Feelings

• How the primary mind and the mental factors are related, depend on the same sense organs
• Feeling, one of the five omnipresent mental factors
• An experiment to show how to separate feeling from sensation, get in touch with basic experience
• Value of focusing on sensations instead of the feelings arising with them
• Developing an awareness of the difference between direct perception and conceptual perception

Mind and mental factors 02: Omnipresent mental factors (download)

Returning to the previous teaching

Think back to that person you liked: how did you feel? Is there a certain feeling in your mind? 

Audience: [Inaudible]

Venerable Thubten Chodron (VTC): There’s a certain feeling in your body? What about when you thought of the situation where you felt uncomfortable? What was the feeling in your mind when you visualized that situation, when you just thought of it? Did your mind get unhappy thinking about it? And what happened when you thought about the Buddha? Did it feel right, peaceful?

All those things when you’re thinking about the person you like, the uncomfortable situation, the Buddha, was that conception or direct perception? It was all conception. Did you see the drastic differences in the feeling in your mind, just by what you imagined. Nothing changed in the room. Maybe the cat walked by, but there’s no big change in the room. Look at the change in the mind, depending what we steer the mind towards. Is that bringing some truth for you? 

This is why we practice the Dharma. And this is why the mental consciousness is so important. Because look at the difference that what we think about and how we think about it makes in our experience of happiness and unhappiness. It’s a very simple exercise. And did you get some feeling for maybe why we visualize the Buddha—especially when you go from thinking about that unhappy situation and then just even for a few seconds turning the mind towards imagining the Buddha? It makes some difference.

And then what about when you’re rubbing your clothes? What happened then? What was the direct perception? What was the conception? You guys need some coffee tonight.

Audience: [Inaudible]

VTC: Yes, it was interesting, wasn’t it? Yes, the sensation stopped, almost immediately, but our mind hasn’t let go of it somehow. There’s still some lingering. 

Audience: And then I’ll go, “Oh, that’s that sound.” And I’ll try to categorize it or something. 

Ven. Chodron: Yes. That was real quick—real quick. 

Audience: With the sounds, I was able to remember the sound, I think almost exactly. I was able to touch and grasp the color. 

VTC: Interesting. Some people learn much better visually, and some people better auditorily, and some people can aesthetically. And I think this has something to do with our capacity to remember the things that our senses come into contact with.

These are just interesting things to do, experiments to do, to get to know how your own mind is working. And especially this one: by just watching how the whole feeling tone of your mind changes according to what you think about. This is the value of doing retreat. When you do retreat, there’s not so much change in the environment. The mind goes on a roller coaster. And it becomes really very, very clear at that time why we need to practice the Dharma. When we’re real busy and we’re distracted by all our sensory perceptions and running around here and there, sometimes we lose the feeling for why practice is so important because we’re so distracted by the senses. We’re so looking for happiness from external things. But when you do retreat and it becomes real, real apparent how much of our experience is governed by our internal processes, then the wish to practice Dharma becomes really strong. 

Five similarities: primary mind and mental factors

So, we were going to talk about the five similarities. Last week I was talking about the difference between primary mind and mental factors. What’s the difference? 

Audience: [Inaudible]

VTC: The primary mind is just the general presence of the object. Like your primary visual consciousness is just seeing color and shape. It’s the thing that sees color and shape. And then the mental factors work together to perceive more specific or detailed things about it or react to it. When you’re thinking, the mental consciousness apprehends the general kind of presence because it’s obviously mental consciousness. You’re not hearing, you’re not smelling. Whereas the mental factors go into the more specific things of it. 

When we talk about the five similarities, we’re talking about the five similarities that any primary mind has with whatever mental factors accompany it. Since we’re going to start in on talking about the 51 mental factors, it’s interesting first to see the relationship between a primary mind and its mental factors. Because any primary mind can have many, many mental factors together with it. It has the five omnipresent mental factors. Those are always with almost every one – every perception, every cognition, whether in a manifest or a latent state. And then in addition, they may have many of the other mental factors that we’re going to be getting into. 

Audience: [Inaudible]

Ven. Chodron: No, it’s not like that. If the primary mind is conceptual, the mental factors are also. If the primary mind is non-conceptual and direct, then the mental factors are also. If you’re seeing something, your visual consciousness plus its mental factors are only apprehending the color and form. It’s not like your visual consciousness is apprehending the color and form and the mental factors are thinking about it. Because it’s your mental consciousness that’s doing the thinking. It’s a totally different way of apprehending than a visual consciousness. 

With every perception or every cognition we have, we have some feeling and discrimination, contact, intention, attention, those five omnipresent ones. We may sometimes have some concentration in there, sometimes not; sometimes there’s some anger, sometimes not; sometimes there’s some faith, sometimes not. There can be a whole bunch of other mental factors that are accompanying any particular consciousness that we have. So, whenever there’s any cognition happening, you have a primary consciousness together with its attendant mental factors. The relationship between them is, first of all, in terms of the basis. They all rely on the same basis, the same sense organ. 

Let’s say you have the primary visual consciousness and its accompanying mental factor of attention—the attention that’s allowing that visual consciousness to remain focused on the color blue, for example. Those are both relying on the same sense organ: the eye organ. It’s not like one relies on the eye organ and one relies on the ear organ. They’re both relying on the eye organ. If you’re hearing a sound and there’s a pleasant feeling with it, the primary auditory consciousness and the mental factor of feeling have the same organ, which is the ear organ. That’s the similarity in basis.

What we’re trying to get to here is that it’s not like we take mind and mental factors and they’re kind of separate little things. They’re not like if your fingers are laced up together and you can really see them as all individual things. These things are really, really blended. They’re really one nature. You can’t have a primary mind without its mental factors. You can’t have the mental factors without the primary mind. And they’re really, really related, although they have slightly different functions and definitions. 

One way in which they’re related is they depend on the same sense organ in order to make them arise. The second way they’re related is in terms of their observed or referent object. They’re apprehending the same object. Your visual consciousness apprehending blue—the primary consciousness—plus the mental factor of feeling that’s apprehending the blue, they’re both apprehending the same thing. It’s not like the primary consciousness is apprehending blue and the feeling that accompanies it is apprehending pink. They’re both focused on the same observed object.

The third thing is they both have the same aspect. In other words, they both reflect the similar image of the object. They both, again, are having to do with the same aspect of the object. They’re reflecting the same image of the object. So, these things are really closely related here.

And then the fourth is they’re of the same duration so that the primary mind and its mental factors, they arise, exist, and cease all at the same time. It’s not like your visual consciousness comes first and the mental factor of feeling that accompanies it comes five minutes later. If these are the mental factors accompanying something, it’s there at the exact same time as the primary consciousness. If you’re having a smelling consciousness—smelling roses, for example—the mental factor of discrimination that accompanies that, it happens at the same time as that direct perception of the smell of roses. It’s able to discriminate the smell of roses from the smell of the cats or something. 

The fifth way that they’re the same is they have the same substantial entity. And this is getting back to your question. In other words, if the primary mind is non-conceptual, so are the mental factors. If the mental factors are conceptual, so is the primary mind. Also, this idea of the same substantial entity, what it refers to is that if you have, let’s say, an auditory consciousness, together with that one moment of auditory consciousness, you only have one mental factor of feeling. It’s not like you have five mental factors of feeling. 

If your moment of auditory consciousness changes, then the mental factor is going to change, too. That’s why sometimes the feeling of when you apprehend something, it starts out pleasant and then it goes to unpleasant, because those are actually different moments of both the primary mind and the accompanying mental factor of feeling. When we talk about any particular moment, they’re happening at the same time, and there’s only one mental factor of feeling for that primary consciousness. Similarly, there’s only one mental factor of discrimination for that same moment of primary consciousness. And in the same way, when you have, let’s say, the mental factor of attention that’s focused on the color yellow, you’re only going to have one visual consciousness with that. You’re not going to have two visual consciousnesses with that one mental factor. This is the meaning of them having the same substantial entity.

What this is kind of getting at, is like the mind and whatever mental factors accompany it are really, really closely related, but with our conceptual mind, we’re looking at differences between them so that we can understand things in a clearer, more discriminative way. But it’s not that things are isolated individual entities that you just kind of put right next to each other in a very kind of rigid, automated fashion. These are things that just kind of happen at the same time, focused on the same object, reliant on the same sense source, and so on.

At any particular moment, we can have more than one primary mind, but we can’t have two visual primary minds at the same time. But we can have a primary mind of visual consciousness and a primary mind of hearing consciousness, because we can see things and hear them at the same time, can’t we? We can have several different consciousnesses going on at the same time. You can smell something at the same time you’re thinking about something, but each one of those has a different perception with its own mental factors that accompany it. Is everybody okay so far? 

Audience: [Inaudible]

VTC: The way we’re using “feeling” here is very different from how we use the word feeling in regular English. And we’re going to start this when we get into the mental factor of feeling. 

Audience: [Inaudible]

VTC: If you look at the sun, and there’s just an incredibly brilliant light going in there, your sight hurts, doesn’t it? It’s an unpleasant sight. There’s something unpleasant going on there. 

Audience: [Inaudible]

VTC: When you’re perceiving something, first you have to have the contact with it, and then the feeling arises after the contact. If I’m seeing the color black, there’s the contact of the object, the eye organ, and the consciousness coming together to yield a perception. And then the next moment, there’s also another visual consciousness that’s having a feeling. But there’s also a feeling at the first moment, too. I think we probably become more aware of the feeling as the time goes on. Not so much in the first moment. We’re not concentrating on it. 

Even when you’re infants, you don’t have a lot of thought processes going on; of course you have conception going on, but you don’t have a whole lot of thought processes. Just the direct sensation of if you’re out in the cold is unpleasant. We don’t do a big intellectual trip of “Oh, it’s cold, and da-da-da-da-da.” Just the cold sensation itself is unpleasant. So, first you have the contact, and then you have the feeling. That’s in the Twelve Links, in pointing out how there’s a relationship there. But in mind and mental factors, when we’re looking at, let’s say, the first moment of apprehending the cold and the second moment of apprehending the cold, both of those moments have both contact and feeling. When you’re talking about the Twelve Links, then you’re emphasizing, let’s say, the contact in the first moment and the feeling in the second moment. But it’s a different way of looking at it. 

Audience: [Inaudible]

VTC: We have five skandhas. The first one, of form—does it have anything to do with mind and mental factors? No, because the form aggregate is the body. 

The second aggregate is feeling. What’s that? 

Audience: [Inaudible]

VTC: It’s one of the five omnipresent. The third aggregate is discrimination. That’s another one of the mental factors. The fourth aggregate is compounded phenomena. 

Audience: [Inaudible]

VTV: Yes, and those two mental factors. Everything else but the primary mind and those two mental factors. And then the aggregate of consciousness? That’s the primary mind. 

Audience: [Inaudible]

VTC: You do it every week at home. I told you this is not a beginning class, and so I’m expecting more out of this class than if it’s a beginning class. 

Five omnipresent mental factors

Now we’re ready to go into the five omnipresent mental factors. These five constitute the basic mechanism of the mind. Without these, cognition, apprehension of objects, couldn’t occur. They’re the things that kind of give the basic structure and do the things that’s necessary for cognition to occur. 

They’re called omnipresent because they’re usually present in a manifest way with all cognitions we have, but they’re not always present in a manifest way. For example, in deep sleep, when it’s non-conceptual deep sleep—not when you’re dreaming, or in the clear light of death, or in the last moment in the bardo right before you’re reborn—in those situations, the mind is in a more subtle state than usual, so those mental factors are latent, but they’re present. So, you can still technically call them omnipresent, but they’re not manifest because that state of mind is a very subtle one. 

They also accompany things like the wisdom realizing emptiness. They accompany all of our meditative states. Again, depending upon the grossness or subtlety of the mind, they might be manifest, or they might be more latent and more subtle themselves. Because there are many different levels of the mind. The mind of sleep is definitely more subtle than non-conceptual sleep; that’s definitely more subtle than when we’re awake and our sense consciousnesses are functioning. The mind at the moment of death, at the clear light of death, is much more subtle than when we’re running around looking for ice cream. There are five omnipresent mental factors. There’s feeling, discrimination, contact, intention, and then attention or mental engagement.

The first one, a feeling: a distinct mental factor, which is an experience of either pleasure, pain, or indifference. This is a very different usage of the word feeling than our normal word. Because we usually say, I feel angry, or I feel depressed, or I feel like I’m in love, or whatever it is. We usually talk of feelings like this. That’s not the meaning of this mental factor feeling.

The mental factor feeling is just the very basic experience of the object. The mental factor feeling experiences the object as either pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral. Of course, there are many shades of pleasantness, many shades of unpleasantness, and many shades of neutralness. We shouldn’t think of these things as rigid categories. But when we say feeling, with mind and mental factors, we’re not talking about things like feeling angry or feeling fake, because those are other mental factors. Those aren’t the mental factor of feeling. Here, feeling is just talking about pleasant, unpleasant, and neutral. 

Karma and feeling

Now, feeling functions. It’s in a very interesting way, because on one hand, it functions to experience the results of our past actions, so this mental factor feeling, or the aggregate of feeling, is one of the chief ways in which our karma ripens. It’s very interesting. Whenever we feel pleasure, that’s the mental factor of feeling experiencing pleasure that is due to positive karma. Whenever there’s an unpleasant sensation, that unpleasant feeling, then that’s the result of our negative karma. Whenever there’s some kind of neutral or indifferent feeling, that’s the result of our neutral karma. 

This is something that when we really sit and think about it in our own experience, it brings the whole teaching on karma very sharply into focus, and it’s why observing karma is so important. Because sometimes we think of karma as this doctrine that’s out in left field, but here I am, and I’m so happy, or I’m so miserable, and it’s as if they’re totally unrelated. But they’re very, very related. All these feelings that we’re getting. And when you think about it, we have so many feelings every day, don’t we? There’s warmth, and so there’s a pleasant feeling. If it’s too warm, there’s an unpleasant feeling. All these feelings are due to our past karma. 

So, whenever there’s an unpleasant sensation, be it you burn your tongue, or you’re thinking about something that your mind’s just totally wrapped up about and miserable about, all those unhappy feelings are results of our past negative actions. We usually don’t think this way, do we? We usually think that the unpleasant feeling is the fault of somebody else or something outside of us. If we can just train ourselves to be really, continually aware of the mental factor of feeling and everything that’s going on, we will really come to respect karma a great deal more. Because it becomes very clear every time there’s unhappiness, there’s nobody else to blame. This is a result of our own actions. Therefore, in the future, we really need to clean up our act. 

Whenever we experience happiness, instead of just getting carried away with the happy feeling and blown away by it and all attached to it, then we begin to say, “Well, this is the result also of my past actions. And so I’d better really use my life now in a constructive way and create more good karma instead of just wasting the previous good karma by having all these pleasant good feelings.” Because then they end and they’re over. 

And it’s really something. I was thinking about this when I was reading and eating today. [laughter] I told you about my habit. I was thinking that there’s so much pleasure that I’m unaware of because I’ll sit and eat, and I won’t really taste the food or experience the pleasure. Here’s all this good karma from previous lives ripening in having a good meal, which many people in this world don’t have the karma to have, but I seem to have three or more of them every day. It’s a product of an incredible amount of good karma. And yet do I really appreciate it? First, am I even aware that this pleasant sensation is happening? Second, do I really appreciate all the work I did in my past life to get it? And am I doing something for my future lives or am I just sitting here kind of like a zombie having my spaced-out pleasures and not doing anything worthwhile with my life in terms of creating the cause for more pleasant sensations? It depends how you appreciate it.

Audience: [Inaudible]

VTC: It depends how you appreciate it. If you appreciate it and say, “Oh, this feels really good, I want more,” then you’re appreciating it to generate attachment. If you appreciate it and then use it to reflect on karma, then because you’re thinking about something that is going to lead you on the path to enlightenment, that thought process becomes creating good karma. 

Audience: [Inaudible]

VTC: Right. That’s creating good karma. And that’s also making us really experience what’s going on with the process of eating, isn’t it? At that moment, it’s not like we’re wasting the sensation either. The sensation is there, but we’re not getting attached to it or feeling averse to it, but we’re using it to generate more good karma.

Audience: You said you can have the most complete meal in the world, you might have that good karma ripen, but if you are in a bad mood then you’re not going to appreciate that, so that’s also bad karma ripening. If you have good karma ripen, you have the good karma of having good food, but your mental state, the fact that you don’t appreciate it then that good karma is not ripening, because you’re upset? 

VTC: No, it is ripening, but remember I was saying we can have different consciousnesses going on at one time? So, at that time you’re having, with your taste consciousness, a pleasant feeling, with your mental consciousness, you might have an unpleasant feeling because you’re upset. Both that pleasant feeling and unpleasant feeling are both ripenings of karma. So, there’s a lot of karma ripening. Karma is ripening all the time. All those different feelings are karma. Karma is ripening. 

Feeling and reactions

And in the same way, another way in which feeling functions isn’t just as a result of the past, but our feelings lead us to the next step of how we react to our feelings. And how we react to those feelings of pleasant, unpleasant, and neutral is what links us to the future karmically. Because so often we have a pleasant sensation, and then what’s the next step? We have an unpleasant sensation, and then the next step is a neutral sensation, and then the next step is, “I’ll go to sleep.”

While the feeling is the ripening of the past karma, it itself is not the karma. But it leads us to generate certain intentions that have other mental factors with them—aversion, or craving, or laziness, or faith, or compassion, or whatever. That’s why it really pays to be quite aware of these pleasant, unpleasant, and neutral feelings, because then when we’re aware of them it gives us the opportunity to cut what is usually the automatic generation of some disturbing attitude and reaction to them. Here we’re linking feeling with the twelve links. Because in the twelve links you have contact, feeling, and then craving. Usually you have feeling, then you have craving to either not be separated from it, or to be separated from it, or something like that.

This is very important for getting ourselves out of cyclic existence—we need to stop that thing between feeling and the arising of the disturbing attitudes after it. That’s one very, very important part where we can begin to cut the cause for cyclic existence, if we remain aware of our feelings. But so often, why is it that we’ll find ourselves super upset and it seems like it came out of nowhere? It’s not like it came out of nowhere. If we were really aware we could see that there was an unpleasant sensation somewhere along the line. And then something kept adding on and adding on and then blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and whammo. And we didn’t notice it until it was at the whammo point.

It’s very interesting to meditate on all these things, to just spend some time sitting on your cushion and thinking of the various feelings. Or do it at the kitchen table. I mean, it depends who you’re eating with. Cats are very good for this. You don’t have to talk to them. You can become really aware of the different feelings. Not just the taste, but the smell, the colors of what you’re looking at: are they pleasant or unpleasant? What you’re hearing—when you hear different music or you hear different sounds, pleasant or unpleasant, and you can examine how you’re reacting to it. If we become real sensitive we can see the feeling and then there’s a reaction. 

The pleasant or unpleasant feeling is a consciousness. It’s not the object that we are perceiving. We usually think that pleasant or unpleasant is the object we’re perceiving, isn’t it? Like the pleasant or unpleasant is out there and I’m perceiving the pleasantness out there. Or I’m perceiving the unpleasantness out there. That’s why we get so attached and averse to things. But the pleasure or the pain, those are the mental factor of feeling.

Yes?

Audience: You were talking about feeling and sometimes craving or pain can arise from that. Is that a mental factor also? 

VTC: Yes.

Audience: But it seems like sometimes we can have a feeling of craving, not a feeling, a mental factor of craving, and that craving itself is an unpleasant feeling.

VTC: Yes. 

Audience: Can we have two mental factors that are occurring at the same time. 

VTC: Yes, and you can have more than one mental factor occurring at the same time. Because you can have, let’s say, the mental consciousness or any of the primary consciousness, and you also have many mental factors going on. But you’re right, the craving itself generates more unpleasant feeling, doesn’t it? 

An experiment with sensation

Now, let’s do a little experiment here so we can see a little bit the difference between the sensation of something, the feeling, the mental factor of feeling, and the other attitudes that are generated because of it. This is a kind of weird one, but it gets the point across. Pinch your finger or pinch your palm or something, dig your fingernails in there. You might want to close your eyes so you can really concentrate here. Dig your fingernails in. Now, be aware of just the sensation. Don’t focus on the pleasant or unpleasant, but just the sensation of your fingernails pinching your skin. What’s that sensation? 

Now focus on the feeling that’s accompanying that. It’s probably unpleasant. Focus on the feeling, the unpleasantness of it—just on the unpleasant feeling, that’s all. Now, check to see if there’s any aversion arising in your mind as a result of the unpleasant feeling. Is there any part of the mind saying, “When can I stop this?” Okay, now let go.

What happened? 

Audience: The aversion was so big that it was real difficult to focus on the unpleasantness. [laughter]

VTC: That’s very interesting. The aversion was so big that it was real difficult to focus on just the sensation or on the unpleasant feeling. Did other people have that experience? 

Audience: [Inaudible]

VTC: You let go. You cheated.

Audience: [Inaudible]

VTC: That’s real interesting, isn’t it? It’s very difficult to separate the feeling out from the aversion because one follows so closely upon the other. And usually, like with your experience, we get so sidetracked into the aversion that it’s hard just to find the feeling separate from it. The aversion just overwhelms.

It overwhelms so much that sometimes it’s hard to even remember what the sensation was. Because the mind starts at that point, very often, getting into a whole conceptual process; we lose the tactile consciousness very often. We stop focusing on the tactile consciousness and the raw sensation of the nails on the skin, and we start a huge conceptual process which is mental consciousness, saying, “Why am I doing this stupid experiment anyway? And when’s she going to tell me to let go? And I’m going to let go anyway when she didn’t say; this is stupid.” And that’s all mental consciousness. And we’re not even aware of the basic raw sensation so much. It’s there, but we’re off in something else.

Audience: [Inaudible]

VTC: Yes. The aversion that’s coming down is really because our mind is already starting to think, “Why am I experiencing this, and I really don’t like it, and I want to stop.” 

Audience: [Inaudible]

VTC: No, the aversion is another mental factor. It’s part of the mental factor of anger.

Audience: [Inaudible]

VTC: That’s why the Buddha taught the four close placements of mindfulness. The first one is mindfulness of the body. And there what you’re trying to do is just focus on the sensation. And for those of you who have done Vipassana meditation, according to the Theravada tradition, you know that one of the things you do there is like when your knees start hurting, you start to focus on just the sensation of the knee. You just focus on the sensation that’s there, what it is. Whatever happens, you’re just trying to focus simply on the sensation without all the conceptualization that follows it. It becomes very difficult when we begin to see how addicted we are to conceptualization and reaction to all these things.

Because as soon as we taste the chocolate cake, as soon as we taste it, we hardly ever really taste it. The mind’s already thinking, “Oh, this is really good. How can I get some more? Do I want the next bite to be with the frosting or be with the cake?” [laughter] I mean, this is just what happens when I notice my mind. And how do I want it to be? And how can I eat this fast and get more before the other person takes it? I want seconds, but how am I going to do it so it looks like I’m really offering the next piece to them but get it for myself and still seem polite? All this is going on on a mental level, a conceptual level, and it’s all over the sensation of the chocolate cake. But I’m so busy with all my conceptualization that the raw sensation of what chocolate cake tastes like is almost lost. 

Audience: [Inaudible]

VTC: It’s very interesting when you just start to focus on the sensation itself and you don’t get all hung up on the conceptualization. It’s not nearly as bad. When it’s just the sensation, that’s manageable. When you start to focus on the feeling of it, then it’s almost like so quickly that the aversion comes. 

It’s very similar when we’re sick, there’s the feeling bad of the body. But I don’t know about you people, the feeling bad of the body is not the problem for me when I’m sick. Usually the body is not so sick. It’s what the mind does when the body is sick. And the mind starts saying, “Oh, I have a sore throat, that means I’m getting a flu and then I won’t be able to do this, and I won’t be able to do that, and it hurts so much, and maybe it’s going to be strep, and then I have to go to the doctor, and that’s going to be expensive, and oh, what am I going to eat, and this doesn’t taste right, and nobody’s going to bring me food, and how come people don’t care about me enough anyway to know I’m sick, and da-da-da-da-da-da.” That’s my soap opera. Well, that’s creating a whole lot of karma. 

Audience: [Inaudible]

VTC: No, the unpleasant feeling of the sore throat is a result of the karma. The feeling is just the unpleasant feeling of the throat hurting, but all that conceptualization I’m having afterwards is creating a lot of karma. Because I’m really involved in aversion and anger and cynicism and hostility and self-pity and I really get into it when I’m sick. So, that’s creating a whole lot of negative karma.

That’s why at that time when we get sick, the way to handle the sensation and any unpleasant situation from it also, is to apply a Dharma antidote, such as the taking and giving meditation. Then doing the taking and giving meditation immediately stops all the other mental factors of self-pity and hatred and all these things. It immediately does that. And by stopping all those mental factors, also it transforms the mind into a pleasant state. So, you wind up with a pleasant feeling. 

Audience: I thought you said that when you have all those negative mental factors related to karma, it doesn’t do it. But that’s part of negative karma, that you’re not able to do it.

VTC: When you’re having all those different thoughts, the feeling that is there—the mental factor of feeling that’s with those thoughts—that’s a result of previous karma. But all your thoughts that you’re doing, they may be habitual from previous lives, so it might be some karmic force that way. From the beginning of this lifetime, I have felt sorry for myself when I got sick, so why break a bad habit? So, there’s that kind of habitual force of karma. It’s also very much what we’re doing right now in the present moment. We can’t just say, “Oh, I’m all involved in my resentment when I’m sick, and that’s the fault of my karma, so it’s all due to karma, and so there’s nothing I can do about it.” We can’t do that because then we just keep creating more and more negative karma. 

You see, at that moment when you have the unpleasant situation, if instead of letting all the disturbing attitudes arise when we’re having the unpleasant feeling, instead of letting the disturbing attitudes arise in reaction to it, or if the disturbing attitudes start to arise, immediately apply an antidote. And that’s why we learn all the different antidotes in the teachings. Because this is the time when we need to apply them so that we stop that automatic response of the mental factor of feeling generating all these kinds of cravings and aversions which create more and more karma.

Is this making some sense, yes? 

Audience: So, like you said in the outline, the feelings can lead to reactions of attachment, aversion, close-mindedness, but they can also lead to faith and compassion? 

VTC: Yes. Yes. 

Audience: And I had another question about those people who were able to concentrate on just the feeling and sensation more than the sensation. So then, since feeling is an omnipresent mental factor, whether it’s that next mental moment, their feeling has gone to one of a different thing. But if you’re focusing on the sensation isn’t the feeling still a constant? 

VTC: Right, yes.

Audience: And the feeling at that point is indifference? 

VTC: No, it’s still a feeling of unpleasantness, but we’re not focusing on it, so it’s not appearing so big. The whole thing is when you focus on something that hurts, it hurts more. And when you’re focusing on just the sensation of it then it doesn’t hurt as much because you’re not focusing on the feeling part of it.

Audience: Whether it’s taking the mental factors for the present to be stronger or weaker. 

VTC: Right. Or our awareness of them can be stronger and weaker according to what we focus on.

 Let’s do this experiment again then we’ll come to your question. Because rather than just getting this intellectually, let’s check our experience. Let’s back to pinching fingers, guys. Pinch your finger, pinch your palm, or something like that. And start out and just try and focus on just the raw sensation, the tactile sensation of the nails in the skin. Focus just on the sensation of pressure, that’s all. 

Now focus on the unpleasant feeling of it. 

Now focus on your reaction to the unpleasant feeling.

Did something come clear during that time? So, you can try this again. It doesn’t always have to be an unpleasant one. You don’t have to come to class next week if you’re completely mutilated. But you can try it with some pleasant things, too. You can try it with just looking at something. Look at a color and just focus on the color. And then focus on the pleasant feeling you get or unpleasant feeling you get from the color. And then check and see what your reactions to that feeling are. 

Audience: The second time it helped more. But the second time I was able to see how much my aversion was bigger in my heart than it was in my skin. So, just when I was doing it, I was a little bit sad. And what I’ve learned to do now is that from this psychological point of view, I think there’s something much more to follow than both of them. At least for me, in my case. Because beyond language, psychologists might say it’s something that’s buried, that I’ve never contacted beyond words or something. I don’t know.  I remember when I was doing the classes, that in the middle of the class, I exploded crying. Like staring and crying and crying. And the teacher made me stand up and open my eyes and look like this for a long time with my eyes open, and breathe until I calmed down. And I couldn’t tell you why I was crying, because there are points that can be pressed that bring things up that I can’t think naturally what those things are. So, there is a connection that I have no control over. I don’t know my mental factor or why it’s creating that. It’s an aversion. Because I don’t have the intellectual tool. I mean, I know I’m going to become like this. But a lot of it is like, I don’t have the tool to do it because I can’t define it.

VTC: It’s like, where did this come from? 

Audience: The aversion is much bigger than why can you say, “Well, I don’t like this because of that.” No, I can’t.

VTC: And I mean, just even in another way, I think many people have had your experience too, but sometimes even, let’s say we receive a small bit of criticism, we get completely bent out of shape. At the same time we’re saying, “Why am I so upset about this? Why am I so bananas?” And yet we can’t control it. So, I think sometimes we react very, very strongly to things that intellectually we certainly can’t explain. But this is how our mind reacts sometimes. It’s somewhat the ripening of karma and previous dispositions and things happening.

It can be very helpful if we’re aware that this is simply a ripening of karma. If there’s  a lot of unpleasant sensation, or a lot of unpleasant feeling, this is the ripening of karma. And then we can do tonglen, and try and steer the mind back to something else. The reason it’s so difficult to steer the mind into something virtuous at that moment is because we are unaccustomed to it. Usually when we have a strong averse reaction, we jump in. It really involves a retraining of the mind to try and train ourselves to respond in a different way.

Audience: Even if you don’t understand?

VTC: Even if you don’t understand. It’s not important to understand. We don’t have to intellectually understand everything that goes on in us. Don’t think that for everything that comes up into your mind, you need to do some big philosophical diagnosis of it. Just whatever you’re experiencing, you’re experiencing that. Let yourself experience that. You don’t need to do this or do that or the other thing. Because what you’re experiencing, you’re experiencing. The thing is to check out how we’re reacting to what we’re experiencing.

It’s like when you get really upset and you start crying. Well, okay, I’m crying. Big deal. But then if you start getting, “Oh, but I shouldn’t be crying, and what are all these people are thinking about me, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah,” then we just make the whole process real confused. But sometimes if something comes up and you cry, you cry. Then you’re finished, and you do something else. When you start with all this conceptualization and reaction and, “Oh, I shouldn’t be crying, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah,” then the whole thing drags on and on and on and on. And especially with the guys, they get in this whole thing of, I can’t cry.

It was really incredible at the Chapman retreat when we had with these university students. We did one go-around, and we were talking about death, and one of the young men started to cry. And it was amazing to see because I’m sure he’s never cried in front of a group before. I spoke with him a long time afterwards, and he was thinking, “Oh, what do these other people think about me?” And then the next discussion session we had, one of the other guys in the group said, “Oh, I’m so glad that so-and-so cried because I wish I could do that.” And the other people nodded their head, including the men. It’s just like if you cry, you cry, and you’re done with it. But it’s different when you start thinking, “Oh, oh, oh, oh, they did this, and then they did that, and I’m so upset, and how come this always happens to me?” Then it’s like five hours we take. 

It’s interesting when you’re having real strong reactions to something. Sometimes it’s real interesting. Just sit yourself down and just feel the reaction. Don’t start making plans to how you’re going to deal with it, and what you’re going to say, and why this happened. Just sit down and experience what’s happened. And just stay with it. And it’s real weird, because it changes a lot. But when we get all caught up in our thinking and reactions and our planning of what we’re going to do, then that whole thing really carries on a long time, and we’re kind of not really in touch with what the basic experience is.

Audience: [Inaudible]

VTC: Well, it depends on how you’re meditating. Sometimes, if you’re all worked up about something, you try and just acknowledge what it is that you’re feeling and feel it, and sometimes it can be real helpful to give it a label: I’m frustrated, or I’m angry, or I’m irritated, or I’m enraged, or I’m depressed, or whatever it is.

Again, this is not some big, huge intellectual thing, but it’s just a process of helping us to identify exactly what it is that we’re feeling. And then you feel that, and then you can start, at some point, thinking of another way to look at the situation. As you look at the situation in another way, then your view of it and your feeling experience changes. Before we can really apply the antidotes, I think we have to recognize what it is that’s going on in us. 

Audience: [Inaudible]

Ven. Chodron: Oh, people do experience things differently, because these things are the ripening of karma. Two people may look at the same color, and one person have a pleasant feeling, and another person an unpleasant feeling. So, it’s not like the beauty exists inside the thing. People have different reactions. The reason I chose the pinching is because I could be 99% sure that people would have a similar reaction. But within that, I’m sure we all experience it very differently. Some people, I’m sure, experience much more pain than other people did from it. People have different pain thresholds. 

Audience: It seems like a lot of it has to do with cognition, so that if I don’t enjoy a particular thing, because when I was four years old, I was locked in a shopping mall and that was what was playing—there was somehow that memory playing into it. 

VTC: Yes, yes.

Audience: It’s like, where does that play into it?

VTC: This is where it gets real interesting to observe our mind. Because sometimes that process is you have the direct perception of hearing, and then you start having the memory come up at some kind of level in which it’s not at all clear. Or maybe you don’t even have the memory coming up as much as you do just some patterned habitual response to a certain thing. It’s not even like you’re remembering being in a shopping mall, but you just have this habitual response. 

It’s very, very interesting to really examine our own mind and, let’s go back to just the sound.: is the sound itself unpleasant? Or, where’s the unpleasantness coming in? Is it the sound that’s unpleasant? Or is it something that’s going on on a mental level? Is it the mental consciousness that’s unpleasant that’s happening later? This is just a way of investigating our own experience to see those things. When you do that, especially when you start really looking at the difference between non-conceptual and conceptual cognitions, it becomes so apparent how we hardly ever experience anything in a fresh way. Because we look at things and then so quickly we’re associating it with something else from the past.

We can see, sometimes we’re walking around Green Lake and we see the duck, and if we’re mindful and aware of what we’re thinking, we’re associating the duck with Uncle Joe’s farm when we were seven-years-old. And we remember it. And if we’re walking around Green Lake with our friend at that time, we might actually start telling them about Uncle Joe’s farm, simply because of having seen the duck. It’s so interesting just to watch the mind and how we associate things and so easily go into conception. A lot of that is associated with patterns, habitual patterns. 

Audience: I think that the way that I’ve been taught to deal with the adversity is by facing what created the adversity. Like if you don’t like something, if you don’t like certain conditions, you practice a lot of things, and the ones that made you look like this are the ones that happened to you, or something like that. But what I’m saying is that there are so many things that we absolutely don’t know. 

VTC: Exactly. And there’s no end to it.

Audience: With that aversion. 

VTC: Right. And what are you going to do? Go back 15 lifetimes? 

Audience: That’s what I sometimes thought. I mean, I think that’s maybe overanalyzing it, or expecting too much of myself. Like, well, I don’t like pain because I am attached to my body. And that is like, I don’t know, like a Buddhist psychoanalysis. So, if I wasn’t so attached to my body, I wouldn’t be so afraid of pain. But what am I going to do? I’m still going to be averse to it.

VTC: That is because we’re understanding things here. We’re doing some big, blah, blah, blah, philosophical analysis. You know: “Oh yes, I’m doing this, and I have so much aversion because I’m attached to my body.” Well, we’re not really letting that understanding affect us in here. And that’s the whole purpose of meditation is to not just see it intellectually on a philosophical level, but to really let that sink in. All this misery I’m going through is really because of this kind of attachment. And it’s shocking, and it’s a little bit scary—more than a little bit sometimes, which is probably why we keep it all up here chattering away and it doesn’t affect us. 

And this is also why refuge is so important, because when it starts to come true, okay, this is suffering, my attachment causes suffering, then at least we know there’s refuge, there’s a path or something to turn to, to rely on, to help us go beyond that and deal with it. So, we’re not just stuck there with, “Oh, I’m so attached to my body, what am I going to do?” There’s a lot to do. And there’s a lot of help. Yes? 

Audience: [Inaudible]

VTC: And it’s so funny, because we never, when we have a happy feeling, go back to our childhood and what caused this happy feeling. Do we? We never look back on our childhood and what happened that was good. Something’s quite off balance.

So, let’s try this week to be aware of not only the difference between conceptual and non-conceptual, and how the conceptual affects your feeling tone—like the meditation we did at the beginning—but also try and be aware of this mental factor of feeling. Be aware of the raw physical sensation, or the mental thing that you’re thinking about, the feeling, and then the reaction to it. Also spend some time this week thinking that when there are unhappy feelings, really kind of sit with the fact that this is a result of my negative actions. And when there are happy feelings, try and sit with the idea that this is a result of my positive actions. And then see how that’s going to inform your behavior for what you do now, and in terms of what you want to create in the future.