This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Mirage; The Similes of the Five Aggregates (3 of 5): Perceptions as Mirage. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

Guided Meditation: Mirage; Dharmette: The Simile of the Five Aggregates (3 of 5);Perceptions as Mirage - Ying Chen, 陈颖

The following talk was given by Ying Chen, 陈颖 at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on July 10, 2024. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Introduction

Good to be with you all again on this Wednesday morning for me here in California. So good to be with you all.

This week, we are going to continue this journey of exploring the similes of the Five Aggregates, or five bundles. Today, we include the exploration of the third simile, which the Buddha used: the mirage that arises in the heat of the noon in the summer. This shimmering mirage can emerge, and it's used to liken our perceptions. Saññā¹ is the Pali term that we often use to describe this. And so our perceptions, Saññā, is like this high-noon, shimmering mirage.

I found this really, really evocative, and so we are going to practice with this and discover what it feels like for us, this perception. There are many words that may be capturing this meaning of Saññā. Perception is one, and there's also perceiving, conception, recognition, name, concepts, impressions, symbols; all of this can be a way to capture this aspect of ourselves that's able to perceive things. It's like a shimmering mirage in the high noon in the hot season.

So let's practice, and then we'll explore this a little bit in the dharmette. I'm going to start with the sound of a bell.

Guided Meditation: Mirage

Come into a meditative posture.

There is often for me a sense of coming home to this body, mind, and heart. What is a sense for you at this moment, coming into your meditative space?

Maybe you're feeling a kind of energetic settling downwards or settling back. Allow yourself to ease into this moment now and ease into this space here.

Mindful and heartful, there is often a kind of a tenderness that arises in my heart, even the sense of a sacredness of coming home to this present moment. The mind may still want to think about the future, the past. It's got plans to do. Let them be the floating clouds.

We are dropping into the felt sense right here and now, sensing the body sitting, lying down, whatever the posture you may be taking.

As you connect deeper with the present moment, there may be a sense of mindful awareness that becomes stable, steady. You may feel more available to the moments, or the moments are more available to you. The movements of the breath may register more fully. You may feel aliveness and a kind of a vitality as you breathe, or you may feel as you breathe the whole body is animated, enlivened. Different kinds of sensations may become visible, felt, or obvious.

Sensations have a kind of buzz in the body, maybe a kind of underlying humming. You may notice we are already perceiving our experiences.

Allow the mindful awareness to expand, receiving the whole energetic field of the body, or maybe even beyond the boundaries of the body. You may notice the perceptions arise as the experience happens, noticing the sensations feel like soap bubbles, or the water bubbles of the rain. Yet the perceptions are ephemeral, like the shimmering mirage of the high noon in the hot season.

You may have images, words, that emerge as your experience happens, and then they fade away.

Sometimes the mind can get excited about the images, the perceptions that arise, and you gently invite yourself to stay connected with the felt sense, without pushing away anything or being pulled into anything.

Notice how the mind can get involved based on the perceiving mirage in the mind. It can start telling stories, start analyzing, criticizing, blaming. It's just a perception. It comes and goes as we experience something in the felt sense.

It's quiet here. And when it's quiet, maybe you can drop in below the surface level of the activity of the mind, maybe even below the perceiving impressions. Trusting the immediacy of your felt sense experience. They don't need words or images to justify their presence.

Peaceful, nourishing silence within.

In a moment, I will ring the bell to end the sit. Again, the invitation is to stay in your meditative bubble, if you like, and I'll begin the dharmette by reading the simile from the sutta. Allow the words to drop into the depth of your being, like stones settling in a quiet, peaceful lake. Let whatever touches you have its own effect; otherwise, they can just settle down to the bottom of the lake.

Dharmette: The Simile of the Five Aggregates (3 of 5);Perceptions as Mirage

Suppose, practitioners, that in the last month of the hot seasons, at high noon, a shimmering mirage appears. A person with good sight would inspect it, ponder it, and carefully investigate it. And it would appear to them to be void, hollow, and insubstantial. For what substance would there be in a mirage?

So too, practitioners, whatever kind of a perception 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 perception?

As I was reflecting at the beginning of the meditation, there are many translations for this word Saññā: perceiving, conception, name, concept, impressions, symbols, signs, etc. It's a miraculous function of the human mind that is able to perceive something and give it a label. You hear something outside, "Oh, that's a bird singing." Or you smell something, "Oh, that's jasmine flowers." We can perceive, and this is a wonderful capacity we all have, maybe based on lived memories and past imprints that we know in our system.

Yet, when we're not careful and present with what's happening in this process, our usual relationship with perception can become rather tricky. We're often very quick to shortchange the momentary perceptions as something much more solid and conclusive, as if they are the truth. For example, sometimes around me, maybe a little further out, there may be a kind of a buzzing sound. It could be a leaf blower, or it could also be some sort of construction that's going on. The immediate perception is a kind of low buzzing sound in my environment. But the mind can leap into a mirage: "Oh, that must be the leaf blower that happens at 7:00 a.m. in the morning. Why would they have to do that right in the middle of my meditation?" You can see how this mirage and the movies start to get created in our mind, whereas the reality of what is happening in the experience is just that we're perceiving a kind of loud sound in the environment. And I don't actually know what exactly it is, but the mind can leap into a kind of conclusion, or truth, or a kind of reality.

Now, I could be right. This is the even more complicated part of the perception apparatus. If I did find out that I was right, we can reinforce our belief and harden our perceptions that were already there. "Look at me, I got it right! Yes, it's absolutely a leaf blower that shouldn't have happened this morning at this time." This is how the perception becomes a clinging perception. The clinging and existing is infused into the immediacy of our experience when we're not attuned to stay with our direct experience.

Often, when our perceptions about something don't agree amongst a group of people, that can be a big fight about what the reality is. This is often how conflict happens. People perceive things differently, but they get hardened into reality, conclusions, and beliefs, and that leads to a kind of bumpiness against each other. Because our perceptions are not necessarily the same—they're just perceptions—yet we take a big leap. That's the danger of this clinging aggregate of perception.

The reality of our perceptions is that they are rather ephemeral, as the simile is pointing to. They're a kind of shimmering mirage in the hot season at high noon. They feel real, but the reality is it emerges in some form, shape, and some texture, and it fades away when the conditions change. When the weather cools, it goes away.

I remember once on a retreat I went on, I had a sequence of experiences and I was perceiving it in a certain way. Then I went to report to my teacher about my experience, and I described it to him with great confidence. I said, "This must be what I thought it was." And my teacher looked at me and said, "Oh, that's just one way to see it." Just at that moment, the mirage burst. I realized I was making it much more solid and much more conclusive about the ephemeral perceptions that were created based on my experience. While the reality is that there may be many ways that the experience could be perceived, and they're already gone, they're no longer there. I can't really be very certain what it was exactly. That was a really very useful teaching and learning moment for me.

Now, I want to speak a little about another aspect of perception. Sometimes this teaching about perception being a mirage can be interpreted as if somehow our perceptions are never valid. I want to just point out that itself is also a perception. Perceiving is a very important function of the human mind and human beings. We count on this part of our function to work well enough for us to go about living our lives without making a total chaos, right? We're counting on us being able to perceive white rice as white rice and brown rice as brown rice. We're counting on our perceptions so we can pick up the right kid from school, not someone else's kid. That's very important.

What the teaching is pointing to is how we and our relationship with this aspect of our function can get stuck. The stuckness, the clinging, the existence, the belief, and the conclusiveness that we have about our perceptions is what leads to Dukkha², or stress. You may have a perception that someone is angry right now, and that's momentary, and that may be very much true. But we can build upon that perception to make a bigger conclusion that, "Wow, this person is really an angry person." Now that's more than a big mirage; that's a big conclusion. The person got boxed in as an angry person. What happens is now it's very difficult to see this person in other ways but being an angry person.

That's what this teaching is pointing to: that there is Dukkha in the clinging of the perception, the clinging aggregate of perception. So we're learning to discern these clinging forces that are operating to allow us, little by little, to let go of the clinging, to allow the ephemeral perceptions to just be what they are.

That's the teaching on the simile of the mirage as a perception. I invite you to have fun and enjoy and maybe be humorous about your perceptions in the rest of the day, practicing with this or exploring this. We'll continue tomorrow. Thank you everyone for being here. Have a wonderful rest of the day.