bare awareness. Before there is a judgment or an opinion or a a desire to act, or any kind of other movement and emotion, there is just this simple awareness of your state in any of the modes of your existence.

[04:36]

Bare awareness is usually not noticed. It disappears very quickly. Emotion usually moves right in to the moments of our lives also very quickly and intellectual responses of some sort depending on what our patterns are about. It's easy to confuse feeling and emotion. emotion belongs to the realm of mental formations and it's very complex and We tend to think of feelings and emotions almost simultaneously, but they are distinct So Contact is the place where the meeting of the three factors of feeling arises.

[06:06]

When you become conscious and make contact, if you do nothing but that, you enter into an intimate moment with life and feel at one in that moment and see clearly and understanding arises because there is a spaciousness that begins to open up which is why we practice the mindfulness meditation is to be able to create that space by staying concentrated in the moment we are living in while we were doing that practice in either of the four frameworks

[07:16]

that are described which is mindfulness of the body, the feelings and mind and consciousness. It is very difficult to stay put because the mind enters into the experience that you're having very quickly and can distract and the practice is to remember to stay with the focus, keep your focus on your feelings and notice what your feelings are doing while you're feeling the feeling in that moment.

[08:20]

So feeling is actually a mental factor which is common to all types of consciousness. Every conscious experience has a feeling tone of either pleasant, painful, or neutral. The point is to get to be able to stay there with whatever feelings are coming up and one of the things that I've noticed is that fear will arise if you get too close when you make contact with the object of your awareness

[09:43]

and allow yourself to let go, there is a fear that comes and tries to block. It's like an obstruction or a hindrance. And if let alone, it will come into existence and then it will go out of existence. and this will enable you to fall deeper into the concentration of your meditation. So... Would you like to say something about what that fear is? Yeah. My experience of it is fear of dissolution of death.

[10:46]

Dissolution. Dissolving. Yes. It is like Chökyam Trungpa describes the mindfulness of feeling as mindfulness of life and along with that is the whole sense that it's really not safe to be alive. That there is a threat implied in the fact that we are here and we are not going to continue to be here. We are going to dissolve and come to an end as everything does. And as we are looking at all the small things and the things in our life they're all doing that and eventually it starts to come home that you yourself are going to disappear at some point in time.

[11:55]

And we have an investment in permanency that I don't quite understand because there really isn't anything that continues. So he actually recommends this, he says the practice of mindfulness of feeling is what he calls touch and go. To allow yourself to experience what is in your present and then let it go. no matter what it is and insight will arise slowly over time that will bring you to an understanding of emptiness.

[12:59]

comes out of the understanding of impermanence and as long as we avoid the feeling of impermanence and cling to life we will not have that insight and we cannot go any deeper into meditation until we allow ourselves to experience that. That seemed to be the main point of the meditation on feeling, was that that was the place where you could go very deep into that aspect of understanding. No, I'm not the greatest at talking.

[14:34]

Let's see. The contemplation of feeling is one of the four foundations of mindfulness. As such, it may be undertaken in the framework of that meditative practice aiming at the growth of insight. It is, however, essential that this contemplation should also be remembered and applied in daily life, whenever feelings are prone to turn into unwholesome emotions. Of course, one should not intentionally try to produce in oneself feelings just for the sake of practice. should rather be taken up for mindful observation only when they naturally occur. There will be many such occasions provided the mind is alert and calm enough to notice the feelings clearly at their primary stage.

[15:42]

That is a difficult thing to do. The whole body and mind has to come to rest to be able to observe that. In the contemplation of feeling, there should be mindful awareness of the feelings when they arise. And one should clearly distinguish them as pleasant or unpleasant or neutral. And that distinction does not seem like much, It is prior, it's primary to everything that happens after that. Patterns within ourselves get triggered based on that, depending on the situation that we're in. So I'd like to open this up to questions.

[16:53]

Peter? I've been thinking this week a little bit about the third category of feeling, which you've used the word neutral. And I don't know whether other translators actually use that word. But the picture we have in front of us says neither pleasant or unpleasant. And I've been reflecting about how those are not the same. That neutral can be taken as something which is not the same as neither pleasant or unpleasant. And I guess what my question is, is that neither pleasant or unpleasant is kind of in a live state, whereas we might tend to fall into kind of an under-focus or spacing out or something, but if we're awake to neither pleasant or unpleasant, maybe it's quite a bit different than some kind of boredom or something like that. You think of neutral as boredom? Well, I think there's potential to kind of consider it that way. This person said that if it doesn't have the sharpness of pleasant or unpleasant, that it would be boring and therefore you would fall asleep if you were contemplating it.

[18:03]

But I'm questioning that. Yeah, I would question that because it would. Well, boredom is unpleasant. This is true. Rory and I have been talking about this for a long time, because we've been studying this and talking about it. This summer, when we went on this rafting trip, we decided, OK, let's keep checking in on pleasant, unpleasant, and this third category as we're going through our day. And what I came to was, Pleasant, unpleasant, and then for me, I was looking at simultaneously pleasant and unpleasant, rather than...

[19:04]

Neither pleasant nor unpleasant. And then I got to visit with Bhikkhu Bodhi. I don't know if we're working with his translations, or he's kind of the, he and Ashantanisarao are the main translators. So I saw him in Massachusetts, and I was talking to him about this. I said, what do you make of this? Because he has sort of photographic memory of this, and really thought about it. And he said, well, my practice is not good enough to catch. That's the most subtle state. And my practice is not good enough to catch it. It very quickly, and this is what Alexander would say, how quickly they move. And that's the subtler of them. And he thought, he hadn't thought about it. He said, well, maybe that's actually pretty accurate. Or there's a very, very, very swift alternation of pleasant and unpleasant that flips back and forth so quickly that you can't quite perceive the distance.

[20:15]

I really felt that when we were on this rafting trip. Some things were simultaneously incredibly beautiful and really difficult. At the same time, you could be having this experience. I just find that more, I don't know if it's, it might be bad dharma, but I find that a more useful way of framing that third state. John? Yeah, I think one of the things that goes on with this, pleasant, unpleasant, and whatever that third state is, that usually when something unpleasant happens, we very quickly are not aware of this unpleasant, we're involved in some kind of process of aversion, and there's sort of an intense emotional state that gets triggered pretty quickly. And the same thing with pleasant.

[21:16]

Grasping things up pretty quickly. I think it's really hard to catch that talking about, you know, monocle terrorists, stuff that pretty quickly, you know, we're off and racing to other stuff, and we don't really catch it. But we notice when we do that. Yeah. You know, I say personally, I mean, a lot of times what I'll notice is that, you know, I'm having a reaction, some sort of reactive emotion, which may be, you know, pushing away, maybe anger, I'm aware of this other kind of grasping type thing, like a piece of pie or something like that. And I think it's really tough to experience just the simple pleasant or unpleasant in and of itself.

[22:24]

And I think that's one of the things that makes it just really tricky and difficult for us to even imagine this neutral state. Because we're so quickly triggered into other, more complex emotional states. Yeah. And our society is so geared towards intense emotional experiences, that there's something missing. So we become boredom and psychotic. Something's finally going to happen. Right. Jerry? I keep on thinking about the conditioned nature of that. Isn't all of that conditioned? Yeah. So that isn't, is it natural for us to respond because we have so many, because we have that consciousness of a conditioned experience? Because I found myself during our summer vacation

[23:26]

I found myself in the Galapagos. You found yourself there? It was totally like being in another world. Everything was different. The animals I'd never seen before. Plants I'd never seen before. And I felt like I didn't have a reaction of, that's a great animal. or that's not a great animal, that I had curiosity. And I wonder, it was curiosity and I was able to be with that new thing that I'd never seen before. For a longer while than I ordinarily am because I didn't have any story about it. Right. No preconceived notion. I didn't have any conditioned place to go. Immediately, of course, I would lay down But the direct perception of, if you see babies, they meet things with curiosity.

[24:34]

And I wonder if that place of just being open and curious is what that is. That would be just being aware before the judgment, before the notion of what it might be. Before you go with it anywhere. Yeah. We so rarely encounter that. We do it in Zazen though. We do it in Zazen. Right. Kate? Well, a little bit, at some point you were talking about the experience of focusing on one thing and having that moment of at-oneness and it's producing fear. because you were saying it was the fear of dissolution. And you went on to say that it was the thought that I'm not always going to be here.

[25:35]

I want to say that when I was speaking with babies, when I was maybe five or six, I had an experience several times. I would look at my hand. And I would think about myself. I would move the hand, see that it moved at my will, and think about what it meant to be me. And it was very, very spooky. At once, I had this feeling that everything was the same and it was really good. Everything was going to be permanently OK. And then I would do it another time, and I would start getting drawn into that, and I would be afraid. And it was a feeling of dissolution. But it was not at all thinking, oh, but I'm not always going to be here. It was a feeling that I might dissolve right now, in this instant. Wait, how old were you? Oh, five or six.

[26:37]

And I can't do it on cue, I'm sorry to say. But the thing is, the point I wanted to make, that my experience was different, was that it was not the feeling, it wasn't anything so complicated as a thought of, ah, but I'm not always going to be here. It was the feeling that this very experience was going to dissolve me right now. And I saw myself pulling back from it and being sorry about that. But nonetheless pulling back. Pulling back, yeah. That's the, like, fear of intimacy. Because to get close to anything is to become intimate. And the closer you get, you... I think fear starts to arise when you get close to merging.

[27:38]

with what is outside of yourself. That is intimate to become one with. In my case, I felt as though I wasn't... I mean, all I was looking at was my own hand. You know, it wasn't some other person. Yeah, but still... But it felt as though... The fear was that I was really going to cease to exist. I'm not repeating myself right now. It wasn't a matter of future consent. It was right this instant. I've experienced that as becoming transparent. Becoming transparent, like clear, see-through, which is a weird feeling. I think it's good to be careful It's not necessarily that in that moment of directly encountering impermanence, fear does arise.

[28:53]

It can arise. not be pushed out of the moment by that, if that's what arises. Also, so can ecstasy and merging arise. And what you're describing, to you and Kate, it's like if you read David Lloyd, who I highly recommend, a Buddhist philosopher, It's like this fear of dissolution is, he's very influenced by Ernest Becker. I don't know how many of you have read Becker. He wrote a book called Denial of Death, which is Woody Allen's favorite book. And so his whole psychology is based on the notion exactly that the fear of this dissolution is going to happen.

[29:56]

Whereas what David is saying based on that is saying, this direct perception, and sometimes it can be that transparency, or what Kate was saying of, I'm not real right now. It's this intuitive sense, not being able to locate your own sense of reality in that moment, which can be, that can be liberating, or that can be really scary. Depends on how you are and what your practice is. But that's where David goes, talking about that sense of lack or emptiness as a sense of this perception of unreality of oneself, because it's not that one isn't real, it's just one can't point to That center, you know, you, anyway.

[30:58]

But fear is not necessarily what comes up. But it often does, because we're apathetic. I think that's what you're saying. Yeah. Yeah. What about the dragon? Is that the dragon? Who? The dragon. The man who loved dragons and had images. But when the dragon came to a story, Oh, right, right, right. Yes. The real thing was too much. What's your name? Joanna. Joanna. Just to add to that conversation, I think it's the fear of ego as a solution, you know? And I think part of that, just sort of on a psychological level, it's a fear of not being able to come back. Like, in that fear in the moment. It's like a kind of very basic fear of sort of losing your mind, so to speak. Actually, that's a very telling kind of phrase. Like, you won't be able to come back.

[31:58]

Actually, what I wanted to ask about, I was curious, there's this emphasis on discerning pleasant and not pleasant. And that seems to be like the binary. So you have like, you know, a truly ambivalent feeling is actually very subtle, it's very rare, but everything is either pleasant or unpleasant. And I was wondering why it's necessary, like, you have a feeling, and that feeling is basically a mix of all these feelings. Why not to just sort of sit with that mix, or that ambivalence? Like, why it's necessary to sort of categorize it And also to add to that, if there's a way to say like, because my thought when I read the prayer book about the not pleasant is that it could be that there's other things, that maybe there are things, that there's a range of things that aren't pleasant or are pleasant.

[33:04]

Right. And there are. It's just before all of those other things enter into the picture, there is just the experience of pleasant, unpleasant for the one in the middle Isn't that non-duality? Isn't the text opening up non-duality in these places? That would be where we were headed through observation, through staying put Because early on where it says breathe in and breathe out that sort of binary, but even that opens up into the calling of the bodily fabrication. And then this duality starts to open up into these neither this, neither that. So it feels like... Right.

[34:04]

Peter? Did you say something? might be helpful to bring the issue of time into the equation. But I think it's getting a little confused. So I've heard people talk about feeling fear of something happening and also feeling fear in the moment. And there's kind of different classes of feelings and emotions. So when you have a primary emotion, let's use the example of you're walking along in the Alaskan wilderness and suddenly a bear comes up and is looming over you. I'm fairly certain that what I would experience at that moment would be fear. But that fear would be eternal.

[35:11]

in that moment there'd be nothing but fear. It's just like... Right. It's forever and forever. This is what the primate, when you have these raw primordial emotions, they're timeless. Right. As soon as you start thinking, if I'm walking along in the Alaskan wilderness and I'm thinking a bear might attack me, that's anxiety. It's anticipatory fear. And a lot of our feelings, I would say probably the vast bulk of them are actually secondary. They're anticipatory or remembrances. And I think it's very important in Zazen, you know, it's really easy to get into looking forward and looking back. And if you're right in the moment, the moment is timeless. And part of what we experience when we time, but time isn't a linear this, that and the other.

[36:25]

So I think someone was talking about non-dual. Emotions actually offer a gateway to the non-dual when you can get to that primary immediacy of them. But as soon as, like John was saying, as soon as we start thinking about them, and filtering them, and processing them, and doing all these things with them, which is what we do, then they get very complicated. Yeah. One more, yes. Eric. Eric? Oh, Alec. over-characterizations of positive, negative, and not positive, not negative, versus the more nuanced idea of sort of ambivalent feelings, as was described.

[37:37]

Is this really sort of this tendency, kind of the Hindu influence of over-characterization such a component of positivity and negativity imbued in it that I can't tease it out into this structure. For example, longing for me implies that I have a sense of scarcity or lack or insufficiency in myself, and that I have an imagining of an object satisfying that, and that imagining, that fulfillment, Correct. So if you were meditating and this was rising, if you were really slowed down before you could possibly see the arising of the feeling, what it feels like and everything coming after that and then the dissolution

[38:57]

of it, but all you would be doing is observing, and it would just come like a wave and leave. But it's going to be a wave that's positive, negative, or not? It'll be all of that. Whatever it is, that's what it will be. But what I hear you saying is it has to be one, the other, or the other. No, it's a sequence. Yeah, like a film. Like all the stills in a movie. But each still is going to need to be positive in any event. It's going to be something. Yep. And it will change. I'm not quite sure I understand that. We have to stop. Alan? I think you're totally right. Yeah. This is a very quick sequence and part of the problem, I think, is in the word feeling.

[40:00]

which has a whole different envelope for us in the West. And I hear, if we're talking about fear, or we're talking about longing, that's not true in the technical terms that we're using here. Actually, that fits into the next foundation of mindfulness, which is mindfulness of the mind, which is really the stories we start to tell about the bare perception. And I don't think it's particularly Hindu. I think it's really an Indian way of looking at things. But it's a very minute moment, frame by frame, as Alexander was saying, investigation of the flow of contact. And it's hard to do. It means really, really. slowing down. Concentrating. Yeah.

[41:02]

And that's an important element. But in the Apankha, you read something else about the daily life. What was that again? This methodology is a meditation practice. It was something like keeping a

[42:04]

keeping a very broad awareness of the flow of awareness. Yeah, in your daily life. It's like not focusing in every moment on this really minute stuff, but when you can do that, that's a useful thing to do. One need not fear that focusing the mind on feelings and emotions in the manner described will lead to a cold aloofness or an emotional withdrawal. On the contrary, mind and heart will become more open to all those finer emotions like friendship, human sympathy, and forbearance. They will not exclude warm human relationships, nor the enjoyment of beauty and art and nature, but it will remove from them the level of clinging so that these experiences will give a deeper satisfaction than is possible when the mind is overrun by tempestuous emotions.

[43:11]

That was not it, but I like that. We take a break. I think you can go in. They're eating dinner. About three minutes, right? Yeah. As soon as I get back. We don't want to take too long. Are you tired? Well, I'd like to take a walk with Beacon Brody today. And we walked from Christenfield over the Golden Gate Bridge and back to Christenfield.

[44:17]

That was like 10 miles. By the time I got out of my car here, it was like my hips didn't work. This class, you know, I took a shower. I feel really good. I'm glad to be here. I mean, being with him just puts you in a good mood. He's a wonderful guy. Really, really nice that he's back in this country, totally accessible. He just said, he invited a bunch of friends to his birthday party. Yeah. Yeah, he should go for it. Well, he lived for like 35 years in Sri Lanka. So a lot of these translations that have come through, Wisdom, this is another one.

[45:18]

He's just he has photographic memory of this. You know, you get so it's really anything. Thank you. Physically and politically. And that was in a monastery, a Chinese monastery. I'm going to New York. Thank you for your time. Enjoy. Do you want to do paperwork? Welcome.

[46:35]

I'm going to continue the talk on the Sutra, talking about the mind as observing the mind. As Alan was saying, just as we ended, maybe we're going to talk a little bit about feelings, but the fear that arises is interesting. I hadn't thought of that as an example, but it's a good one. So, let's see, I was talking with a fellow who's not here tonight about the class, and he was asking about the sutras and how they fit in with our practice here at the Berkeley Zen Center. So, I was thinking, you know, these early sutras give us another point of view on our practice. They're so, the Indian way of language. outline of things rather than a narrative.

[47:40]

I'm used to reading novels and that sort of thing where the line is all narrative and that's certainly not the case with the Sutras tonight. It certainly gives us an idea of our roots, where Buddhism came from, which I kind of like. I think understanding the history of things gives us a deeper understanding of where we are right now. We know where it came from and how its processes and gives us a deeper understanding of where we are right now and who we are. It's like seeing always the front of a building and now suddenly you get a chance to go around to the back and see that same building from the back. You have a much better idea of what that building is really all about. So that's pretty good. So I'm going to talk about the third part of the Sutra. Mindfulness of mind is mind. Or as one author I've read talked about mindfulness of mind, but not my mind.

[48:51]

The difference being that we're not talking about the old ego processes that are going on, but what's this mind that's up here? Or wherever it is. What really is it? I think Kate had a really good way I understand her talking about, she looked at her hand and said, that's me. But in a sense, she created herself at that moment, it seems to me. And it was that fear. Suddenly she said, if I can create myself, I can also destroy myself. It's kind of the impression that I got, the interpretation that I took from what Kate was talking about. So it's this mind that's doing this processing for us. It's creating us and destroying us at the same time. So we're going to talk about the mind. and try to understand it in terms of maybe not my mind. So this sutra is pretty dense. If I handed you the Constitution of the United States and said, here, this is how our government works, you would look at me like I was nuts, right?

[49:59]

The sutra needs a little unpacking and understanding and discussion like we're having tonight, as we'll have probably for the rest of our lives as Buddhist students. In one of the sutras that I saw recently, the Buddha was talking about how the Sangha was separating itself out into various... one part of the Sangha liked this kind of activity, like chanting, and so they were over to talk to a senior monk about how to chant. Another one liked to talk about the Dharma, so they were with another senior student talking about the Dharma. And that's kind of what we're doing here. We're no longer just looking at the sutra, but we're talking and meeting among ourselves, sort of discussing, hey, what's going on here? So I wanted to actually read the first paragraph of Part 3.

[51:04]

Simply because, actually, when I first read these years ago, I really put them down very quickly, because I was really put off by the language. and whatnot, and as I've read them over and over again, I think they're kind of interesting. Okay, let me first go on the mind. And how does a monk remain focused on the mind in and of itself? There is a case where a monk, when the mind has passion, discerns that the mind has passion. When the mind is without passion, he discerns that the mind is without passion. When the mind has aversion, he discerns that the mind has aversion. When the mind has delusion, he discerns that the mind has delusion. When the mind is without delusion, he discerns that the mind is without delusion. So that's the first paragraph of the three that are part of this section. I won't go on. I just had to read that first part. As I said, I'm beginning to fall in love with it.

[52:10]

It's strange. So this reminds me of a joke I heard years ago. where the person says, well, keep your eye on the ball, keep your shoulder to the wheel, and that's why it worked that way. So when we're, you know, the decision is sort of saying, okay, be aware of what's going on and not be aware of what's not going on, be aware of what's today, it takes a lot of attention and a lot of focus to do that. If in need, you can do it at all. It's not clear to me that I can. So I might have spent my entire life observing my mind. What about my job? What about my friends and neighbors and my wife and my children?

[53:11]

So the language and repetition are off-putting in that sutra. And so when I was younger I said to myself when I put it down, well, I'm just going to stick with zazen and hope that mindfulness will come. And I think to some extent that's the case. But the sutra, as we said earlier, is not really saying, you know, spend all your time, all those mental processing in your brain just thinking about what the brain is doing. There's something else going on. that's going on. And at the same time, there's a little bit of an observer sitting there sort of saying, hmm, that's interesting. Oh, you're not feeling so well. Oh, you're feeling pretty good. Oh, that's an interesting thought you have just now. And that's what's going on. And Zazen is one of the things that sort of enhanced that for me. It's given me the, I guess, the ability to slow down enough, but actually recognize the thought as it comes up. But some of that takes effort.

[54:15]

And I ran across this. The internet is really wonderful, you know, because you can find so much on it. And so I found this sort of this Tibetan essay on this sutra. And actually, by Tripong Rupacholch, I can't pronounce that, his teaching. So the headline, he said, do I remain indifferent or do I become interested? Do I remain indifferent or do I become interested? What attitude do I take toward my life? Toward my mind? Am I interested in knowing the mind and to get out of samsara? Samsara being suffering. Am I interested in knowing what's really going on here and by that knowing releasing me from the suffering that's going on? Or am I indifferent to all these questions and prefer ignorance and stupidity? Stupidity means to be indifferent to what is happening, not to care about one's own future or about others.

[55:22]

me as, it's really true, it's easy to get lazy, it's easy to turn on the TV, like tonight there's a baseball game, the radio, all sorts of mystery novels one can read, science fiction, the most current Hugo Award winner, those things are wonderful. I'm taking drawing classes, and I draw really hard, and I find myself doing the drawing, and of course I don't have to do it, it's totally discretionary, And I say, you know, instead of doing this thing, which I'm really, really concentrating on hard, why don't I go over and do that really easy thing over there? That's much easier, but I suspect also not quite as gratifying, not as much fun in the final analysis, not as much, not as enriching. And I think that that's the kind of effort that they're talking about here, that sometimes staying tuned in to what we're, is not very much fun, and it's much easier to go do something else. And so the payoff is deeper understanding of ourselves, and a little more freedom from the samsara, from the suffering that goes on.

[56:58]

Effort. So when we sit zazen, I think this is what was talked about already earlier by Alexander, when we sit zazen, this has certainly been the case for me that I've discovered. that these activities come up, the feelings, the mind, in my case the thoughts come up, and I see them when I'm sitting zazen, and they go away, and they come up again, and they go away, and over a period of a lot of zazen, Because it's, actually, in Zazen it's slowed down. That's one of the things about Zazen. It slows you down. And there's a lot of repetition, at least in terms of these feelings and thoughts and whatnot. And so over time I say, oh, there's that thought. Oh, there's that feeling. Oh, there's that. And because it's happening in Zazen, it doesn't have the

[58:03]

if you will, or it does have a hook. But at least in Zazen, the hook also becomes recognized. So now, the feeling of the thought comes up, usually a negative one. The hook is an inner, which creates more suffering and more thoughts and whatnot. But as I'm sitting in Zazen, I'm seeing all this go on. And then when I'm outside, I finish Zazen, I've left the gate, I've gone outside, and the same thoughts, the same feelings come up. I recognize them. Oh, I've seen that one before. Oh yeah. And so the Zazen has sort of, if you will, preconditioned me to be able to recognize these thoughts and feelings. I also trained my observer so that when I'm and given me sort of a relaxation, if you will, that what I'm seeing in these things outside the gate, in my daily life, they're not so fearsome or scary, if you will.

[59:18]

When they're fearsome, scary. And also the ones like the desires and the lust, they're more recognizable. I can see what's really going on. Sojin was talking about his walk down the street. I guess he went by a used car. But he saw this review, and that car is all he wanted to have. And he looked at it for a while and said, yeah, that's nice. Then he walked on. It was wonderful. He said, I don't need that car. I've got a fine car where I am. So I guess that's what we learned about Zazen, is how to turn down that flashy car. I was reading an article today. today have been so conditioned through advertising and keeping up with the neighbors and what not that we think we want this thing over here, whereas what we really need as an individual and also as a society is something that is much less abusive to the culture.

[60:33]

Either that will happen, I don't know. Okay, so, I read the Sutra. I read some of these first words or mental formations. Passion, aversion, delusion. There's also a bunch more here. Constricted, scattered, enlarged, surpassed, concentrated, released. And so I thought it would be fun to sort of talk about some of those a little bit. Some of the words in one of the other translations, there's a little footnote that sort of describes them, like greed. does not just mean strong passion, but refers to the whole range of lust, craving, and attachment to senses of pleasure. Attachment to senses of pleasure, from the weakest sensual desire to the strongest lust, you can produce only unwholesome actions. This is interesting.

[61:34]

So greed, he's saying here, the author or translator is saying, greed can produce only unwholesome actions. Which is of course one of the reasons we want to recognize that we have greed. the greed that's arisen in us and identify it. Because once it's arisen and we've identified it, then just the very nature that we've identified that, oh that's greed, and then of course I just told you that's unwholesome, that's totally not a wholesome feeling. That in itself just helps alleviate or moderate that, the energy that that thought or that greed has for you. And just from the tiniest little thing, like, boy, I sure would like to have another bite of that donut, to maybe some craving for a sexual encounter with someone that you don't necessarily want to have a sexual encounter with. The mind without greed is the wholesome opposite of greed.

[62:36]

It is the cause of renunciation, generosity, charity, and giving. So without greed, it is the cause of renunciation, generosity, charity, and giving. Anger can produce only unwholesome actions. Mind without anger is the wholesome opposite of anger and is the cause of loving-kindness, friendliness, and goodwill. Delusion is the mental concomitant that crowds and binds the mind, making it unable to discern between right and wrong action, unable to perceive the characteristics of impermanence,

[63:41]

unable to perceive the Four Noble Truths. It is common to all unwholesome types of consciousness, but here it refers specifically to those types of consciousness associated with doubt, uncertainty, restlessness, distraction, and confusion. The mind without delusion is the wholesome opposite of delusion. It is the wisdom that perceives the impermanent, unsatisfactory, soulless nature that conditions right and wrong actions. So it's nice to know if we're deluded or not deluded, although it's a hard one for me. Greed, anger, and delusion and their opposites all have a wide range of intensity from weak to strong. In insight meditation, that's the kind of meditation they're talking about here, it is important to be aware of whatever is present in the mind, no matter how weak or strong it appears to be. So I think Insight Meditation is not one that I know very much about, Vipassana.

[64:49]

I guess there's whole schools that practice this kind of meditation in a much more rigorous way than I think we're taught as how to meditate here at the Berkeley Zen Center. I think in Berkeley, for me at least, my experience has been that I'm sitting Zazen and Shikantaza, which means the thoughts arise and when I recognize the thoughts have arisen, I let it go. But during that process of recognizing that it's a thought, there's also the other understanding that, oh, there's that thought. Oh, it's making me feel bad. Oh, and there's this chaining of other thoughts that go along with it. I'm not seeking to do an analysis of it, but the analysis comes up anyway. It's just part of it. And when I recognize I'm doing the analysis, then I say, OK, let's just go back to the breathing and the posture. OK, let me talk about the shrunken mind. This is what I know about. Shrunken mind is lethargic, indolent, and of highest interest in anything. So that's a shrunken mind.

[65:51]

And so you're saying, oh, my mind is kind of shrinking. I'm feeling kind of lethargic, or indolent, or hacking at anything. It's like everything's gray. I suppose it differs from depression. And a fused restless state of mind that goes here and there is therefore not concentrated. Developed, the type of mind, the developed type of mind experiences sort of, I guess, meditative raptures. They call it rupa. We don't really talk very much about it here at Berkeley, but I think they're part of the other kinds of Buddhist meditation schools. Developed mind knows that they're experiencing these rapturous states. Undeveloped mind knows that they're not.

[66:55]

Richard, that's distinguished from the rapture, right? Well, I suppose if you're in that case, you just know, OK, I'm in the rapture now. Yeah, I don't know. It's not something that I'm really very experienced with. Then there's the superior mind. These are all minds that things have come up again. They're distinguishing the two different kinds of raptures, if you will, one being better than the other. So the superior mind is a little bit better at its rapture we do shakantaza, which doesn't really talk about any special states, you know, we're not here to say, this is better than that. The way I am right now is better than the way I was two minutes ago. And I'm going to sit down here and try to be in this special, wonderful state. This is not what we do here at Berkeley.

[67:57]

You just sit here. But nevertheless, I guess there are schools that do it. So it's part of this being aware of where you are. Peter? What you're doing right now is dovetailing what I see how short it was. It seems like they've been very nice to us to give us two paragraphs of examples to kind of lay it out for us. And it could be several thousand paragraphs of when the minus were this, the minus were this, when the minus were this, when the minus were this. So it's sort of like saying, be aware of what's happening there. Moment by moment, we're aware of the mind.

[69:00]

Moment by moment, we're aware of the mind. And it's not our mind. It's the mind. The mind is like this. Awareness of the mind is like this. Awareness of the mind is like this. It's not like that. It's not like that. Yeah. Yeah. Alan? Well, I think that if you were to start, see, the last one, you only had three pages to do it. Yeah. So you could cover it. You know, here, if he's going to get started in delineating mind states, there are hundreds of them. If you read the Abhidhamma, every mind state is a Dharma. And in that system which comes after this, which is kind of Buddhist psychology, it's kind of endless, and it talks about in great detail about every, what we would call, emotion.

[70:01]

And so here, he's just compressing it all, basically saying, look at your emotions, look at your mind state from moment to moment. It's like the same thing is in our specific, where are you right now? Where are you right now? He said, look at the mind externally, physically. Look at the mind internally, emotionally, feeling tone, all that. So it's just compression, I think. Because if he was going to tell a whole sutra. Yeah, I mean, it's like, yeah. It wouldn't have been written down yet. That's right. And this isn't about analysis of the mind. It's just awareness. That's right. It's just awareness. some of these words I had never seen before, especially in the context of the Buddhist world. But I actually only have two more to go through here.

[71:05]

Of the Kalas, these Kratnos only have two more. One is the concentrated mind. The mind was either proximate concentration or absorbed concentration. The meditator will not need to be mindful of the concentrated mind, the superior mind, or the developed mind. The mind temporarily free from defilement due to insight or jhana, there are ten defilements, namely greed, anger, delusion, conceit, wrong views, doubt, sloth, distraction, lack of moral shame, lack of moral dread. That's kind of the sort of things that are embedded, if you will, in the Buddha knows that they have this mental state. The Buddha knows, or the student knows, that they don't have this mental state.

[72:06]

Those are some of the mental states that you can know that you have or don't have. And I guess, you know, the monks back in 2,500 years ago, are certainly very different from us today. All they did in their life as monks was to basically study this stuff and meditate and talk with each other, and of course they would go on alms rounds to collect their food and whatever clothing and medicine they needed, but they spent a lot of time to think these things through. I don't know that we have that time today to do that. Maybe some of us do. Maybe most of us do if we don't watch so much television, certainly mystery novels. But I think what Alan and Peter and what we're all saying here is that really we don't need that list.

[73:07]

What we need to do is to just sort of say, OK, this is what's going on with me right now. And that takes that energy. is going to have some payoff for me. This work is going to give me the insight into myself that allows me to release and relax the unwholesome activities of my life and to gather up the wholesome activities, the wholesome states of mind. Well, I've lost my notes. I think this is the point where I was going to ask if there's any questions. Yes? What do you make of this word discernment? I think I'm easily swayed by it as being something like distancing myself and looking at experience from a type of distance, but I'm wondering

[74:16]

it's closer to, and I'd like to hear your thoughts, it's closer to something that gets at the intimacy, something that is moving into subtlety, versus that's moving in with the experience, not moving away from it and looking at it from the outside, So your discernment would be what seems to me you can have a long or a faraway discernment versus opposing discernment. I guess I don't know that much. I'm not very good at language, but certainly to me means you're just making a distinguishment between this and that. Right. But what is that? Distinguishment is. Yes, I think my Western vantage point is that discernment. That's there's an analytic there that I'm engaged with.

[75:18]

distinguishing versus experiencing and a type of synthetic is that work and maybe just a different flavor that I'm bringing to the text in terms of understanding that word different flavor not so much as distinguishing but engaging intimately with your thought well with all of these with the Turner, the turning of wood uses that as sort of a thoroughly example of what's happening here at the long term and the short term. When you're talking about the intimacy, I'm thinking in terms of, for me, when I have sort of unwholesome thoughts, I want to reject them. And I have little ways that I sort of push them away from me. And as I become more familiar and more comfortable and feel more safe, then that same thought becomes more... I can get closer to it.

[76:27]

And I can see it for what it is. It doesn't have to be a wholesome thought. Well, it could be a wholesome thought. But I can have that thought. side of you? No, the thought is right here. Because everything is inside. Our whole reality the whole issue of observation versus immersion. And they're kind of two sides of the same coin.

[77:30]

But I think it's a very practical question for us as meditators. Because on the one hand we're told to sort of plunge in, no separation, We're told to be aware, wholesome, unwholesome, choose. And there are two sides of our nature. But it's kind of a koan, I think. Richard, while you were saying the mind is reading this, Some translations I've read, instead of saying, I am feeling such and such, or I am aware of, it says, this person is experiencing such and such. And I've sometimes worked with that practice, instead of saying, oh, I'm feeling such and such.

[78:38]

It's really interesting. So this person is... It's hard to put into words, but something kind of shifts, although very quickly this person becomes me, you know, the I, kind of absorbs it again, but the de-egoization of it, I think is fundamentally what this is pointing towards. I've done that too, and it helps me if I'm, if this person is angry, doing something, or feeling something, or in some state that I don't like, it allows me to be more compassionate to this person. As you say that, I'm thinking, I tend to do more when I'm in a state that I don't like.

[79:38]

It's much harder to do it in a state that I like. I sometimes do find it helpful, I've heard this teaching here, the thought or feeling arises, this is what's arising now. And to put it, where is it in my body, where do I notice my breath? And I find that trying to analyze it is not so helpful for me. go to the middle formations and somehow trust in that somehow the grounding in the body is where it seems to be most beneficial for me. And I've had the experience in some machines where things slow down and the arising occurs

[80:47]

I notice where it is in my body and it leads to crying. Crying arises and it just disappears. The whole thought disappears. It's just crying. It's just a sensation of tightness in the throat. It's just going down to the belly. And the labels drop away. It's like it's not my fault. didn't know that thing about being easier on yourself. This is a human response. I don't know if this is what you're saying or not, but to my mind it sounds like it's sort of a cathartic sort of process. in me that I haven't seen before, and when I'm in Zazen, it's slow enough that I can actually identify it.

[81:53]

And it's not the enemy that it was when I, before this machine, when I had that same thought, and it was a thought that I needed not to think because I didn't feel so bad. Yeah, it's a bad thought. It's a bad thought. It's like facing what there is but not grasping it. Yeah. There was one more over here and then I think we're finished. I just kind of struggled over using the word distinguished from using the word discerning. Distinguished always to me conjures up a mental, a very intellectual function where you list the pros and cons. and you make a difference. As opposed to discerning, which to me in Zazen, sometimes when there is a dilemma, or even something that you don't understand, and leave off with it, then a kind of direct intuition comes up.

[82:57]

And that direct intuition, you end up getting something, that it was not an intellectual exercise and yet you really see directly or experience directly wholesomeness or unwholesomeness. So discernment in this case is the intellectual or the insight that comes out of direct knowing. Coming out of direct knowing. Which is very different from the way I was thinking about discernment. I've always thought of those as different. At least when I read discernment used in other Buddhist texts, that's what it looked like. I think discernment, and also it's a very large factor in Catholic Christian formation, and I think it's talking about it in roughly the same sense. It's actually the... a kind of confidence and clarity that arises from a direct encounter with yourself so that you come to a place where you really, you trust your

[84:13]

intuition about something. Intellectualizing could be part of it, but it's not fundamentally an intellectual process. First of all, say I'm in a discernment process, or I'm in a period of discernment, and they don't mean they're thinking about something or analyzing. They're practicing. Sitting with it. Clarifying. One more. You wanted to say something and then we'll finish. Well, I was wondering, again, about the discerning. Pleasant, unpleasant. I was wondering about the moment where you start crying and it kind of moves out of that feeling and just into being at that point. So a feeling comes up and you discern pleasant or unpleasant, or you somehow recognize it. Then is it transformed? I mean, this is kind of just a rhetorical question. I don't know if there are two people here Is it transformed then?

[85:15]

I mean, there's a feeling that's unpleasant, and then it just becomes what it is. And then does it transform from being unpleasant to being something else? Or is it, that's the nature of it? I think that's next week. See you next week? Good. See you next week?

[85:32]

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