Working With Pleasant Feelings As A Way To Travel On The Path Of Awakening

This talk took place at the Kuan Yin Centre NSW Australia in November 2020 This is about feelings, or the hedonic qualities of pleasant, unpleasant or neither. It distinguishes between worldly pleasure and spiritual pleasure highlighting how spiritual pleasure can concentrate the mind and lead states of happiness, peace and ultimately awakening.

Transcript

So,

Welcome everyone.

As I mentioned a bit earlier,

Tonight's talk is about,

Well it's another talk about feelings.

Last time I was here,

I talked about unpleasant feelings and gave you an example of unpleasant feelings in the body.

When one becomes ill,

Like I became ill,

And also when we have unpleasant and painful emotions and how to work with that,

With using mindfulness of Vedana,

Which is,

Vedana Nupasana Satipatan,

Which is mindfulness of feelings.

This time,

However,

I'm going to talk about pleasant feelings and how we can approach them skillfully.

This talk is also partly to do with the difference between hedonic happiness and a more genuine spiritual happiness.

In the Satipatthana Sutta,

The Buddha talked about distinguished mindfulness of feelings as one of the Satipatthanas,

One of the domains of mindfulness.

There's four domains,

Mindfulness of body,

Feelings,

Mind or heart-mind and phenomena.

That second one,

Mindfulness of feelings,

He distinguished between pleasant feelings,

Unpleasant feelings and neither pleasant or unpleasant feelings.

Another distinction he made was between worldly feelings and nonworldly feelings.

If you look in the Sutta,

That's what it talks about there,

Just the distinction that it talks about.

As far as I understand,

The worldly feelings are related to pleasant feelings,

Unpleasant feelings or neither in relationship to worldly endeavors.

Nonworldly feelings are more like feelings,

Pleasant,

Unpleasant or neither in relationship to traveling on the path to awakening.

The first type of feelings are more likely to develop craving and craving leads to clinging,

Leads to grasping,

Leads to clinging,

Becoming and a whole mass of suffering.

Worldly feelings are more likely to generate that.

And nonworldly feelings are more likely to help us walk along this path,

Help us practice on the path and awaken to the way things are,

Wake up basically.

As far as worldly pleasant feelings are concerned,

They are mostly related to the eight worldly wins.

And if you remember the eight worldly wins are praise and blame,

Loss and gain,

Pain and pleasure and fame and disrepute.

So with pleasant feelings,

Worldly pleasant feelings are related to a sense of fame,

For example.

Worldly pleasant feelings are related to gain.

Worldly pleasant feelings are related to praise and worldly pleasant feelings are very much related to pleasure,

Pleasure.

And when we talk about pleasure,

We're usually talking about pleasant feelings related to sensual pleasures of touch,

Of sound,

Of seeing,

Of taste,

Of smelling and of the mind.

As you probably know,

There are six senses in Buddhist psychology.

They are sight,

Sound,

Smell,

Touch,

Taste and mind.

The mind is considered as a sense organ.

So we can have pleasant experiences arising in our mind.

So the Buddha recommended and advised us to be cautious of sensual pleasures.

He said,

Do not delight in them.

In other words,

Do not get engaged with them.

Do not kind of get sucked into them.

Primarily because if we delight in them,

They can lead to,

They can lead,

They don't necessarily lead.

We can still enjoy without having craving,

Of course,

But they can lead to craving,

Grasping,

Singing,

Becoming,

Birth,

Aging,

Sickness,

Death and so on in this cycle of suffering that I think I mentioned dependent arising last time.

We're talking about unpleasant feelings.

So on the other hand,

He said to not be afraid of spiritual pleasure.

He said don't be afraid of this.

And he recommended the cultivation of joy and happiness and the nourishment of the types of pleasure that is born of concentration and working on the path to awakening.

So I bring this topic up because I was doing a mindful self-compassion half-day retreat last Saturday.

And I hadn't thought about this talk at that time yet.

I don't know what I'll talk about tonight.

I hadn't thought about it.

And on that retreat,

I'm doing a mindful self-compassion course online and between the fifth and the sixth session,

There's a half-day retreat and it's all scripted out.

I don't know how many meditations there are.

There's probably about 10 different meditations that are all scripted out.

I usually stick to the script pretty closely because I want to respect that particular course.

And we came up to a mindfulness exercise that was called savoring food.

And I wondered about that.

I wondered about that.

I did it according to the script and I think it was very good.

I think people really got a sense of being mindful.

But I did wonder about why they would call it savoring food.

In fact,

When I introduced it,

I introduced it as savoring and appreciating food and drink.

I needed to add the word appreciation.

And actually the script is pretty good.

It emphasizes that appreciation and emphasizes understanding the interdependence of what we consume,

The fact that it just doesn't arrive here,

That it doesn't arrive in our mouth when we're consuming it.

There's a lot of work put into it,

Getting it there.

A lot of people put in a lot of effort.

And also there's a combination of a range of conditions and causes and so on,

Bringing it together so we can consume this morsel of food,

The sunshine and the earth and so many things coming together.

And I know that when I reflect on that,

When I'm eating food,

I know that when I reflect on the interdependence of it,

Which includes what brings it into my mouth and also the processes that result in eliminating it as well.

So this whole process,

When I reflect on that,

It develops an understanding of interdependence and it develops an understanding of,

I also have a sense of gratitude.

So that sense of gratitude is wholesome or a spiritual pleasant feeling.

It's a feeling that is a part of this path.

So I did look up the word savoring and it says that it's,

In the dictionary it says,

Taste good food or drink,

To enjoy it to the full.

In other words,

To get the most out of it.

To kind of savor something is to get the most you can get out of it,

Like to get as much enjoyment as you can.

And I've often thought of the promotion of mindfulness in the secular world.

When I say that,

I talk about mindfulness courses that are completely divorced from any connection with Buddhism or any connection with the Eightfold Path,

For example.

And people advertise mindfulness for this,

They didn't get mindfulness stools,

You can get mindfulness shovels,

Flowers,

You can get mindfulness anything.

You know,

Sometimes there's mindfulness of sex workshops or how to eat mindfully and so on.

In those trainings,

There's often the suggestion that mindfulness training can help you get more out of life,

Can give you more success,

Make you healthier and generally have more pleasure in life.

But I think,

When I think about what the Buddha taught,

He didn't actually mean that.

He didn't mean to practice mindfulness in order to get the most out of life,

In order to get more pleasure.

And without putting it down,

I want to say that often the secular approaches to mindfulness will advertise their mindfulness as giving that more pleasure and more enjoyment and more success and everything from practicing mindfulness.

And I think that somebody's called it Buddhism by stealth or something like that,

Because what ends up happening is when people start to concentrate on this,

They start to focus on it because they may want to see,

They definitely see that it gives you more pleasure and enjoyment.

However,

When they start to do that,

They also see the impermanent nature of these experiences.

They also see the not-self nature,

The interdependence nature of these experiences.

And they also see the dukkha nature of these experiences,

Meaning that these experiences are not a source of enduring happiness.

So when we can eat food,

As an example of a pleasant experience,

And understand the impermanent,

The not-self,

And the dukkha nature of that experience,

Then that gives rise to a different sort of pleasure.

It's not a pleasure that's relying on the sensory experience.

It's a pleasure that arises from insight and understanding.

And I was watching someone who came into my office the other day,

And he'd been practicing mindfulness and I offered him a drink of water.

He said,

Yes,

Thanks very much.

And I noticed that when he picked up the water,

When he put it on the table,

And when he had to pick it up,

He picked it up with this connection to being present for the water,

Completely being present.

He lifted it up,

Put it to his mouth,

Swallowed,

Put it down.

And I realized that he was actually having a very subtle sense of pleasure.

It wasn't from the taste of the water,

It was from being mindful.

It was from being present.

And I know that's what happens to me when I'm present.

There's a really subtle sense of pleasure.

It's a lovely sense.

When I can be present,

There's something very enjoyable about that.

And because it's related to mindfulness,

One intuitively doesn't cling to that pleasure.

It doesn't turn into craving,

Grasping,

Clinging,

And so on.

It is a non-worldly pleasure,

If that makes sense.

So as you know,

The Buddha,

When he was 29 years old,

Up until when he was 29 years old,

Lived a life of pleasure,

Lived a life of indulgence in pleasant experiences.

And then he shifted it around suddenly when he left that worldly life and lived that life of an ascetic for six years,

Where he practiced the extremes of self-denial and self-mortification.

And he did that for six years.

He tried every sort of practice that was denying any pleasure.

And he almost died of emancipation.

And then he had a memory.

He had a memory,

A recollection of when he was a young boy in the fields of his father,

Sitting under a rose apple tree.

And at that time,

He spontaneously went into a jhana,

The first jhana.

And he remembered the joy that came from that jhana.

He remembered the pleasantness that came from that jhana.

And he realized that if he could take a little bit of that,

If he could practice the middle way,

Which is what he did,

Which is not extremes of indulgence,

Nor self-mortification or self-denial,

Then that maybe would be a way to wake up.

Maybe it would be a way to enlightenment.

And he was right.

So he realized that the middle way is one of non-extremes,

Non-extremes of indulgence,

Nor non-extremes of self-mortification.

And in this path of middle way,

There is enormous room to work with pleasure,

To work with pleasantness.

So in Buddhist approaches,

There's lots of ways of cultivating pleasure,

Lots of ways of cultivating joy.

The Buddha basically focused on joy at this point in his life.

At that point in time,

He realized that if I could cultivate some joy,

It would be beneficial on the way to awakening.

And he was right.

And some of the strategies for joy that are written about in Buddhist texts are thinking about positive aspects of being free from emotional distress,

Thinking about the path.

Just thinking about that is a way of experiencing spiritual joy,

Spiritual happiness,

Spiritual pleasure,

Remembering personal actions that have been in accordance with ethical values,

Like remembering your ethics,

Recollecting your ethics.

This is a subtle pleasure.

This is uplifting,

Living a good life,

A good life meaning living a life of integrity,

A harmless life,

A blameless life,

A life of generosity and kindness,

And recalling one's acts of generosity.

And even recalling acts of generosity in general,

Like hearing about someone else's acts of generosity,

That arises a sense of empathetic joy.

Avoiding company of the aggressive,

Angry,

And insensitive people.

And I've often listed these strategies out before,

And I've made a point that sometimes,

Sometimes if you're in the profession that I'm in,

Sometimes you come across people that are aggressive and insensitive and angry.

But fortunately,

We can cultivate equanimity and compassion in that company.

But generally,

In our social lives,

We avoid people who are aggressive and angry and insensitive.

And having friendships with people who are warm,

Loving,

And refined.

Reflecting on and hearing and reading dharma.

Reading about how dukkha is alleviated and uprooted.

And inclining the mind towards or committing oneself to the cultivation of joy.

This is another way we can cultivate joy.

Another way of cultivating joy,

Or these experiences of spiritual pleasure,

Or wholesome pleasure,

Is by reflecting on acts of kindness and care,

Both to and from oneself.

And simply noticing the beauty of things.

There's a lot I can say about,

I've just looked at my watch and I'm probably going over time already,

I don't know.

Where did I start?

I can't remember.

Good day.

Bad day?

Okay.

Alright.

So reflecting on acts of kindness,

There's many things that we can appreciate in the world.

You know,

Just looking out at the sky,

Looking at being in a sangha,

For example.

There's so many things we can appreciate.

And we can also empathize with others,

Successors,

And virtues,

And skills,

And wholesome actions,

And so on.

And this is called empathetic joy.

And yet another way of cultivating joy and pleasure is through concentration,

Or samadhi.

And in this respect,

There is a kind of a progression of pleasure,

Like sort of more gross pleasure,

It's still spiritual,

To very refined states of mind.

And if you remember that meditation I guided you in a little bit earlier,

I asked you to pay attention to something pleasant in your body.

There is a kind of a sense of progression through the jhanas.

And I know there's quite a bit of controversy about the jhanas.

The main controversy is about the depth of them.

And I read a really good analogy about them the other day in a wonderful book by Shayla Katherine called Focused and Fearless.

It was a really wonderful book.

I haven't finished it yet.

But she talked about this controversy of the jhanas,

And there's eight jhanas.

There's four formless jhanas.

Someone compared them to being like pools,

Really deep pools.

So they're all different pools.

And depending on how deep you go into them is the level of depth that you go into these jhanas.

And some controversy about the jhanas is that you completely have no connection with the senses in the first jhana.

But other people say the jhanas,

We can experience them in daily life.

So there's a whole range of a spectrum of the levels we can experience the jhanas.

So it's like the depth we go into this pool.

There's eight different pools and there's eight different jhanas.

And it depends on the depth.

So at a very basic level,

One thing that can stimulate joy,

Which is referred to as pity,

Is gladness or pleasure,

Pleasure born of concentration,

Like when you're meditating and there's some kind of nice little feelings happening in your body.

If you focus on that,

After a while,

It's easy to focus on because it's so inviting.

After a while,

It will give rise to pity,

Which is a more evasive joy that flows through your body.

It's also called rapture.

Focusing on rapture,

Rapture becomes gross and gives rise to a more subtle happiness or called sukha,

Which is more refined than this energetic movement through the body.

Focusing on sukha gets more and more refined.

You let go of the grossness of sukha and it develops into a mix of happiness and equanimity,

Which is often called contentment.

It's a very quiet,

Peaceful space.

But there's no joy in it because there's no rapture.

It's much more subtle than that.

It's just this evasive sense of contentment,

Not wanting for anything.

Focusing on that,

It gives way to even a more subtle experience,

Which is neither pleasant or unpleasant,

Which is equanimity,

Which is quiet stillness deeply into a particular pond.

This particular jhana,

The way they relate to that is as a person covered with a luminous sheet.

They're brightly aware of things,

Yet at the same time they're insulated from the world,

From the hassles of the world.

That's a very nice place to be.

In this respect,

One can use pleasure as a way of stepping up through the jhanas.

You can use the jhanas then to progress with insight and wake up.

I better finish off soon,

But I just want to mention these things.

Coming back to worldly and non-worldly pleasure,

There is something distinctly tangible about the difference.

I think you probably know the difference.

It's useful to talk about it and think about it,

Because then you start to distinguish it.

I noticed that I remember that once upon a time I was tormented by sexual desire,

For example.

These days I'm not so tormented.

In fact,

I hardly have any thoughts about sex at all.

I remember being tormented with sexual desire.

I remember what that's like,

And some of you may also know what that's like.

But when I had a taste of non-worldly pleasure,

The pleasures that come from sensual delights simply piled away.

They were nothing in comparison.

And what happened with my sexual desire torments were that I wasn't any more interested in them.

In fact,

The sensual desires of,

Say,

Sexuality or food or whatever it is,

It just became less appealing.

And it's a much more subtle and refined way of being with this spiritual pleasure.

By the way,

I still value intimacy and connection,

But the interest in sex has just fallen away.

I think it's partly to do with my age,

But it's also strongly to do with being able to appreciate and enjoy spiritual pleasure.

Okay,

So thank you very much.

That's the end of the talk tonight.

I hope it's been helpful and beneficial.