The end of suffering and its causes '“ NOT the end of feeling

Kenneth, depending on what you mean by feeling, I either agree or disagree... could you be explicit about what you mean by feeling? Perhaps without using the word 'feeling' itself, since it can be interpreted as: sense-contact itself; sense-contact that is unpleasant, pleasant, or neutral; emotion; affectively tinged sense contact, etc...

In my experience relieving suffering is about realizing how infinite awareness is and how empty all phenomena are, and living in that "space." How on God's green earth can anything ever touch the clear light of awareness, especially if it is as fleeting as the "me" that arises and the objects it claims?

But that's just me

I'd like to know what "affectively tinged" means.

Kenneth: "...when they could end suffering while continuing to experience the whole spectrum of human sensations?"

From what I understand, you no longer experience a center-point, no? Wouldn't you say that is a human sensation you no longer have access to?

Didn't you lose the ability to have certain sensations arise, by going on to KFD 6 and KFD 7?

Kenneth: "This means, simply put, that enlightened folks still have feeling, but do not cling to it."

That also sounds like they will not be able to experience certain sensations (namely: clinging to feeling).

We suffer because we do not yet experience a well-being indenpendent of conditions.

When such an unconditional well-being is available, the conditioned sensations that arise don't disturb it.

Talking about ending certin types of sensations in order to experience well-being is the very pith of samsaric existence, is it not? Trying to avoid this, or to grasp that, in order to be OK?

The part of the path involving the cessation of the aggregates (in general) is quite temporary. The moment of awakening is devoid of conditioned sense-experience. But the awakened human being returns to an experience of sense experience, only now there is no need to chase after conditioned things to find happiness.

The mind is quite happy with the unconditoned. So much so, in fact, that it doesn't have a stake in whether conditions churn out arisings or not.

awouldbehipster: "Talking about ending certin types of sensations in order to experience well-being is the very pith of samsaric existence, is it not? Trying to avoid this, or to grasp that, in order to be OK?"

Yes, avoiding and grasping won't get you anywhere. I aim to totally and entirely stop avoiding and grasping, regardless of conditions.

I just so happen to think that certain patterns of sensations (e.g. anger, resentment, desire, fear, tension in particular parts of the body with a sense of location attached to them, etc) **already** in and of themselves **ARE** avoiding and grasping. So I look at them with equanimity so that I can stop avoiding and stop grasping and just BE.

And the more I do it, the richer experience gets.

"Talking about ending certin types of sensations in order to experience well-being is the very pith of samsaric existence, is it not? Trying to avoid this, or to grasp that, in order to be OK?"

Trying to end defilements is the core thing that the Buddhist path (of the Pali suttas) aims at, no?

No more craving, no more clinging, no more becoming, no more of the mental effluents, no more fetters...

Indeed (taking a broader view) the goal of Buddhism involves ending rebirth, which means an absolute end to all conditioned experience, which includes the end of vedana too.

Beoman, I am all in favor of the practice of applying mindfulness and cultivating equanimity with regard to whatever you're experiencing in each and every moment. Whether we agree on other things is much less important!

EndInSight: "Trying to end defilements is the core thing that the Buddhist path (of the Pali suttas) aims at, no?

No more craving, no more clinging, no more becoming, no more of the mental effluents, no more fetters..."

What's happening here, as I see it, is a confusion between intentions/actions and results. The list you provided, "craving, clinging, becoming," are things we do. The effluents are not sensations to be removed, but tendencies toward action that are to be overcome.

This is why I would not say that any sensation is equal to grasping, aversion, craving, or clinging. These things the mind can stop intending to do. And it only stops doing these things when it can get beyond believing that they can result in longterm happiness, and even beyond "longterm".

Jackson's essay was ambiguous about who it was critiquing.

I think the main problem is the terminology. We are all over the place with the term 'vedana'. If we take the connotation of 'feeling tone', then post-last shift, I still experience pleasant, unpleasant and neutral sensations throughout the body. This did not vanish. If we also take the connotation of 'preference', then there is also still preference for pleasant sensations over unpleasant sensations post-last shift.

There just isn't any full blown sense of any of the following fabricated mentally felt arisings in my ongoing experience:

self / self-obsessing chatter / being / presence / location in the world / subject to objects / duality / inner world / me-ness / instinctual passions / any full blown affectively felt mind state / moods / being of any kind / being the absolute / being one with everything / being one with anything / being connected to everything / being space / being infinite consciousness / being no-thing-ness / being the void / being anything / imagination / the flow of time / existing, mental anguish / mental tension / push and pull.

But there is a shadow thingie which is hard to describe for the past 3 months, but lessening to a great extent. After much exploration, experimentation and asking and talking with others it is now easy to see vanish and not arise at all. @ End: distinctions!

"Getting rid of suffering by getting rid of feeling is like using a hydrogen bomb to kill a gopher."

Well, I personally do not advocate getting rid of suffering by getting rid of feeling (as I have said to mumuwu, I claim that in a PCE, all that remains is vedana [and other sense-experience, obviously]).

However, I worry that by comparing the problem of suffering to "a gopher", you are minimizing the significance of the very thing that began Gotama's quest to understand existence...the full extent of the horror and misery that every moment of craving, clinging, and becoming are. Imagine someone told him: "Hey, don't worry about this too much! Why are you afraid of a little bit of suffering, anyway?"

Each of us will have our own opinions. My testimony, from my experience as a contemplative, is that craving-clinging-becoming are abject horror (no matter how innocuous it appears) compared to what experience would be like in their absence. Their absence (even when not complete) is so profound as to defy any attempt at describing or classifying what ensues.

But I will say, in honesty, that there has been so much confusion about this subject, that I am not sure whether we even disagree. I have a deep respect for what Jackson wrote, as it attempts to re-unite the community around ideas that we all may agree on or at least have a measure of agreement on. And, as you know, I have a reasonable level of confidence that what you call "rigpa" is somehow related to what many of us have been going on about regarding PCEs / etc. I think we are all aiming to a greater or lesser extent at the same thing, but have been getting sidetracked by terminological confusion, and that confusion is not allowing us to see whether or not any disagreements that exist are substantive or illusory in the first place.

In any case, I hope we can all return to speaking the same language and helping each other.

(continued from #33)

The interesting thing about the path is that we aren't just asked to believe that stopping such intentions/actions will lead to freedom. We're advised to put the whole thing into practice on purpose! We use clinging, craving, grasping, aversion, becoming, birth, aging. change, and death; also selfing and non-selfing; to access jhana or traverse the progress of insight. We change our relationship to experience so many times that we realize the whole process of shaping and changing is futile. But it takes a certain quality of awareness to really see this, which is why dependent co-arising against itself to develop right concentration.

When we really see the truth, and allow wisdom to replace ignorance, we taste awakening directly. It just happens as a result of wisdom feeding into the loop, signaling the mind to let go.

Marvelous.

"What's happening here, as I see it, is a confusion between intentions/actions and results. The list you provided, "craving, clinging, becoming," are things we do. The effluents are not sensations to be removed, but tendencies toward action that are to be overcome."

Do you believe that craving, clinging, and becoming are *experiences* as well, or merely just tendencies that have no experiential quality at all?

As I included defilements in my list, do you believe they are experiential as well, or completely non-experiential?

What kind of experience do you think suffering is? Vedana? Something else? (If you say "the attitude of the mind towards experience" or something along those lines, what kind of experience do you think "the attitude of the mind" is?)

EDIT: To give you a sense of my opinion, I consider "desire and passion" to be craving-clinging-becoming, and I think they are clearly experiential (although there are obvious behavioral tendencies attached to those experiences). www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/sn/sn35/sn35.191.than.html

"Jackson's essay was ambiguous about who it was critiquing." ~Nick

I wasn't critiquing anyone in particular. I am not speaking out against anyone's claim to any specific attainment.

I've just notice a lot of confusion around this topic (as well as that of "sankharas" - but don't get me started! haha), and decided to clear things up as best I could.

I'm glad to hear that you still experience vedana, and that you are clear about having preferences. If you didn't, well, I'd be concerned for you. And I don't mean that in a belittling or pejorative way.

-Jackson

EndInSight: "Do you believe that craving, clinging, and becoming are *experiences* as well, or merely just tendencies that have no experiential quality at all?"

That's a tricky question. Let's look at craving: craving is, in part, an intentional fabrication. It's something that a person does. It's an action. There tends to be a felt sense to craving, and we often use perception to the feeling and identify it as "craving". But the same feeling can be described in terms of form and feeling-tone. So, for me, what makes craving "craving" and not something else is the "doing" function, the fabricating.

It's tricky because all of this stuff arises together. You don't really find craving without the other aggregates, the same way don't usually find perception without feeling-tone. The process isn't linear, and it's wicked fast.

Suffering, for me, is very complex. It's a feeling, but not a simple one. It's more of a condition.

EndInSight: "To give you a sense of my opinion, I consider "desire and passion" to be craving-clinging-becoming, and I think they are clearly experiential (although there are obvious behavioral tendencies attached to those experiences)."

It would seem that desire and passion are not just feelings, because they are outcome-based. There's a direction to them. There's no direction to feeling-tone. That's why the volitional aspect is so important to keep in mind.

Sorry if I'm a bit slow here, but I can't find a link to Jackson's essay that is being referenced.

thanks

"That's a tricky question. Let's look at craving: craving is, in part, an intentional fabrication. It's something that a person does. It's an action. There tends to be a felt sense to craving, and we often use perception to the feeling and identify it as "craving". But the same feeling can be described in terms of form and feeling-tone. So, for me, what makes craving "craving" and not something else is the "doing" function, the fabricating.

It's tricky because all of this stuff arises together. You don't really find craving without the other aggregates, the same way don't usually find perception without feeling-tone. The process isn't linear, and it's wicked fast.

Suffering, for me, is very complex. It's a feeling, but not a simple one. It's more of a condition."

I have previously claimed to be able to discern something, which I call "craving", which follows every experience of vedana in a lawlike way...even in the absence of the gross mental state that gets called "craving" in natural language.

I, personally, do not consider craving to be an intentional action, but an inevitable and constant rapid-fire reaction that the mind has to vedana. (As vedana are constantly being experienced, so is craving). I think the suttas agree with me (from vedana, conditioned by ignorance, arises craving). But, I believe what I do on the basis of personal experience, not on the basis of what the suttas say.

I could not describe craving in terms of anything else. For example, it is similar to vedana but a different class of experience. On the thread about compassion, I described an observation that no amount of jhanic pleasure (vedana) seems to be able to interfere with craving, in the moment it's experienced.

If you had a similar experience, would you consider changing your mind about this?

(cont)

Stepping away from the matter of what I think and what I claim, it would be good to know on what basis you have formed your opinion about craving.

"It would seem that desire and passion are not just feelings, because they are outcome-based. There's a direction to them. There's no direction to feeling-tone. That's why the volitional aspect is so important to keep in mind."

I agree that desire and passion have an experiential and a behavioral component.

It seems that you are identifying what you call the "volitional aspect" with the behavioral component. However, it seems to me that the behavioral component (the inclination to behave in a way conditioned by desire and passion) arises *as* desire and passion. That is to say, I see nothing volition in the process by which desire and passion are manufactured...they arise and pass as experiences, based on conditions (simple unthinking reactions of the mind to, I claim, vedana), and those experiences have attached behavioral tendencies.

Relating this to the goals of Buddhism, this is why I say that the point of Buddhism is to get rid of certain types of experiences...the experiences that are suffering.

EDIT: I will say that the kinds of desire and passion that arise are clearly dependent on past thinking and past behavior and so on, so there is cross-talk between volition and these experiences. However, insofar as the lawlike link between vedana and craving that I'm talking about is concerned, I see no volitional component in the way that I believe you mean "volition".

"Sorry if I'm a bit slow here, but I can't find a link to Jackson's essay that is being referenced.

thanks

"

Here you go:

kennethfolkdharma.wetpaint.com/page/The+...T+the+end+of+feeling

Thanks Jackson.

aaron

Thanks for the essay Jackson. It makes sense to me.

Those are great questions, End.

My use of the word 'volitional' may be unique to how it is usually used. Here's an example.

When someone learns to drive, there are a lot of things they have to consciously remember to do. You have to open the door, sit in the proper seat, shut the door. Put the appropriate key in the ignition. Make sure the car is in park. Turn the ignition in just the right way, for the right amount of time, to start the car. Put on the seat belt. Check the mirrors. Put one foot on the break. Put the car out of park and into drive or reverse (and remember which one!), etc., etc.

After a while, what was once very conscious and very intentional becomes less conscious and seemingly less intentional (more automatic or reflexive). Intentional actions become habits, and habits become reactive tendencies. Still, there is a difference between something purely reflexive and something moving from conscious/intentional to less-conscious/reactive.

My understanding is that craving is a reactive pattern, but that it's just like other reactive patterns that first start out as deliberate attempts at action toward a result. That part doesn't change. It's just an intention that you've done so many times you no longer think about it.

So, for me the line between reactive and intentional is blurred. And yes, this is not just a conceptual reality for me. I've gotten to the point where many new skillful habits are becoming more and more reflexive, to the point where they just happen without my really thinking about it. Come to think of it, I can hardly think of a time during the day when I'm not practicing mindfulness in some way. It just happens now. But that doesn't mean it isn't intentional'¦ at least not to me.

So yes, I maintain that craving is something we do, and can learn to not do. We can learn to do something else, until we don't need to do anything at all.

"Thanks for the essay Jackson. It makes sense to me."

You're welcome!