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The Mind of Freedom (1 of 3) - Andrea Fella

The following talk was given by Andrea Fella at The Sati Center in Redwood City, CA on September 13, 2024. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

The Mind of Freedom (1 of 3)

Introduction

Welcome, everyone. I'm happy to be here with you, reflecting on these suttas¹ that are particularly alive for me. I've been teaching about them, especially in the last few years, and they are very resonant suttas for me.

I'm curious, when you received the Zoom link, did you receive PDF copies of the suttas that we'll be working with? A few of you are nodding. Okay, great. Some of you had expressed an interest in getting them in advance. I was not expecting you to read them in advance, but some of you had expressed that interest.

The direction or the movement in this exploration that we'll be doing with these three suttas is to explore a teaching from the Buddha where he basically describes what it's like to be in his mind. It's one of the few descriptions of the Buddha offering a description of his own experience, or how an enlightened being experiences the world—or actually, more accurately, doesn't experience, because the framing of that sutta is largely in the negative.

So that's the direction we're headed: to explore that teaching, that sutta called the Kalakarama Sutta. I was first introduced to this sutta through a lovely little book called The Magic of the Mind by Bhikkhu Nanananda². It's a lovely reviewing of that sutta and a whole bunch of commentary by his own thinking about it, and it was just so interesting and inspiring to me. I've revisited it over and over again.

I found that that particular teaching is fairly dense and a little bit opaque. What I found for myself is that a couple of other teachings in the suttas can help us to understand that teaching a little bit more. The first teaching that can help us with that is called the Honeyball Sutta³. Many of you may have heard pieces of that teaching in the past; it's a very common, popular teaching. That one is the opposite side of the coin, because in the Kalakarama Sutta, the Buddha describes his own experience, what his experience is like, the mind of freedom. In the Honeyball Sutta, one of the key aspects of that teaching is describing how we usually relate to experience, how our minds usually get involved in their experience.

The difference between those two is essentially the non-involvement of the processes of craving, clinging, and selfing in the mind of a Buddha, and the processes of craving, clinging, and selfing in our habitual reactivity, our habitual way of meeting the world. So there are these two kind of bookending teachings: one that describes how minds work, and this one that describes how an awakened being's mind works.

Then the teaching in the middle that I'd like to point to is a practice teaching, the Bahiya Sutta⁴, which many of you have also possibly heard before. It describes a way of exploring experience, a very direct meeting of experience that helps us to begin to see the involvement of those processes that get in the way of freedom.

So we'll kind of go in that arc: from the Honeyball Sutta this week primarily, to the Bahiya Sutta next week, and the Kalakarama Sutta the third week. There'll be a little bit of weaving back and forth to point to some of the teachings from previous weeks, but primarily it'll be one sutta a week. We're not going to explore these suttas line by line. I would like to mostly focus on some key teachings from each of those suttas, rather than trying to do an exhaustive, line-by-line study that would take quite a bit of time. I want to kind of focus in on some of the key teachings that I found really useful, not only in terms of understanding how my mind works, but in terms of seeing things in practice. Because I'm very practical; I like to understand how the teachings that are in the suttas help me to understand my mind. So that's some of the emphasis that I'll offer here too.

The Honeyball Sutta (Madhupiṇḍika Sutta)

So, the Honeyball Sutta. In this teaching, the Buddha is wandering for alms and then goes to sit in a wood for meditation. This person, Dandapani⁵, comes. And Dandapani, as is seen in this little exchange, is kind of an arrogant guy. He carries this walking stick, and the commentaries say that he didn't need a walking stick; he just liked to carry it, and it was gold-plated. I don't know where they got all this detail, but anyway, it's a little bit of a showpiece for him, this stick.

In asking a question to the Buddha, it says: "Dandapani the Sakyan, while walking and wandering for exercise, went to the Great Wood... he went to the Blessed One and exchanged greetings with him. When this courteous and amiable talk was finished, he stood at one side leaning on his stick and asked the Blessed One, 'What does the recluse assert? What does he proclaim?'" This whole way of meeting the Buddha—that he's standing, leaning on his stick, not sitting down, that he calls him "the recluse"—the whole exchange here shows arrogance and lack of respect.

The response of the Buddha here is really pithy and kind of convoluted, hard to understand. Here's the response of the Buddha: "Friend, I assert and proclaim my teaching in such a way that one does not quarrel with anyone in the world with its gods, its Maras⁶, and its Brahmas⁷, in this generation with its recluses and brahmins⁸, its princes and its people; in such a way that perceptions no more underlie that brahmin who abides detached from sensual pleasures, without perplexity, shorn of worry, free from craving for any kind of being."

So that fairly pithy teaching does have some very deep meaning, and we'll come back to this, probably at the beginning of next week. But this is what he offered Dandapani, maybe because he was kind of meeting him in his arrogance. Dandapani basically expressed confusion, wagged his tongue, shook his head, raised his eyebrows, and then departed leaning on his stick. He didn't even bother to ask the Buddha a question. It's like, "Okay, whatever," and kind of walked away.

Later in the evening, the Buddha was talking to his monks and told them that he had met Dandapani and what he had said to him. The monks are equally confused. They basically ask him, "Well, what does this mean?" So the Buddha responds to them with this teaching: "Bhikkhus, as to the source through which perceptions and notions born of mental proliferation beset a person, if nothing is found there to delight in, welcome, and hold to, this is the end of the underlying tendency to lust, of the underlying tendency to aversion, of the underlying tendency to views... doubt... conceit... desire for being... and ignorance. This is the end of resorting to rods and weapons, of quarrels, brawls, disputes, recrimination, malicious words, and false speech. Here these evil, unwholesome states cease without remainder."

That too is pretty pithy, especially this sentence: "As to the source through which perceptions and notions born of mental proliferation beset a person." That sentence is hard to unpack. What does that even mean? And so the Buddha departs, and the monks are left kind of scratching their heads about that one. Then they ask another teacher, another monk, Maha Kaccana⁹, "This is what the Buddha said. Can you elaborate on this?" That teacher said, "You know, you should have asked the Buddha when he was here because he would do a better job of elaborating than I would. But yes, I will elaborate for you in my understanding."

So Maha Kaccana says, "I understand the detailed meaning to be as follows." This section is what really describes our usual way of dealing with the world. It's an alternative description; there are a number of descriptions in the suttas that describe how our minds get caught by craving and clinging, how our minds are stuck in selfing. There are teachings on dependent origination¹⁰, the five aggregates¹¹, the six sense bases¹², and conditionality. There's a lot of teachings that describe how craving comes to be, and this is one of them. It actually interweaves the teachings on the six sense bases, the five aggregates, and conditionality together. There's even a piece of dependent origination in here.

So I'll read just a little bit of this, and then we'll unpack that piece. This is Maha Kaccana speaking: "Dependent on the eye and forms, eye-consciousness arises. The meeting of the three is contact. With contact as condition, there is feeling. What one feels, that one perceives. What one perceives, that one thinks about. What one thinks about, that one mentally proliferates." He then goes through this with respect to the other sense bases: dependent on the ear and sounds, the tongue and flavors, the body and tangibles, the mind and mind-objects. He goes through this structure of how we typically meet experience with respect to every sense base.

Let's go into this a little bit more. "Dependent on the eye and forms, eye-consciousness arises." We have an eye; this is one of the six sense bases. There's light waves, there's objects in the world, and there's a meeting between the object—the light rays from the object—and the eye. The eye-consciousness is the seeing, actually. So we could say, dependent on the eye and forms, there is seeing.

"The meeting of these three is contact." There's an impingement, a physical meeting. We know this from science; I don't know that the Buddha knew this, but the photons actually physically impinge on the retina. So there's actual contact. It's the same with smell, sound, taste, touch. There's that contact. For instance, this shirt is an object and it's contacting the body, and there's sensation there. There's contact. That's just the simple way that our apparatus works.

"With contact as condition, there is feeling." When there's a contact of a sense impression, there is a feeling tone. This is the teaching on vedanā¹³, of the sense impressions being either pleasant, unpleasant, or neither pleasant nor unpleasant. Every sense contact has a feeling tone; it's got one of these three flavors to it. Some of you may recognize some of this here from the teaching on dependent origination, which has a section where the six sense bases condition contact, and contact conditions feeling. This is a piece of the chain of dependent origination. This is a conditioned process that is just quite natural.

On Perception

The next thing that happens, and this is said to arise simultaneously with feeling, is a perception of what the experience is. This too is just a very normal part of our sense apparatus. We see something—so there's the eye and a form, some object. There's the meeting, the contact, there's a feeling, and there's a recognition. Perception is a recognition of essentially what that experience is. So right now, looking across my room, there's a picture on my wall. That "picture" is a perception. Perception is essentially the recognition of what has been seen, heard, felt, sensed. It's the mind kind of going into its memory banks and recognizing, "Oh, this is what this experience is." This is a mental process.

So we perceive, we recognize what experience is happening, and then, based on perception, here's the next piece of this teaching: "What one perceives, that one thinks about." Now, this is what our minds do. This is where it kind of veers out of just the normal processes of our senses doing their job into our getting involved. We start to think about things. For instance, I may be meditating, just experiencing things, and there's a bird sound that arises. Without awareness of what's going on, the thinking will probably come in. "Oh, what kind of a bird is that? Oh, maybe that's an owl," or something like that. That's kind of rudimentary thinking, almost associated with the perception.

And then the next piece is, "What one thinks about, that one mentally proliferates." Now, often this mental proliferation is understood as kind of taking off in the thoughts. "Oh, it's an owl. I wonder what kind of an owl it is. Maybe it's that kind of an owl I saw in Santa Cruz the other day. I wonder if there's one of those here." And there we've gone. We've kind of just launched into mental proliferation.

I want to come back and look at perception because that original teaching that the Buddha gave highlighted this phrase: "as to the source through which perceptions and notions born of mental proliferation beset one." So, two words in that teaching of the Buddha are of particular interest: perception and mental proliferation. I'm going to take some time to explore those two words.

First, we'll talk a little bit about perception. Perception is one of the processes of our mind. It's understood to be a mental process, related to recognition—how we recognize experience in the world. So there's the eye and the form, and the meeting of those. What sight is is pretty much form and color. Our minds recognize those various shapes of form and color and identify them based on history, on our conditioning, based on prior experience. We recognize what's around us as couch, table, cushion, bell, lamp, picture, wall. We recognize all of that because of conditioning, because of learning. Our minds have learned these shapes are these things. This perceptual process is a kind of a process of our minds seeing something come in and the process of perception kind of goes into our memory, into the filing cabinet, asking, "What is the best match for this experience?" "Oh, couch."

We can watch this perceptual process at work. On one retreat, my mind was quite quiet, and I could see kind of layers of perception happening. I turned and just glanced over at something to my left, and I watched the mind identify the object. It went in like three clicks. The first thing it recognized was that it was green. The next thing it recognized was that there were jagged edges. And then it recognized that it was a leaf. So the perceptual process kind of built on itself.

We also notice that perception makes mistakes. I had an experience of this recently. For the last many months, there was a new sound outside at night, all night long, a kind of a very repetitive, harsh sound. I took my bird identifier out there, and it did not identify a bird. I looked around, wondering what this could be, and I landed on frogs. I found a tree frog sound on the computer that kind of sounded like this. It's like, okay, this is some weird new kind of tree frog. Mostly I like tree frogs, but this was a very unpleasant sound, and it was going on for weeks. I started having these ideas about tree frogs. There's a creek nearby, and I had this idea, "You know, I've never heard this sound before. There are tree frogs invading our neighborhood and they're taking over." That was kind of bothering my mind a little bit.

So I went on for weeks believing this was tree frogs. Then I was in Santa Cruz, and I heard the same sound. I turned to my friend and I said, "Gosh, this is the same sound I hear at home. I'm pretty sure this is tree frogs. Are the tree frogs coming in everywhere in California?" And she said to me, "Somebody told me that was an owl." And I thought, "Okay." Then we started seeing owls flying around, and it was pretty clear that the sounds were coming from the owl. So my perception of the sounds shifted.

No longer was my neighborhood being taken over by tree frogs. Now there were cute barn owls in the tree about 50 feet from my window. I looked at this because the sound was still unpleasant, but it was nowhere near as unpleasant. I could fall asleep to the sound of these without waking up and being disturbed. And as I thought about it, I thought, "What is the difference?" It was the belief that there were tree frogs invading the neighborhood that was the problem. That was mental proliferation. The belief, the idea that tree frogs were invading the neighborhood. When the idea was replaced with, "There are barn owls, and these are baby barn owls asking for food"—because I did all this research then on barn owls, and they cry all night long waiting for Mom and Dad to bring food to them—that sound was baby barn owls.

This perceptual process makes mistakes, and it makes mistakes a lot. When we don't notice perception, we do tend to leap off of it, as this teaching describes, to thinking and proliferation. But if we see it as perception, if we see it as recognition, then there's the possibility that we can know, okay, this is what's being perceived. This is my relationship to what's being perceived, and know that it's a construction of the mind.

Q&A

Question: When you were talking about perception happening automatically, I was kind of practicing it a bit. And then I realized there were two parts to it. There's a perception that's silent, and then there's the word of what it is, and that follows afterwards. I realized that I could actually look and have a perception of something but not actually be thinking about the actual word name of what it is. I thought it was really interesting how I could look at my piano and without hearing the word "piano" in my head, there's that feeling of perception of it.

Answer: Yes, there can be that. Sometimes our perceptions do come with words, but they also can come more as a felt sense. You know, we might experience a perception, for instance... I was a dancer for a while, and you know, I could think about dancing, and I could watch somebody do something and feel it in my body. Then there's also kind of a visual; sometimes we recognize things from a visual thing without the words. So there's a recognition that can be quieter than the words. And sometimes I've seen that the words are where it actually starts to go into thinking. We shift from the perception to the thinking, but sometimes perception is a thought. So it's interesting.

Question: I've had experiences of states of consciousness where everything I saw was like shape and color, and that's it. And there was no recognition. It was like I was walking on an alien planet. I've been curious about that experience for a long time.

Answer: It's not accidental in that the conditions of the meditation created the conditions to see the experience in this way. I've experienced that too. Usually it's when there's more concentration, the mind is less in the world of concepts. There is perception because there's perception of form and color, but it's like that more bare, raw perception than the object. The mind has entered into the space where it's just seeing the bare information, and the recognition part, the identification or what the concept is, is not happening. It was like I could see a stop sign, for example, and I could feel when I started to read the stop sign and think "it's a stop sign," I could feel myself coming out of the state. So then I would stop doing that and just go back to the form and the color. It's fun to play with if you have that possibility.

Question: Practicing receptive awareness, I've been dealing with a lot of intrusive thoughts. What I started doing is, okay, I'm just going to call it a thought. Then I started to realize, oh, that's a story. The perception of the thought kind of immediately jumps to the story. It's like I don't have the chance to separate. It's been helpful to say, "Oh, that's just thinking that this is not happening," and all that. But then it's like, wow, look how interesting, it jumps to a story immediately.

Answer: This is also not-self. This is an example; we can't stop it, but we can begin to recognize it. We can't intentionally stop it. As Brook's description offers, there are times when the mind won't be going there, but it wasn't something she could do either, so much. It was what happened. And it happens when we get curious about these processes. That's actually some of the teaching for next week: what does it mean to just recognize, "Oh, story-making is happening"? So it jumps to story. If you can see that it is doing that, then you're seeing something of what the mind is doing. You're recognizing that thinking process, that story-making process, and that's valuable to see. And also that "I didn't ask for this, I didn't try to do this, it just happened." That's a teaching. That's wisdom being born. That's seeing not-self, that this is just processes unfolding. The more we can see that this is just processes unfolding, the less we tend to cling to trying to make things be a certain way, because we see it's just unfolding. It's just happening.

Question: I just wanted to express gratitude for your explanation and your stories. In the vein of anxiety and hypervigilance, I've been understanding that my mind is doing something, but the examples you gave with the rope and the snake, and the owl and the frog, it really provides a mechanism to identify and almost prevent hypervigilance that creates an exorbitant amount of anxiety and stress. So thanks, that's really cool.

Answer: I'm glad it's helpful. I think curiosity is a key—to be curious about what's happening in your mind. "Oh, thinking about something, thinking again, rethinking again." That kind of process of looping, and that's what we'll get to in the next piece, is to talk a little bit more about that looping piece. I think you'll see another layer of it in the next part of the teaching.

On Papancha (Mental Proliferation)

Let's go back to the sutta. We went through this part: "What one thinks about, that one mentally proliferates." So that's that word papancha¹⁴. I want to read the next piece because this is a kind of a loop: "With what one has mentally proliferated as the source, perceptions and notions born of mental proliferation beset a person with respect to past, future, and present forms cognizable through the eye."

One interpretation of the word papancha is proliferation of thought. That's kind of what was going on with me with the thinking it was tree frogs invading Mountain View. The mind was proliferating the idea, thinking about those thoughts, and getting disturbed by that idea. This is one interpretation of the word papancha, the word that is translated here as "mentally proliferates"—the mind running riot, lost in thought. We could call papancha "the story," to use Sandra's language, that it just explodes into a whole story. It can be interesting to be curious about that movement. We may not be able to stop it; in fact, often we can't. But we can be aware, "Wow, look at this. The mind is exploding in story. The mind is exploding in anxiety or frustration."

But my understanding of this word papancha is that it's much subtler than that. There's a place in the suttas where the ailment of papancha is described as being very close to fully liberated. So this ailment of this process of "pancha-ing" is understood to be very close to freedom, to non-clinging, to non-craving, to not-selfing. And freedom is a lot more than just not thinking a lot. We can go into states of not thinking through concentration, and that's not necessarily freedom; that's not necessarily wisdom.

So another understanding of this word papancha is the creation in the mind, or the belief—we could say the believing a perception to be real. To give another example, I was meditating in Burma and I was hearing a squealing noise regularly. That squealing noise was perceived as "pig." I was in a village kind of area, and I just thought somebody had a pig next door. Hearing this squealing noise over and over again every night around the same time, I began to think that not only was this a pig, but this was a pig in distress because it was being butchered. So my mind created the idea of pigs being butchered on the other side of the wall. Compassion for the pig, distress about the pig dying, all of that was happening. I knew that the idea that it was a pig being butchered was an idea; I could see that as a story. I wasn't just running amok with that. I could know, "Okay, there's that idea, and what's the effect of that idea? Compassion is the effect." So I was observing all of that.

Then one night, I was walking instead of meditating at that time of night, and I began seeing these bats flying around. The bats were squealing; the bats were what was making that noise. So that perception of "pig" was wrong. The interesting part was, when I saw that it was bats and not a pig, the thing that was so highlighted to me there was I knew the butchering idea was a fabrication. I did not know that the idea that it was a pig was completely made up in my mind. That was very humbling.

This whole experience, the belief that it's a pig, in that case, that was itself, in my understanding, a form of papancha because it was a kind of reification of the perception into a thing: "This is what it is." The idea of papancha is this kind of objectification or conceptualization—believing the concept to be what's actually happening.

Now, we can't live without perceptions and concepts. The description of being in the world with just form and color—it can be kind of hard to walk across a room when it's just form and color. So we need our concepts, we need our perceptions. What part of the process is problematic? It's a problem when we believe our perceptions to be what's actually happening. So there's a kind of a reification, a taking the concepts to be the reality. We're not seeing them as processes, as concepts, as constructs of the mind.

This process of objectification, my understanding is that it happens simultaneously with the sense of self. When there's an object, there is a subject. When there was a pig, there was a me, there was an "I" knowing the pig. So the process of papancha is very deeply entwined in this process of selfing. Our minds go through life creating this separation of "thing" and "me knowing a thing." This process, when we are taking our concepts to be reality, is where our further interaction with sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and touches are influenced by those prior views, beliefs, ideas, and perceptions.

The example of the pig is exactly this kind of loop that the sutta was pointing to. With what one has mentally proliferated as the source—so with that belief, "this is a pig being slaughtered"—perceptions and notions born of proliferation beset one. The next time I hear that sound, that belief that it's a pig being slaughtered gets applied to that sound more immediately, more immediately, more immediately. A pithy version of this teaching the Buddha said: "Whatever one frequently ponders, that becomes the inclination of the mind."

This process describes why we're in such a mess in our world. And the Buddha pointed to it in his pithy teaching: "...this is the end of resorting to rods and weapons, of quarrels, brawls, disputes, recrimination, malicious words, and false speech. Here these unwholesome states cease without remainder." The Buddha points to this process of separation, this division into self and other, and applying that division to how we are taking in experience as being the source of war, being the source of all the ills in our world.

So it's really worth beginning to understand this process. Again, we're not going to be able to turn it off, but what we can do is begin to see it. Like I saw, "I know this is a story, I don't know whether this is true." I could see this as something that was going on. And that, perhaps, also gave me the space to recognize that the sound coming from the bats was the same sound that I thought was a pig.