Terror & Revulsion

August 27, 2007

When you meditate you want to understand both the how and the why. How
you meditate. Why you meditate.
If you focus only on the how, it becomes mechanical, simply a matter of
technique: something you do while you sit here with your eyes closed and then
you drop it to go off and do something else.
But the why helps the practice to seep into the rest of your life, to give you
new perspective on what you’re doing with your life.
Because that’s always the emphasis in the Buddha’s teaching is: the doing.
Why we do things, and whether we’re really getting the results we want from
the things we do.
But first the how.
Close your eyes. Sit up straight. And focus on your breath. Know when the
breath comes in, know when it goes out. All the way in, all the way out.
Try to stay with the sensation of breathing wherever you find it clearest to
follow. For some people, it’s the sensation of breathing in the nose. For others,
it’s the movement of the chest, the movement of the abdomen—any place in
the body where you can sense: Now the breath is coming in, now the breath is
going out.
And wherever you focus, allow the sensation to be comfortable so that it
feels good breathing in, feels good breathing out. If it feels good, it’s a lot easier
to stay with the breath.
This may require adjusting the rhythm and the texture of the breathing:
deep breathing or shallow breathing; heavy or light; fast or slow. You can
change the speed and the texture of the breath in the course of even one breath,
especially when you’re doing long breathing. Be careful that it doesn’t get too
strained.
Then, once you’ve been able to get the breath comfortable, think of that
sense of ease flowing through all the nerves of the body. Because the sensation
of having a body here is a type of breath energy. If we didn’t have the breath
energy in the body, we wouldn’t know we had a body here. We wouldn’t feel it,
we wouldn’t sense it. So try to think of all these sensations as being connected.
That also helps not only to make the breath really comfortable deep down
inside but also to keep you awake. If the range of your focus is too narrow, it’s
very easy, once the breath gets comfortable, to fall asleep or to start just drifting
off—or in and out of focus. So make sure that once there’s a sense of ease, you
allow it to spread like melted butter spreading over toast, seeping down into
the holes in the bread, saturating the bread.
 And then once you’ve got a sense of ease filling the body like this, try to
maintain it. And make your awareness fill the body, too. And here you have to
be careful, because there will be a tendency for your awareness to shrink. So try
to keep aware of the whole body breathing in, whole body breathing out.
That, in a nutshell is the how, how you do the meditation.
The why takes more explaining.
But in brief, the why comes from our reflection on our own lives: realizing
that we do things and say things and think things primarily because we want
happiness—that’s the underlying motive all the time—and yet to what extent
do we really find happiness, do we actually create happiness? Often the things
we do create pain instead, both for ourselves and for the people around us. And
we can set our sights on goals and spend our whole lives working toward things
that will not bring happiness at all.
So the purpose of the meditation is to deal with that issue, to put the mind
in a position where it can really reflect on what true happiness is and also what
the actual results of our actions are, what do we need to change, so that our
actions will lead to the happiness we want..Because it is within our power, one,
to change, and two, to find true happiness.
This is why we meditate: to be more sensitive to our own actions, and
particularly the actions of the mind.
Now, the how and the why are not radically separate.
I recently went back and re-read some of Ajaan Lee’s instructions on basic
introductory meditation. And I was struck by how often he refers to the word
samvega as a way of inducing concentration. You get the mind to reflect on
things in such a way, he says, that you induce this feeling of samvega.
Now, samvega’s a hard term to translate. In Pali, it’s related to a word that
means “terror.” What it comes down to is when you start reflecting on your life
and the things you’ve been attached to, the things that you’ve been thirsting
after and looking for: You come to see how pointless they all are. All that
energy, all that effort focused on things that are not going to help you to find
true happiness at all, and in many ways set you up for major disappointments.
That’s what the terror’s all about: You see how complacent you’ve been,
focusing on things that are of no substance, no real worth, and then doing
things that actually put you in harm’s way, set you up for a fall, a major fall.
You’ve probably read of cases where people have worked very hard for
something and looked back at their lives and realized that the whole time was
wasted. That’s scary. That’s the element that puts the edge on samvega. There is
an element of terror. There’s that possibility that you could spend your whole
life struggling for something very hard and then it doesn’t provide you with any
help at all.
We see people in old folks’ homes. Say, professors who’ve worked very hard
at trying to understand a subject and then they get Parkinson’s and they forget
it totally. They get to the point where they can’t even recognize their family.
Or people who’ve worked very hard at being fit all of their lives and all of a
sudden the body turns on them. We’ve seen people die and all the things
they’ve done in their lives don’t seem to help them at all at that moment. That’s
scary. Because you could be in those positions as well.
When you reflect on this, it helps sharpen your focus on the meditation.
It’s a common pattern throughout the Buddhist tradition that the feeling of
samvega is paired with pasada. Pasada means a sense of confidence, confidence
that there’s a way out and that this is it.
The more you realize how other things are closing in on you, and that this is
the one way out: This sharpens your focus, gives you more energy to practice,
to try to understand how it is that the mind can spend so much time working,
working, working for happiness and yet acting in ways that actually cause
suffering or leave you unprotected when aging, illness, and death come.
So it’s good to reflect on these things, to remind yourself why you’re here.
And it helps put more energy into learning how to develop the skills that will
protect you from those dangers: mindfulness, alertness, concentration, and
discernment, all founded on a sense of pasada or saddha, which means
conviction, conviction that your actions can make a difference and that there is
a way out.
This way, samvega’s paired with heedfulness. You realize that your actions
are important and so you have to be very careful about what you do. Because it
is very easy to slip off the path and lead a life of quiet desperation that ends up
in major disappointment. So you’ve got to be careful.
The other emotion that’s good to reflect on is nibbida, which is translated as
disenchantment or even revulsion. This comes more toward the end of the
practice. After you’ve gained powers of concentration, you can really look at
where you’ve been trying to find happiness in the past, and you develop a sense
that you wouldn’t want to act in those ways ever again.
This is where the Buddha’s image of feeding comes in. There’s a passage in
the Canon where he’s teaching a young novice through a list of questions. The
questions are, “What is One? What is Two? What is Three? What is Four?” on
up through, “What is Ten?” And Two, Three and Four up to Ten deal with
well-known teachings of doctrine: Two is name and form. Three is the three
kinds of feelings. Four is the four noble truths, and so on.
“One” is interesting. The question is, “What is One?” And the answer is,
“All beings subsist on food.” This is how the Buddha introduces causality. In
other words, causality, interconnectedness, is not always a pretty thing. It’s
essentially feeding. And if you’re feeding on something inconstant and
undependable, your life is inconstant and undependable, too.
 This image of feeding also goes to a deeper level when the Buddha talks
about clinging, because the word for clinging—upadana—also means the act
of taking sustenance from something. And here again, the Buddha has you
reflect on where you try to find happiness and realize that you’ve been feeding
on things that really don’t provide any solid nourishment.
That’s when the feeling of revulsion comes in, or the feeling of
disenchantment: You’ve had enough of that kind of food, and don’t want to
feed on it anymore.
Now the Buddha has you develop this feeling as the mind has developed
concentration. Through the practice, you’ve been learning these strengths of
conviction, persistence, mindfulness, concentration, and discernment, these
strengths that nourish the mind. As you practice, you want to feed on these
things. But ultimately they put the mind in a position where it’s so strong that
it doesn’t need to feed anymore. That’s where it’s skillful to develop nibbida.
The sense of disenchantment or revulsion then lead to dispassion. From
dispassion, there’s release. You let go of the things you’ve been clinging to. And
in the image of fire as it’s used in the Pali Canon, once there’s letting go, there’s
release: In other words, the reason you’re stuck on things is not that they’re
hanging onto you. You’re hanging onto them. The same way that the fire, they
say, clings to its fuel and it goes out when it lets go. It’s unbound because it lets
go.
The same image applies to the mind. We cling to form, feeling, perceptions,
thought-constructs, and consciousness because we think we’ll get some
nourishment out of them. For the most part, though, they’re like junk food—
they give pleasure, but no real nourishment, and can actually be harmful. But
once we’ve turned them into the health food of the path, and they’ve
strengthened us as much as they can, we realize that we don’t need to feed on
them anymore. If we let go through the strength of the practice, we don’t have
to feed on anything at all. When we let go, we’re freed. We’re unbound.
So this is why we practice. We see that we’ve been looking for happiness in
the wrong places, making the mind dependent on things that can’t really
provide it any shelter or refuge. Realizing this, we learn to develop the qualities
of mind. We have confidence that these qualities of mind will grow and
develop and provide the mind with a path out to true freedom, a freedom that’s
unconditioned. So unconditioned we don’t have to feed on any conditions at
all.
So we move from a state of heedless feeding to a state where we become
more heedful, to a position where we don’t have to feed at all.
That’s how the how and the why come together.
So it’s useful to reflect on these things. A lot of the meditation deals with
the how, the techniques of how you deal with this problem, how you deal with
that problem. But it’s always good to keep the larger picture in perspective by
remembering the why.