“Mind the Gap” with Jean this Sunday at Minneapolis Insight

Dear Community,

Last week, Benjamin talked about putting down the burden of self. This involves three stages: (1) letting go of clinging to thoughts, (2) letting go of the idea “I am the thinker,” and (3) letting go of identification with being the knower. With practice, we can learn to become familiar with, even befriend, our thoughts but not take ownership of them.

This Sunday, I’d like to take a step back to something called vedana, or feeling tone. Feeling tone can be pleasant, unpleasant, or neither and always follows contact with an object through our senses. We all experience it—it’s part of being human—and it’s not self. According to the Buddha’s teaching on Dependent Origination, how we respond to the experience of vedana will determine whether or not we will suffer. If we proliferate thoughts and emotions in reaction to the feeling tone of pleasant, unpleasant, or neither, we fall into craving, clinging, and becoming. If we can stop our reaction, we have the possibility of stopping the chain of events that leads to suffering.

Gloria Taraniya Ambrosia puts it this way:

In short, there is a strong tendency for pleasant, unpleasant and neutral feeling to escalate into the more complex, karmically weighty, and suffering states of greed, hatred and delusion. And it is because of this tendency that vedanā figures so strongly in the Buddha’s teachings about freedom from suffering.

Everything up to this point—being born, having a body and mind, having sense organs with their sense doors, even the experiences of contact and feeling themselves—are conditions which have been set in place. There is nothing to be done about any of these. They are results, the outcome of past actions. However, the Buddha tells us in no uncertain terms that while there is a strong, conditioned tendency for good feeling to escalate into greed and for bad feeling to escalate into hatred or anger, we have the capacity either to go in the direction of our conditioning or not.

Buddha is trying to point us in the direction that self-observation takes us—that is, to liberating insight. He wants us to see for ourselves the truth of suffering, impermanence and selflessness. There is suffering. And no matter how good we may feel in any moment, that good feeling will end. Everything born of the body and mind follows the laws of nature. It is not self. As meditators, we can see these truths directly by opening to feeling.

All are welcome to join this exploration on Sunday! Zoom information available here.

With mettā,
Minneapolis Insight