Our usual responses to pleasure and pain
If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to our RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
Identifying with experience
“Sensing a feeling of pleasure, he senses it as though joined with it. Sensing a feeling of pain, he senses it as though joined with it. Sensing a feeling of neither-pleasure-nor-pain, he senses it as though joined with it. This is called an uninstructed run-of-the-mill person joined with birth, aging, and death; with sorrows, lamentations, pains, distresses, and despairs. He is joined, I tell you, with suffering and stress.
This is perhaps the most interesting part of the passage. The two paragraphs quoted above explain the dynamics of reactivity — how an initial painful feeling (usually mental rather than physical) leads to a cascade of painful responses — but here the Buddha is pointing to the underlying problem, which is our relation to our feelings.
How we relate to our feelings is crucial. The fundamental problem with the spiritually-untrained mind is that it identifies with its experience. We have a painful, pleasant, or neutral feeling, and we fail to recognize that it’s simply a phenomenon arising in the space of consciousness and that it is not inherently a part of us.
Instead, we assume on some almost instinctual level that our feelings are indeed a part of us, and that they say something about who we are in our essence. So when we experience pain (the friend not acknowledging us) we quickly move to the assumption that there is therefore something wrong with us (nobody likes me).
It’s hard to put into words exactly what this means and how it works. In essence it’s something we have to experience by practicing mindfulness. When we meditate we start to see how often we identify with the contents of our consciousness — the thoughts, feelings, and emotions that pass through us. And we start to stand back from those thoughts, feelings, and emotions, and to have a less “joined” relationship with them.
No longer attached to them, and no longer identifying with them, we start to see them as simply experiences that are passing through. And this is enormously liberating.
Pages: 1 2
Write a comment