Follow-Up To Engaging The Abhidhamma With Tony Bernhard

This is a clip of my comments to Tony Bernhard about not needing to believe nor disbelieve fantastical accounts from the suttas and moreso my newly recorded follow-up to musings to Tony on the “neither pleasant nor unpleasant” portion of vedanā (hedonic/feeling tone) not seeming to get much mention in Buddhist circles recently

Transcript

Here's a clip of me making a comment about belief and disbelief,

And then asking questions and making comments about neither pleasant nor unpleasant from a recent Tony Barnhart event with Sati Center on the Abhidhamma,

And stay tuned after that clip for my follow-up comments.

Josh,

Do you have a,

You've got a question?

We can move to questions here.

I can put this.

Yes,

Just a brief,

Thanks for doing this,

Just a brief,

I don't know if it's a rhetorical question on your part to answer,

Or,

You know,

These things in the suttas where they seem fantastical or things like that,

And this notion of believing or disbelieving,

I just made a comment in the chat,

Just,

I just don't see where,

Especially if we were looking for things that are truthful,

Where there's a requirement to believe or disbelieve anything,

You know,

We can just take it as information until we can verify it for ourselves.

You know,

I didn't live all this time ago.

Our life has changed so much,

Even within a hundred years.

So to me,

A lot of things about life could be potentially unimaginable for us,

You know,

When we talk about all these really old time periods.

So the short answer is,

You know,

It's just information.

I don't need to believe it or disbelieve it,

These fantastical things.

Yeah.

You know,

The belief disbelief pretty much for me narrows down to impermanence,

Unsatisfactoriness and insubstantiality,

Emptiness,

You know,

Other things,

Speculative views,

Some of them are useful,

Some of them are not.

People will go to war over and people will call you wrong,

You know,

And you should believe and you shouldn't believe and those are,

But you know,

If you've seen for yourself how acting out of anger is painful,

Well,

You stop doing it because we're not stupid,

Slow maybe,

But we're not stupid.

We won't hurt ourselves on purpose.

We do it because we think,

You know,

Our default responses.

The other quick point was,

It seems recently there's more emphasis on pleasant,

Unpleasant and that's the ones that are easy to connect to,

But it's also,

There's also neither pleasant nor unpleasant and yes.

You know,

That's,

So that's something to explore using the Vedana meter,

Try to find something that is neither pleasant nor unpleasant,

That's actually zero on that scale from minus 10 to plus 10.

I find that the closer I pay attention to something,

You know,

I can get down maybe not to tenths of a point,

But I can get down to noticing,

Is there really some pleasantness?

Is there pleasantness to neutrality?

Yeah,

This is where our perception comes in that's,

You know,

When perception becomes more malleable,

Then it becomes kind of an interpretation or how we want to interpret it and,

You know,

How much can we quantify it and how much can't we at a certain point as well.

Well,

The Vedana meter is an effort to try to articulate for ourselves feeling time,

That second factor of awakening,

The second factor of mindfulness.

All these teachings are integrated,

You know,

The four foundations of mindfulness have to do with the,

With the skandhas.

Kate,

You've got it,

You've got your hand up,

Please,

You're muted.

Yeah,

I just a comment on that.

It sort of seems like if we bring mindfulness,

If mindfulness arises,

And we're looking at Vedana,

Mindfulness itself is pleasant,

Sort of,

You know,

So it kind of adds a plus,

It's like if I think of something as being negative,

But then mindfulness is really strong.

It doesn't seem so negative anymore.

It depends on the thing.

Mindfulness may be pleasant,

But a present moment may be an unpleasant moment.

Right.

It just seems like it always mitigates it a little bit.

Well,

What it does is it works against us making things worse.

Yeah.

Okay.

Right.

No second arrow.

Yeah.

Right.

No second arrow.

Vanessa?

Hi.

I was wondering if you could say something about what,

Something I read about it.

It says,

Neither painful nor pleasant feeling is pleasant in virtue of knowledge and painful in virtue of want of knowledge.

There are all kinds of ideas out there,

Pleasant,

Neither pleasant nor unpleasant seems to me to be perhaps a point on a line.

And so actually experiencing neither pleasant nor unpleasant,

It's not a broad swath of experience that's neither pleasant nor unpleasant if you bring your attention to it.

In my experience,

Now you may find that you bring your experience to,

You know,

A part of a sidewalk and you find it neither pleasant nor unpleasant.

But if you start looking more at your experience,

You'll notice the textures of the sidewalk.

It's bright.

Maybe it's uncomfortable for your eyes.

Maybe you notice stuff on the sidewalk that makes you cringe,

You know,

Pleasant and unpleasant are constantly changing.

And that's why equanimity,

Tatra maja tatha,

Is a balancing act.

It's a skill to develop,

And we may not be able to do it as well as we can later on.

So when it comes to Vedan,

Neither pleasant nor unpleasant,

A few things come up in my experience where I'm at now on the path.

And this notion of neither pleasant nor unpleasant was mentioned,

I think,

Way more by teachers just five years ago,

10 years ago.

So I hear them talk more about just pleasant and unpleasant,

Don't even mention neither pleasant nor unpleasant.

And some people also call it neutral,

But I don't know if that's really the case or not.

There's a few things to mention here.

Neither pleasant nor unpleasant.

When we're paying attention to the whole body in meditation,

And excuse me to close my eyes here so I can tune in more,

There's,

Depending on what we're paying attention to,

If we're just paying attention to the breath at the nose starting off,

Well then we're missing a lot of the experience in the body,

Just that.

So what's going on in the body if we're just paying attention to that?

Is it pleasant,

Unpleasant,

Neither pleasant nor unpleasant?

It's hard to tell.

It's like the old Zen saying,

If a tree falls in the woods and there's no one around to hear it,

Did it even fall or whatever?

And the answer is,

I guess I don't know.

Also we can bring the awareness to something kind of that we don't pay attention to a lot.

Let's just say the teeth,

And maybe not a lot of people will feel their teeth regularly.

And so we tune into that and how that feels.

Well it seems like on a gross level,

Right at first in my experience,

There's not much sensation going on there.

Not much pleasantness or unpleasantness,

As long as they don't have a toothache,

Right?

And then on a gross level,

It seems like,

Yeah,

It is not really pleasant or unpleasant,

But if we pay attention more,

Then we can start feeling,

Or I can start feeling different sensations and these sensations are momentary,

Like Tony says,

But also pleasant and unpleasant are momentary as well.

I can have pleasant and unpleasant at the same time in the body,

And it can be changing very rapidly,

These sensations.

Now when a sensation is new,

Or like there's a different vibratory rate,

Or maybe it's pulsing differently,

Or tingling in a way that I haven't felt before,

Then maybe perception has a lot to do with this,

To kind of fill in the gaps and say,

Okay,

Wait a second here.

This is different.

I don't know what to make of this.

Some people,

I guess,

Will jump right away to,

I don't know what this is,

So it's unpleasant.

Some people that are seeking new experiences might be,

Ooh,

This is great.

This is new.

I don't know what this is,

So it must be pleasant.

So I think perception has a lot to do with these as well.

When the mind settles down a lot and there's not a lot of chatter and a lot of a charge,

Emotional charge or energetic charge to sensations,

Then I know in my experience too,

Over the years,

What I would once immediately be reactive to as,

Oh,

This is pleasant.

Oh,

This sucks.

This is unpleasant.

A lot of that has gone away.

So yeah,

It goes more and more towards zero,

I think,

This neither pleasant nor unpleasant overall comparatively in the past where there's not as much reactivity.

Now,

Whether or not there's an absolute zero in it and it stays there and it's an experience over and over again,

I don't know.

And then,

Like I say,

I don't know how much this needs to be quantified or actually can be quantified.

Why do we need to give it a number?

How much of it is objective and subjective?

So I think this is an area of practice to bring up again,

This neither pleasant nor unpleasant.

Also,

Who benefits from this?

You know,

If there are certain maybe corporations or something that benefit from people being pleasant or unpleasant more times than neither of those,

Because when there's neither present a lot,

Then there's not really any need to sell products and services,

Right?

Usually people buy products and services because they're unpleasant and they want to feel pleasant.

You know,

They go to see somebody because there's something unpleasant and they want it to be more pleasant.

So this kind of hedonic tone,

I like this mention of this.

So if there's an absence of a hedonic tone one way or the other,

You know,

Who's going to be benefiting from that?

This notion of pleasant and unpleasant is also one of the vicissitudes or worldly wins.

The others being,

You know,

Gain and loss,

Fame and ill repute,

And praise and blame.

But pleasure and pain,

I guess it can be considered pleasant or unpleasant.

I don't know if it applies in all contexts or not.

But are we going to be,

There would be no reprieve from that if there wasn't a pleasant nor unpleasant.

There is a last point here to make,

And that is that of equanimity and,

You know,

What is the experience of equanimity itself when there's not a lot of charge,

Emotional charge?

Is it pleasant,

Unpleasant or neither?

Where is the balance or the even keel?

Can that be kind of a heart state or a mind state,

More prolonged,

Or even if it's momentary,

More and more of these overall?

Can that be possible or is that possible with equanimity?

Is that the case?

If we had to put a feeling tone of Vedna on being completely balanced and equanimous,

Maybe most people might find that pleasant.

It's definitely not unpleasant,

I don't think,

But in what context in comparison to what?

Is it helpful to draw those comparisons or not?