This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Water Bubbles; Simile of Five Aggregates (2 of 5): Feeling tones as Water Bubbles. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

Dharmette: The Simile of the Five Aggregates (2 of 5): Feeling tones as Water Bubbles; Guided Meditation: Water Bubbles - Ying Chen, 陈颖

The following talk was given by Ying Chen, 陈颖 at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on July 09, 2024. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Introduction

Good morning and good day to all of you from all around the world. I'm seeing it in the chat message.

Today, we're going to go into the second simile of the Five Aggregates¹, or five bundles, and the human process. Yesterday, we practiced with the first simile of this five-bundle, which is using the lump of foam on the river Ganges to liken the felt sense of this embodied feeling, material form.

Today, we're going to use yet another simile that's also used to illustrate some embodied aspect of being human. This second aspect, the Pali term is Vedanā². Many of you may have heard of this, and this term sometimes gets translated as "feelings" or "feeling tones." In Satipaṭṭhāna³, this is the second aspect that's often being practiced with.

Often when we're speaking about feeling tones, we may be referring to a whole spectrum from unpleasant to neutral to pleasant feelings. They're not like black and white lines drawn, but it's really a spectrum. There is a whole spectrum from being extremely unpleasant and painful all the way to just heavenly pleasantness. It can happen both in the embodied way and also in a way that may be related to a mental being in some way.

I was looking up the Pali dictionary for this term; sometimes the translation of Vedanā is just "sensations," so it may be included here too. The sutta⁴ described this feeling tone, feelings or feeling tones, as if they are the autumn rain in India that hits the puddles and makes water bubbles pop up because of the contact of the rain with water. The water bubbles pop up and burst away. It's quite visual again, and we'll practice with it. I'll offer some more words when we switch to the Dharmette. Again, if you'd like to stay in your meditative bubble, please do so even as we're transitioning to the Dharmette part later.

So here we go, let's practice.

Guided Meditation: Water Bubbles

Maybe taking a few long, deep breaths. As you breathe out, arriving here and now, as if you're entering into the temple of this body, mind, and heart.

Arriving with a sound, arriving with a breath, entering into the posture you're in.

A sense of reverence may come in, maybe a sense of safety, entering into this meditative bubble, kind of a protection of our heart and mind.

Allow mindful awareness to be on the foreground, front and center. There may be heartfulness here too. Whatever the word "heartfulness" might mean for you, you don't have to think about it. There may just be a kind of a bodily response to it.

Being mindful one moment, and another, and yet another. The momentary mindfulness can form a chain of mindfulness. Maybe there is a sense of being more and more present. At some point, the continuity of Sati⁵ may be strong enough such that we feel more available, available to the lived experience here and now, and the momentary experiences are available to us.

There is a sense maybe, of being more and more rooted, stabilizing in mindfulness. The felt sense of breathing may become fuller or more fully registered, received.

Allow the mindfulness to expand throughout the body from inside or all around. As you breathe, the breath enlivens the body. A sense of aliveness may come forth, as if you're melting into the felt sense of dancing sensations in the body: tingling, pulsing, vibrating, gentle expansion, contraction, rising and falling, rhythmic.

Experiencing this body from within itself, releasing concepts, ideas. Feeling and sensing quietly.

You may begin to notice feelings, feeling tones. Maybe a pervasive kind of pleasant sensations, like a light drizzle of rain hitting a peaceful lake, making tiny water bubbles on the surface of the lake. Maybe bubbly, pleasant sensations. Or maybe there are big raindrops hitting the surface of the lake, where the big water bubbles burst up, like an occasional sharp, unpleasant feeling.

Resting in the felt sense, in the sea of sensations. A spectrum of pleasant and unpleasant may shift and change, just like the raindrops hitting the surface of the lake or the puddle may change the shapes, the intensity of the water bubbles.

As you stay connected with the immediacy of the felt sense of your experience, it can highlight how the mind might react, where the likes and dislikes, clinging, aversion, judging, and fixing are. You can know these are extra.

In a minute, I'll end the meditation with the sound of a bell, but if you like to stay in the meditative bubble, please feel free to do so.

Dharmette: The Simile of the Five Aggregates (2 of 5): Feeling tones as Water Bubbles

I'd like to read you this part of the simile from the sutta:

Suppose, practitioners, that in the autumn when it's raining and the big raindrops are falling, a water bubble arises and it bursts on the surface of the water. A person with good sight would inspect it, ponder it, and carefully investigate it. And it would appear to them to be void, hollow, insubstantial. For what substance would there be in a water bubble?

So too, practitioners, whatever kind of a feeling there is, whether past, future, or present, internal or external, gross or subtle, inferior or superior, far or near, a practitioner inspects it, ponders it, and carefully investigates it. And it would appear to them to be void, hollow, insubstantial. For what substance would there be in feeling tones?

As we were meditating, I was inviting us to imagine that maybe in the fall, the monsoon season in some parts of India, there is this kind of rain—sometimes an ongoing drizzle, or sometimes this kind of periodic pouring rain with gaps in between. And sometimes maybe it's sparingly for a while, with big raindrops hitting the ground, and the water bubbles arise out of all the contact of raindrops on the surface of a water, and they burst away. The Buddha likened this to feeling tones emerging out of the contact with the body, and sometimes even the mind.

Sometimes this may feel pleasant. Maybe on a hot day when the cool raindrops are falling, making contact with the skin, face, neck—that's a kind of pleasant feeling, pleasant sensations that can emerge. And just like the water bubbles that quickly make contact, they arise and pass away.

In the meditation, I was having somewhat of more quiet, pleasant sensations in my body, very energetic and pleasant. I felt like this pervasive layer of thin water bubbles on the surface of the lake. At other times, if there may be a prolonged, intense or mild unpleasant sensation, that can also feel like rain, maybe a bigger, non-stop raindrop hitting a water surface, and the water bubbles are a kind of a pervasive sense of unpleasantness. They may be harder to tease apart.

Yet other times, the water bubbles may feel distinct. This kind of pleasant sensation may be more sparkly, or unpleasant sensations may be more sparkly, kind of like occasionally you have this sharp ping happen in certain parts of the body, but it just comes and goes like this big water bubble that gets formed and pops away, and they are distinct. So there are all the flavors of feeling tone that can emerge in us.

The Buddha used this simile of water bubbles, pointing at the fact that all of these feeling tones, the Vedanā in us, they come and go. Whether they feel pervasive or whether they feel sparkly, one moment at a time, yet they're all bursting away in one way or another. This is the way that the Buddha was pointing, I feel, to how we're experiencing it in our own felt sense. It's quite immediate.

Yet often, when we're sitting in our meditation, what we may also observe is when there are pleasant and unpleasant feeling tones arising, often there are habitual tendencies, reactivities that arise immediately with them as well. With the unpleasant, we may have a sense of not liking it, or we want to push it away. We have a certain kind of aversion to it. Or even worse, when the unpleasantness doesn't go away, we can blame ourselves, we can shame ourselves, and we can try very hard to fix it. When the pleasant sensations come, we can try to hang on to them, and when they go away, we really want to linger and get them back.

But this image of water bubbles—we can't really grasp at bursting water bubbles, right? That's very vivid to illustrate this aspect of human experiences. In their own nature, they're not graspable, they're not clingable. And yet the reactivity can feel like it wants to grasp at something that is actually inherently not graspable.

I also like to point out that this doesn't mean somehow that there is no appropriate response to our feeling tones, to our Vedanā. For example, often there is a lot of pain in the body, maybe unbearable pain. The invitation is not just to say, "we're not going to be able to do anything," but rather, when we're staying with our experience in an immediate way, we're not covered by the layers of reactivities in our mind. There is more room, resource, and space for us to tune in to what may be needed here, what is the skillful response that can emerge and become available to us. There is a deeper kind of embodied intelligence that may be available, that is much more intuitive and much more immediate. So when we're not tuned in, this kind of immediate, emergent, intuitive kind of intelligence or response doesn't have a chance because we're so often caught by how we want to fix things. We don't allow this deeper kind of care and wise response to come forth.

So when we're staying attuned to our immediate experience, those wiser and more compassionate aspects of our being become more available to us. That's also the nature of this human body and human mind too. We're not just somehow believing that we need to just bear with the pain. Sometimes that may be appropriate, and other times there may be wise, compassionate responses that can come forth.

Similarly, in relationship to the pleasant sensations and pleasant states of being, so often the habit tendencies are to linger in it, "you know, I want to linger in this again and again, I want to hang on to it." And when we don't get it, we get very frustrated. I remember in the past when I did self-retreat at home, sometimes I would be in a rather quiet, sweet kind of a state of being, but then all of a sudden it occurred to me, "Oh, it's time for me to go pick up my son from school." And often I would notice this momentary aversion coming up, "Oh, I don't want to let go of this." It took me a while to notice this momentary aversion that comes, and gradually learning to let go of this, saying, "Ah, this experience is situational. It's a lot more important for us to learn to let go of these different forms of clinging and aversion than trying to hang on to the pleasant experience."

So these are the teachings on the water bubbles from the rain. My invitation is for today, as you go about your day, maybe allow this simile to come alive in you. Enjoy the rest of the day. We'll see you tomorrow.