This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video GM: Simple Knowing or Complications? The Six Sense Spheres-Our World (5of5): Mind & Mental Phenomena. It likely contains inaccuracies.
The following talk was given by Ying Chen at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California. Please visit website www.audiodharma.org to find the authoritative record of this talk.
Welcome, everybody. Welcome from foggy Santa Barbara, which is our typical spring and summer weather here—typical June weather. We call it “June gloom.” Hopefully, it gets a little bit sunnier in July. There’s mental activity in the relationship to seeing and having perceptions about the weather, just to be noticed.
Today is the last day of our week’s exploration of what the Buddha described as making up the world: the six sense spheres. These are the six pathways through which we meet all the experience of our lives. I’ve been spending the week with you looking at these because our relationship with them is the most basic way that we create obstacles to the clear seeing that leads to insight in our practice. It’s also the most basic way that we can let go of those obstacles.
Where do the obstacles arise? They arise in our minds. The mind, of course, has a really big job in our life. It’s in charge of our relationship with all the other physical senses, with what makes up our world. It’s part of our world. It interprets the world for us. It guides how we interact with all the situations and people that we come in contact with in our lives. Without it, we could not function. And we know this, of course; that’s nothing new.
We also know that the mind’s activity can get us in trouble. The kind of spinning out that the mind can do—chewing on some old grievance, conceiving elaborate fantasies, going down a rabbit hole of judgment and blame, sometimes of ourselves, sometimes of others. What is called papañca1 in the texts, a word familiar to many of you—mental proliferation—is probably the biggest source of dukkha2, the biggest source of suffering that we create for ourselves in our lives.
So, attending to the arising of an unhealthy attitude or of some kind of habitual reactivity in the mind before it runs off into this proliferation, this flood of conceiving, can help us avoid so much dukkha in our lives. It’s something we can learn to become more skilled at: to catch the beginning of the inclination, to stop the thinking train before its engine gets going. You know how energy builds as we start to think about something that has emotional impact for us. It really builds and builds.
The path of practice in Buddhism could be characterized as gradually inclining the mind in the direction that gets us out of that trouble—the onward-leading direction toward what is beautiful, toward what is wholesome, skillful, kusala3, and away from what is the opposite of those. Every situation in life is made up of different kinds of sense contact. Remember, that is our world. So attending to how the mind reacts to different kinds of situations is a training in learning where the onward-leading direction lies. It helps develop the discernment and the energy we need in order to keep moving in that direction.
Today, I’m going to talk about the last of the six senses. And I want to bring the mental factor of vedanā4 into the mix because vedanā accompanies every moment of sense contact—that is, of course, every moment of life. It plays a big part in the arising of fetters, and it plays a really big part in how fetters can be abandoned as well.
So first, before I get into that, let’s meditate.
Take your posture, adjusting if you need to. I need to adjust a little bit myself here, just to find that place of stability, balance, ease, and alertness.
Doing a little body scan if that’s helpful to you, looking for those places where there’s tension and just seeing if they can ease up, soften, relax a little bit. Maybe using the breath to assist with that.
And then letting the breath be the center of your attention for a little while. Just being receptive to the sensations of breathing, not reaching out for them, grasping at them. We will breathe, and the sensations that accompany that breathing will be there. They can be known. Just simply okay.
Now, if you’re feeling relatively settled, I’d like to invite you to just open to whatever is arising in your experience. Being receptive, keeping that receptive attitude, noticing the arising of sensations, of visual images, of sounds—whatever is arising. Just being receptive.
And we know that as we sit, thoughts will arise, and emotions will arise. A sense of an experience being pleasant or unpleasant will arise—forms of mental activity. And we can be present to those in a receptive way as well.
Sometimes we will get caught. We’ll take hold of a thought or image and start to expand on it. And then we notice, and we can let go if that’s easy. And if you find that difficult, attend to how the body is when there is thinking with some kind of urgency, some kind of needy quality driving it. What are the effects you feel in the body? Are they pleasant? Are they unpleasant?
Just invite a relaxed, receptive awareness. Like sitting back and watching the stream of sensations and mental activity that arise. This is our world, this interplay of physical senses and the mind. And every time we get caught in the mental activity that takes us away from being present, we can recognize that and just see if we can let it go, noticing the effect it has on our state.
So, what’s going on in the body, and what’s going on in the mind? What’s the effect of what’s going on in the mind on the body? We can just simply know that, know each of those things, without moving into evaluating, analyzing, judging. It’s all natural. It’s the arising, the unfolding of our lives. Just see if you can know it simply, with easeful energy, with kind awareness.
Everyone in the world has these five physical senses and this mind to work with, unless they’re in some way injured in one of those areas. But this is the way we all make our world, perceive and conceive our world, all over, everywhere, everyone.
And those of us here, we can take those senses, the abilities that are associated with those senses, and we can use them in a way that brings some goodness into the world, that brings kindness and care, friendliness, wisdom, a little bit of spaciousness. And I hope we will do that, so that we’re adding a little bit to the goodness in the world.
So that all beings may be safe. All beings may be happy. All beings may be healthy. And all beings may have ease in their lives. And all beings everywhere may be free.
Thank you for your practice, and thank you for the practice all this week. Welcome again. Today is the last day of this brief investigation of the six sense spheres and the fetters that can arise in relation to them.
Anytime there’s sense contact, any kind of sense contact, there’s also some kind of mental processing of that contact. What that mental activity begins with is something that I think we’re familiar with: an immediate, simple response, experiencing the contact as either pleasant, unpleasant, or neither. That response is called vedanā4 in the Buddhist texts. I would imagine you’ve heard many talks about this very simple, basic, and powerful mental response, which is happening constantly in every moment of sense contact—which, we know, is every moment of our lives unless we’re unconscious.
So vedanā is not a fetter, but it is seen as the trigger for all the mental activity that often follows sense contact, which includes fetters. The word vedanā is most often translated into English as “feeling tone.” The tone of a feeling. Another translation comes from psychology and also from chemistry: “valence”—positive, negative, or neutral valence. I kind of like that one, except that “positive” and “negative” seem to have some judgmental connotations with them, and that’s not what’s being pointed to with vedanā. “Hedonic tone” is another translation, but it seems a little bit opaque to me. Gil has been using the word “sensation” lately—just pleasant or unpleasant, pleasant or painful sensation.
The Pāli word vedanā itself comes from a root that has meanings of both sensing and knowing, kind of a merging of the two in a way. So sometimes, instead of “pleasant” and “unpleasant,” the words used are “pleasant” and “painful,” which are more literally accurate because the Pāli words for these two flavors of vedanā are sukha5 and dukkha2. Sukha, you’re probably remembering from Gil’s talks about samādhi6, can mean happy, contented; it has a really delightful aspect to it. And dukkha means suffering, stress, discomfort, unease. So, sukha and dukkha—pleasant and unpleasant, pleasant and painful.
There are lots of complex ideas about this response. Bhikkhu Bodhi7 calls it an “affective factor” that is in essence very simple. The reason for all the different ways of defining and describing it is that, simple though it is, it’s understood to have a lot of power in driving our thinking and our behavior. It’s a kind of mental activity, and it acts as a bridge between the body and the mind.
Conditioned on sensing an experience as either pleasant or unpleasant, different mental states and mental activity will arise. We hear that often. If an experience is received as neither pleasant nor unpleasant, then the typical response will be boredom or zoning out. Pleasant vedanā, of course, commonly conditions mental activity in the desire realm, moving towards something. And unpleasant or painful vedanā conditions the mental activity in some flavor of the aversive realm.
We don’t have conscious control over vedanā. It will arise. It’s natural. But we don’t have to obey it. And that’s a really important point. That’s a kind of pivotal point in our practice with fetters, our practice with all the kinds of mental activity that exist.
In every instance of sense contact, one of these ways that the contact is felt will arise immediately—what feels like simultaneously to me with the contact itself. If we aren’t paying attention, especially if the pleasantness or the painfulness are strong or intense, that vedanā is likely to lead to some kind of reactivity, that is, to a fetter, to a knot. This sequence is very famously laid out in the teachings on the 12 steps of dependent origination, the very systematic description in the texts of how dukkha arises in us. The four middle steps of the 12 in that cycle are the sense spheres, sense contact, vedanā, and then some form of craving—craving for or craving against, we could say, dependent on the flavor of the vedanā.
Vedanā is often described as the weakest link in this chain of how dukkha arises. If we notice it and then just leave it be—”this is pleasant,” “this is unpleasant”—without elaborating, we can stop craving and clinging in their tracks. The chain is broken, and dukkha doesn’t arise.
We can use vedanā in the same way in practicing recognizing fetters. When there’s a sensation at one of the sense doors that we sense as pleasant, we can know that this is pleasant, and it can be possible to go no further. I take a piece of chocolate from its wrapper. I eat it, savoring it, and it’s very pleasant. I recognize this is very pleasant, and I stop right there before the desire for another piece catches me and gets me eating. I have avoided a fetter arising.
The same is true with the unpleasant. There’s a kind of mental reactivity happening. We can abandon the fetter that has arisen. We hear a dog barking close by. Perhaps it’s kind of loud. There’s unpleasant vedanā. And then we begin to feel some judgment arising: “Oh, they should keep that dog indoors. That dog needs to be trained.” If we’re paying attention right there, we can notice, “Okay, there’s a fetter arising. There’s some judgment, there’s some ill will.” Notice how it feels in the body, maybe. And right there, we can decide, “I don’t want to move into that mind state. I prefer to be at ease.” We abandon the fetter.
The same is true with what we experience as pleasant. I can take that same piece of chocolate from the wrapper. I eat it. It’s pleasant. And then my hand starts to open the wrapper again, and I feel the urgency of desire to have another piece, and I stop right there. I recognize the fetter, and I abandon it. Or maybe I have another piece before I recognize the fetter or before I’m willing to abandon it.
So it’s possible to notice the vedanā and not go beyond there. And it’s possible to just begin to feel the arising of what is really painful and to maybe stop it right there as well. As we practice in this way, hopefully, we can let that pleasant or unpleasant just be known and left right there. And even after the fetter is known, after there is some aversion or craving present, we can recognize the fetter that’s arisen, and we can stop right there, not let it get the upper hand, not let it tie us down, keep us stuck in desire or aversion.
Remember the teaching from the Buddha on the gratification, the danger, and the escape. Part of feeling the danger of the fetters that arise is feeling the dukkha in the fetter itself. Craving, aversion, delusion, denial—these are unpleasant mental states. They’re dukkha. Becoming more and more sensitive to the dukkha that is inherent in craving or aversion, then the painful vedanā of these mental states becomes clearer. It helps us to let go of them.
Vedanā, like all mental activity, is of course conditioned by past experience. It isn’t inherent in the experience, just like the mental activity of a fetter is not inherent in the sense contact. In a sense, I’ve been talking about vedanā all week long. The knots that arise, the fetters that the Buddha described—all the varieties and relatives of craving or aversion or delusion that present themselves in relation to sense contact—they’re conditioned by this even more basic, immediate sense of pleasant, unpleasant, or neither. They are conditioned. And because they are conditioned, they can change. Our minds and hearts are continually being reconditioned by our lives as we live them, conditioned by everything that we come in contact with. Practicing the dharma is one of the conditions that we bring into our lives. And practicing the dharma conditions the mind in the direction of freedom, of beauty, of deep sensitivity, so that our minds and hearts are moving in the direction of freedom, of insight, of peace.
The teachings on vedanā in the discourse on the foundations of mindfulness, the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta8, distinguish between vedanā that is worldly and unworldly, or worldly and spiritual, or as Gil has recently translated the words, as “surface” and “deep.” Vedanā in relation to deep experience is that which is experienced with samādhi6, with the cultivation of beautiful qualities of heart and mind. Pleasant vedanā in this context doesn’t lead to craving; it leads to appreciation, to gratitude, to mettā9. And unpleasant vedanā in this context is more connected with the desire for liberation, a kind of painful longing for what is wholesome and free. Attending to this deeper vedanā can really help guide our practice in a beautiful direction. But that’s a whole other topic for another time.
Today, I’ve only been speaking about vedanā associated with sense contact, the worldly variety of vedanā. It’s something to really pay attention to. It’s got a lot of power in the activities of our mind. So, very simple and a key place to look.
I hope this week’s topic has been useful to you. I’ve really enjoyed being with you all this week. Remember the Buddha’s words: “For it is in this fathom-long body with its perceptions and mind that I describe the world, its origin, its cessation, and the practice leading to its cessation.”
These six sense spheres—the physical organs of sensation, their objects, and the mind with all its myriad activities—are our world. And by attending very carefully to what arises in this world, noticing when what arises is taking us in the direction of becoming a slave to comfort and pleasure or a slave to anger, resentment, and judgments about ourselves and others. Noticing that how we relate to what’s happening is what’s holding us down, keeping us from being open, spacious, wise, and caring.
When we attend very carefully in this way, we don’t have to obey those inclinations. When we see what is arising in our minds, when we are mindful, we have choices. Until we see, we really don’t have a choice. Our old conditioning, way back to latent tendencies, will choose for us. But the dharma gives us choices. It shows us a healthier way of relating to what’s operating in us, a healthy way of relating to what’s happening on the outside.
Dharma practice moves us in the direction of what is kusala3, what is skillful; what is kalyāṇa10, what is beautiful; what is wise; what is conducive to growth. The dharma is “onward-leading”—my favorite words in the dharma teachings.
So I’ll leave you with that. Next week, Kim Allen will be with you and with all of us. I wish you a wise relationship to all that is happening in your six sense spheres and much joy coming out of that. Thank you for being with me this week.
Papañca: A Pāli word for mental proliferation, conceptual elaboration, or the tendency of the mind to complicate and spread out from a sensory input, often leading to craving, conceit, and views. ↩
Dukkha: A Pāli word often translated as “suffering,” “stress,” or “unsatisfactoriness.” It is a central concept in Buddhism. ↩ ↩2
Kusala: A Pāli word meaning “wholesome,” “skillful,” or “meritorious.” It refers to actions and intentions that lead to positive outcomes and spiritual development. ↩ ↩2
Vedanā: A Pāli word for “feeling” or “sensation.” It refers specifically to the affective tone of an experience as pleasant, unpleasant (painful), or neutral, which arises from contact between a sense organ and its object. ↩ ↩2
Sukha: A Pāli word for happiness, pleasure, ease, and bliss. ↩
Samādhi: A Pāli word for concentration, a state of meditative absorption where the mind becomes unified and focused on a single object. ↩ ↩2
Bhikkhu Bodhi: A prominent American Buddhist monk and scholar of the Theravada tradition, known for his numerous translations of the Pāli Canon. ↩
Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta: The Discourse on the Foundations of Mindfulness, a key Buddhist text that provides detailed instructions on the practice of mindfulness meditation. ↩
Mettā: A Pāli word meaning loving-kindness, goodwill, benevolence, and amity. It is one of the four “divine abodes” (brahmavihārā) in Buddhist practice. ↩
Kalyāṇa: A Pāli word meaning “beautiful,” “lovely,” or “virtuous.” It is often used in the term kalyāṇa-mitta, meaning a “spiritual friend” or “virtuous friend.” ↩