MIDL Talk 5: Understanding Feeling in MIDL

A series of talks given by Stephen Procter explaining how to gain the most benefit from MIDL Mindfulness meditation training.

Mindfulness Meditation in Daily Life (MIDL) practice is designed to be brought into your everyday life. When practicing this style of Mindfulness Meditation there is no difference between sitting in formal seated meditation and your everyday activities. Systematic training during seated meditation is used to develop Investigation, Mindfulness and Concentration to a refined level so that the Mindfulness meditation practice transfers into everyday activites. This is a Soft path, it is the path of Softening Into, accepting whatever your are experiencing. It is a practice that leads to deep, unconditional peace that is not dependant on life situation or circumstances.

Transcript

We can experience our mind during MIDL practice as functioning on two distinct levels,

The surface level and the survival level.

It is through the surface level of the mind that we are interacting now.

We can intentionally think,

Have a conversation and send signals to move our body around.

We use this level to communicate and interact within the world.

Actually,

It is on this level of mind that the world around us first appears.

The surface level of our mind lives and functions in this created world,

The world after perception.

Within this world we appear to have some choice and control.

Below the surface level of our mind is a deeper level.

This deeper level has only one task,

To protect us by sorting the experienced world into dangerous or safe.

So I call this level of mind the survival mind.

It sits at your five senses as they come in and it looks out through these senses and tries to understand the world around it.

It sees this one as dangerous,

This one as safe and this one as I don't care.

It has a very specific sorting mechanism,

A sorting mechanism that the Buddha called Thetana,

Pleasant or unpleasant feeling.

If it judges an experience as safe,

It then releases a pleasant feeling within your body to attract you towards it.

If it judges an experience as dangerous,

It then releases an unpleasant feeling within your body to drive you away from it.

We can understand more about how this works and its function within us by considering our ancestors.

Imagine thousands of years ago,

Travelling through an unknown forest in a strange land with a friend in search of food.

Many of the plants look unfamiliar and neither of you are sure whether they are safe to eat or not.

You come across some berries.

They look nice and remind you of ones that you have eaten at home.

Encouraged by this and the hunger in your belly,

You reach for a berry,

Pick it and look closely at it.

It looks okay to you.

You take the berry and bite into it,

Touching it to your tongue.

It tastes sweet.

You take a bigger bite,

It tastes good and you chew and swallow.

You and your friend then eat the berries,

Feel full and happy.

What is happening within your mind during this time?

When you first see the strange plants and berries,

Your mind cannot identify them.

Your mind releases a slightly unpleasant feeling within your body to signify danger.

You feel cautious.

The discomfort of hunger within your belly drives you to escape from it.

You taste a berry and experience a sweetness.

Your mind considers sweetness as safe,

So it releases a pleasant feeling within your body to encourage you to have more.

You are now attracted to the berries and even more enjoying the pleasant,

Sweet taste.

Your mind now stores a memory of these berries so that you can remember them as a food source in the future.

And it attaches a pleasant feeling to that memory to attract you towards them.

Now when traveling through this strange forest,

You recognize and are attracted to a particular plant and as berries,

You know they're safe to eat.

You and your friend travel on through this strange land full of energy.

One hour later your friend starts to feel sick.

The berries,

It must have been the berries.

The illness is painful.

Your friend's mind now removes the pleasant feeling,

Safe feeling from the memory of the berries and attaches an unpleasant,

Danger feeling to that memory.

From then on,

Whenever your friend sees the berries in the forest,

They are repelled by the unpleasant feeling triggered by the memory and released by the mind.

They feel sick when thinking of them.

When you see the berries,

Because you didn't get sick,

Your mind releases a pleasant feeling within your body to attract you towards them.

Your mouth salivates and you want more.

Your friend doesn't like berries,

You like berries.

This is the arising of all likes and dislikes.

So next time you go to dinner with friends and they say,

I like this,

I don't like that,

Smile,

Because you know it has nothing to do with likes and dislikes,

But rather with their relationship to the pleasant and unpleasant feeling produced by their own mind.

The pleasant feeling that we experience when we see a beautiful flower is not found in the flower.

It is found within our own body released by our own mind.

The unpleasant feeling we experience when we see something unattractive is also found within us,

Not within that which we are repulsed by.

This is why you can feel attracted to your partner one day,

Then after a disagreement feel unattractive to them the next,

Pushing them away.

Your survival mind keeps changing the feeling from pleasant to unpleasant and back again that is triggered and released within your body from contact with your partner.

One day they make you feel pleasant and the next you say,

You don't make me feel like you used to anymore.

As if they are responsible for how you feel.

Of course they aren't.

It is just your survival mind changing the feeling from pleasant to unpleasant depending on whether it deems something to be dangerous or safe.

Our mind can change these feelings attached to memories very quickly and the feeling of pain triggered from one experience can quickly replace the pleasantness of another.

Let's look at an example.

Suppose you enjoy flying.

Taking flights around the world is exciting and gives you a pleasant feeling to fly.

You make many trips around the world and all in all it is a pleasant experience.

Now suppose during one flight the plane hits some turbulence.

The plane is shaking and you feel anxious.

Danger.

The experience of turbulence brings up old fears and is unpleasant to you.

The flight now seems to take forever.

Your plane arrives safely,

You have a wonderful holiday,

But when it comes to fly home again you start to feel anxious.

Why?

Because the thought of flying now feels unpleasant to you.

You continue to react to this unpleasant feeling through anxiousness and develop a fear of flying.

Reacting to this fear,

Reacting to the unpleasantness released within your body,

You develop a fear of flying and find it hard to travel again.

Now we can start to see the trap.

We cannot trust the thoughts and emotions that the surface level of our mind produces because they are influenced by attraction to pleasant feeling and aversion to unpleasant feeling produced by the deeper survival level of our mind.

The survival mind uses pleasant and unpleasant feeling in this way to sort the world into dangerous and safe.

It does it to protect us.

It does this so we can navigate through life safely.

We can see this by observing memories.

Every memory of our life when brought to mind has been sorted by having either a pleasant or unpleasant feeling attached to it.

If an experience we had within our life was neutral to us,

Then our mind does not attach a feeling to the memory so it is not placed into the memory filing cabinet.

Since our mind cannot perceive through anything other than what it thinks it already knows,

It interprets now through past experience,

Through the memories in the filing cabinet.

Using this we can understand that the survival mind is producing these feelings through judgment based on stored past experience.

This is what the Buddha called moha,

Delusion.

We cannot trust what our mind is telling us or the feelings that it is producing because it does not know reality.

When an experience contacts one of our five senses,

Our survival mind dives into the filing cabinet and pulls out a suitable memory to identify the experience through.

If this memory has a danger signal,

An unpleasant feeling attached to it,

Then unpleasantness will be released within our body and color the current perception.

If it has a pleasant feeling attached to it,

Safe,

Then a feeling of pleasantness will be released within our body and also color the current perception.

Every time you react to a feeling that arises by wanting more,

Your mind goes,

Ah,

Safe,

And increases the pleasantness of the experience to attract you towards it.

Every time you react to an unpleasant feeling by wanting to go away,

Your mind goes,

Ah,

Dangerous,

And increases the unpleasantness of the experience.

Understanding this,

The answer seems simple.

All we have to do is ignore unpleasant feeling and encourage more pleasant feeling to grow.

Then the strength of pleasantness within our life will increase and unpleasantness will go away.

It sounds good.

This is how we live our normal life.

The economy within Australia is based on this thinking.

All advertising tells me this is where my happiness can be found.

So it must be true.

Yeah.

We bring this sane thinking to our meditation practice.

We sit down in meditation chasing after pleasant feeling and avoiding unpleasant feeling.

But if we deepen our practice in M.

I.

D.

L.

And we observe our mind clearly,

Free from distortion,

We can see why this doesn't work.

This tactic of avoidance doesn't work because we cannot trust our mind's judgment of dangerous or safe.

We cannot trust the feelings produced by our survival mind or the thoughts and emotions on the surface level that arise in response to them.

Through observing this,

We can start to understand how we get trapped in our life and also what the Buddha meant by delusion.

Just because our mind says something is safe and produces a pleasant feeling within our body to attract us towards it,

This doesn't mean that the experience is safe.

And just because our mind says that something is dangerous by releasing an unpleasant feeling within our body to make us push it away,

It doesn't mean that experience is dangerous.

If our memories of our past experience have been flawed,

For example by a past trauma or pain,

Then the information that our mind is using to perceive now,

To understand now,

To work out what is happening in the world,

Is flawed.

Through flawed experience and memories,

Our mind can judge anger,

Alcohol,

Drugs,

Gambling,

Abusive sex as being safe,

And produce a pleasant feeling to attract us towards them.

Through flawed experience and memories,

Our mind can judge a moth,

Elevator,

Tall building,

Open spaces,

Public speaking as being dangerous,

And produce an unpleasant feeling to make us push them away.

Here is the problem that arises when we sit down to meditate,

Or meditate within our daily life.

Everything we experience is pre-sorted by the survival level of our mind.

And this sorting is based on our past experience.

This means every experience we have is tainted by a feeling produced by our mind,

Signaling,

Dangerous or safe.

Since we habitually react to feeling,

We cannot see reality.

Everything is distorted by reflections of our past.

So how do we break free from this delusion?

The Buddha taught a meditation practice called Satipatana Vipassana,

Or what is more commonly known today as mindfulness meditation.

M.

I.

D.

On mindfulness meditation is based on the Satipatana Sutta and follows the instructions given within it to create a viewing platform to see reality as it is.

Through practicing the three pillars of M.

I.

D.

L.

We have the ability to experience our six senses before this perceptional overlay,

Before the judgments of the survival mind.

We can then observe the survival mind sorting,

Creating perceptions and releasing pleasant and unpleasant feelings within our body.

We can also see the surface level of our mind grasp onto these feelings when released and see the arising of I like,

I don't like within the mind.

Using this way in M.

I.

D.

L.

We can notice the longing and tightening of our body,

The change within our breathing and the agitation within the surface level of our mind in relationship to these feelings.

We can observe the surface level of the mind producing thoughts such as how can I get more of this,

How can I get away from that.

As it searches for the trigger of these feelings,

Looking outward into the world around it.

We can then observe the arising of our mind's defensive mechanism to unpleasant feeling,

Defensive emotions arise within our body as various sensations.

We see these distort the perception of our survival mind.

Looking through the distortion of the defensive emotions,

It starts to misperceive the world and releases more unpleasant feeling to mirror what it sees.

We notice how its continued response creates our defensive personality traits.

We observe that this then feeds the whole cycle and it spirals,

Spinning out of control as we view the world through the nightmare produced within our own mind.

We can then see others trapped in their own nightmare,

Crushing through life,

Desperately seeking happiness but leaving destruction in their wake.

We can see samsara,

The cycle of rebirth and suffering.

That we don't suffer and we are not reborn.

Through continued development and balancing of investigation,

Mindfulness and concentration we can see these cycles clearly.

We observe ourselves fall and become lost within these cycles time and time again.

And then mindfulness developed during MID or practice pulls us free.

We develop understanding through observing this reality and drop by drop,

Step by step,

Wisdom into the nature of reality arises.

This wisdom is stored in the filing cabinet of our mind and since the wisdom has been developed based on observing reality,

It overrides the delusion within our mind.

It changes our relationship to past attraction,

Trauma and pain.

Our survival mind then perceiving the world through the six senses,

Looks into the filing cabinet of memories asking,

What's this?

It accesses the understanding developed through self observation and now interprets the world through that wisdom.

The wisdom developed changes our relationship to perception,

To pleasant and unpleasant feeling.

It changes our relationship to likes and dislikes,

To thoughts,

Opinions and views.

It changes our relationship to emotions.

We see everything as a natural flow of experience.

We no longer take any of it personally.

We wake up from the nightmare and find peace within our life.

I hope you found that helpful.

Have a wonderful day and goodbye.

Reviews

Dear Stephen, thank you. I listened to your offering while feeling inundated by my survival mind and feelings of danger. Your calm, lucid understandings helped me choose another response. I am grateful.

This is an important message. Multiple listenings may be
needed to take it all in.

Simple reminder of the benefits of daily mindfulness and meditation practice. Thank you 🙏

Thank you so much for this ! It arrived just after a deep and long conversation with a friend on the relation we reciprocately we created with the world. We are both having a thyroid problem, opposite on its function. So, this talk, arrived when I needed the most and it is very helpful to me. Thank you again for this and thank you for everything you do for everyone.

Stephan has a way of speaking truth clearly, straight from his heart to mine.

Thank you for thismorning meditariin

Thank you for you lovely talk.
Namaste

This was Very helpful in understanding feelings & reactions.

Very interesting and a lot to reflect on.

Very interesting! It's amazing how the mind works! Thank you!

You make these principles clear and useful. You are a gift.

Roots. Go. Deep.

Great timing of choosing to listen to this talk which explains the unfortunate prison (in either direction) we have created through experience. Thank you, Stephen!

Thank you. I’m still listening and working through your talks. It is good to understand why this app s happening. Hopefully one day I break the connection. I don’t want to live this way

Excellent talk. These five talks really break down the path to Awakening, explaining in depth the mechanisms in our minds.
This is very helpful. Thanks

Excellent. Very helpful. Thank you 🙏🏻

Nice talk on our survival mind vs our reality.
Namaste
🙏🏼🦋🌺🐾🌷💖

That talk really helped me accept something which is troubling me at the moment. Thank you very much