christina feldman - papañca - proliferation of thoughts
TRANSCRIPT
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Papañca – Proliferation of Thoughts
Christina Feldman
Talk given at the Insight Meditation Society
Barre, MA on July 22, 2009 http://www.dharmaseed.org/teacher/44/talk/6748/
Transcribed by Marcello Spinella
This evening I want to talk about a
process, which in Pali is called papañca. If
there’s any word you’re going to remember in
Pali and take with you from this retreat, this is
the one I’m going to recommend: papañca.
Let it roll off your tongue, sit in your mind.
So I’m going to give you a loose translation
of it which is a whole big mouthful. Papañca,
loosely translated, is ―the proliferation of
thoughts and mental events that generate
reactivity and views that cloud and distort our
capacity to see and understand the way things
actually are.‖ Did you get that? Anyhow, I’ll
explain as I go along.
Papañca, as the Buddha speaks about
it and as we experience it, is the source of
most of the agitation, restlessness, anxiety,
and unease that we experience in our hearts
and minds. It’s papañca that often leads us to
struggle with ourselves and others. Papañca is
certainly very much involved in obsession,
rumination, and preoccupation. Outwardly,
papañca has a very big role to play in the
generation of violence, war, greed,
consumerism, and of all of the –isms that
beset our world. Papañca is what is happening
inwardly when we find ourselves tormented
by an overfull mind. Papañca leads us to fall
into craving and hate, to fear about the future.
Papañca has much to do with the loops of
guilt that we can play and replay in our
minds. It’s part of what leads us to practice
avoidance. It’s what is happening when we’re
lost in fantasies, constructions, and stories
about ourselves and others. Papañca is what is
happening when we find ourselves replaying
the unfinished symphonies that we carry
through out lives. As we find ourselves once
more going around that familiar thought circle
that we have gone around a hundred or
thousand times before.
I’m going to read you something that
so well illustrates what papañca is. Now you
have to understand that this is a note written
by a yogi [a meditation practitioner], and
before I read this, I have to tell you that we
don’t save your notes to read in future dharma
talks. Please be assured of that. The yogi who
wrote this note recognized in retrospect that it
was such a masterpiece of papañca that when
I asked her if I could keep it and share it, she
gave me full permission.
This took place at a retreat I was
teaching in California, and I was actually
quite reassured to get this note after having
seen a naked yogi standing on a porch with a
bucket of water and a scrubbing brush. You
know, we are very tolerant on retreats but that
seemed to be pushing the limits a little. So
here it goes:
So I was taking a walk on one of the
paths. Think: city girl feeling proud about
being adventurous, and all was well until
the woods. A big black spider [see picture
on back], glommed onto my sweatshirt. I
began squealing--so much for noble
silence—and then started running. I
ditched the path and headed for the field
to get out of the woods. Unfortunately, I
thoroughly disturbed some roosting
turkeys and they started squawking, which
scared me. I ran back into the woods and
on to the path and picked up the pace.
Then it crossed my mind that I was sure to
be a mountain lions dinner, so I tried
walking, saying to myself, “Be mindful. Be
mindful.” But it was all too much so I
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said, “Screw mindfulness, screw the
mountain lions,” and I took off at a high
rate of speed-- for me anyway seeing as
how I quit smoking four days ago. My
lungs aren’t able to keep up with my legs.
As I was cruising past the dead stumps of
trees (homes of mountain lions???), I
spotted in passing the dreaded poison oak.
I am now convinced, since I was running,
squealing like an idiot and not paying
attention, that I am covered in poison oak
oil. I threw my clothes on the floor and
washed my face and hands. But I’m
worried. I saw the laundry soap in the
manager’s office but it didn’t seem to be
special poison oak soap. I didn’t see
anything poison oak-related. I did notice
that you have a wonderful supply of
Chinese herbs, though. Anyway, what do
you recommend I do, besides shutting up?
P.S. I woke up singing in my head “Thank
God I’m a Country Boy” by John Denver.
It was probably an omen from the
universe. I’m sticking to paved, open
roads.
P.S.S. [sic] Can poison oak get inside
your body? Because as soon as I changed
I went and ate lunch.
It is a masterpiece, and I’m sure we all
have our own masterpieces we could share if
we were brave enough. Now when we listen
to this note, and when I read this note, I just
smiled. It was even humorous for her. It was
humorous in retrospect, when she could see
what had happened, how a world had been
created through thought, and through anxiety,
that colored and distorted the capacity to see
things as they were, and to respond wisely in
the light of that scene. Now this particular
piece of papañca took place over an hour or
two. But in reality it can happen in seconds. It
happens, of course, countless times in a single
day. Think about the journey to lunch. Please
forgive me if I’m endlessly going on about
lunch, but it’s the most universal example on
a retreat and it’s not that I’m obsessed about
lunch. But think about the journey to lunch.
How does it begin? We hear the bell, and we
know the time. We’re sure of it. It’s not time
for walking. Just hearing the bell can provide
plenty of fuel for papañca to begin. How the
mind starts going:
“Gosh, the bell! I better get going, get to
the front of the line. What if the food runs
out? No I was on the front of the line
yesterday. I better not go to the front of
the line today because someone will
notice and think I’m very greedy. But that
means I have to postpone my lunch plans.
How am I going to fit both my nap and my
walk into my lunch break if I’m not on the
front of the line?” We pass the notice
board on the way to the line, still
undecided. “Oh, there are no notes for me
today, but Julie’s getting lots of notes. I
wonder if she’s getting a lot of extra
attention. Maybe she’s having a hard
time. I wonder if I’ll have a hard time on
this retreat. Maybe I should write her a
note of sympathy” Get in line. “Oh,
what’s for lunch? Oh no, not that again,
more of this vegetarian stuff.”
It just goes on and on. Does it sound
familiar at all? We get the picture. It’s this
kind of psychological and emotional
vandalism that we seem almost addicted to,
that we feel hopeless, sometimes, before. In
one of the discourses, the Buddha says that
the definition of a well-trained mind is a
person who thinks the thoughts they wish to
think, but does not think the thoughts they
don’t wish to think. Do you get the
implications of that, what that would look
like? Imagine that, to think the thoughts you
wish to think but don’t think the thoughts you
don’t wish to think?
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Now some papañca can feel pretty
pleasant. If we’ve got a lovely fantasy on the
go, really delicious daydreams, imagining
some future delightful event, we’re
embroidering it in our minds, proliferating
that. It can feel pretty pleasant. Some papañca
feels fairly neutral. It doesn’t have any
extreme emotional character. It’s kind of like
going through the day with this commentator
running in the background. There’s this
commentary that’s churning out.
Some of the papañca we find
ourselves lost in is pretty toxic. The judgment
loops we get in about ourselves and others,
the thoughts that go around and around,
solidify the truth of those judgments. We can
be lost in depression and our thoughts about
our worthiness, thoughts of despair and
hopelessness can spin round and round,
solidifying that sense of bleakness. We can be
anxious or phobic and the whole world is
assessed as being an invader or fearful and
generating endless thinking and then endless
action to try to protect ourselves from injury.
What I think is really important to see
is that even when papañca feels fairly benign
or even feels pretty pleasant, the habit of
papañca is not at all benign. Because it has no
conscience, and it’s not as if we can just
choose to proliferate about the present and
then choose not to proliferate about the
difficulties. The habit of papañca, that
tendency within us will be hijacked by
aversion, by craving, by conceit, by fear. The
Buddha once said that there is no one thing
that can do us more harm than an untrained
mind, and there is no one thing that can be a
greater friend, a greater ally, than a well-
trained mind.
Much of papañca, of course, is an
internal activity. It’s a psychological and
emotional activity. But then it, of course, does
so much govern, direct, and shade our speech,
our actions, our choices, and our
relationships.
It is important to see that papañca, can
be individual, but it can also be collective.
Collective papañca is even more toxic than
individual papañca. Gossip is the classic
example of that. We don’t like someone, we
find someone who also doesn’t like the same
person and we feel much more reassured
reaffirmed in our dislike and our views and
the righteousness of it if we can generate the
story together. We find the reassurance of
views through collective papañca.
Some of you are old enough to
remember the days when communism was
going to take over the world. We fought the
Vietnam War over it. It was a whole
collective papañca, wasn’t it? Communists
were coming. It was going to be a domino
effect. Pretty soon the whole world was going
to be overtaken by communists. We went to
war. Thousands of people lost their lives, lost
their homes. And who’s our favorite trading
partner now? It’s like, ―Communism, well
that’s actually not a problem anymore.‖
We’re even taking it off the immigration
form. You don’t have to declare anymore
coming in to America if you’ve ever been a
communist. That’s great news. Until this year
you had to. But it’s okay now. Think about
the papañca that was produced, think about
sexism, racism, homophobia, all of the –isms
which are really a sharing of collective
papañca.
When we see this, we surely see the
importance of understanding how the process
of papañca, in a way, is a process of building
our world. It’s building the world that we
believe in, share, and act in. Surely, then, we
see the deep importance of taking care of the
quality of our own hearts and minds, because
no one can do that for us. The Buddha once
said that this mind, this body, it does the
bidding of the skillful and the unskillful. This
mind, this body, it does the bidding of the
wholesome and the unwholesome. But used
well, used wisely, this body, this mind is a
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raft to freedom. But used unwisely, this body,
this mind ties us to suffering.
So papañca is not something that is
predetermined. The emotional, the
psychological storms that we can find
ourselves in do not arise ready-made. It is a
process. It’s a process that can be understood.
It’s a process that can be liberated. It’s almost
as if this teaching and this path is really
inviting us to imagine a mind that is a
papañca-free zone, a mind that is not prone to
papañca, and to imagine that is a very real
possibility for all of us.
Papañca is an emotional,
psychological habit of constructing, of
fabricating, of obsessing and ruminating. In
this tradition it’s usually called the habit of
dwelling. But of course, the habit of dwelling
really persists, like all other habits, in the
absence of mindfulness. One of the very
direct effects of mindfulness is to loosen and
to dissolve habit, and in the end to actually
uproot the habit of dwelling.
I’m going to give you some formulas
in this talk, but don’t feel like you have to
grab hold of them. I really hope that I’m able
to illustrate these formulas, that at first might
sound a little alien, with some very specific
examples. And I’ll probably go back to lunch.
The Buddha put forward this simple but
profound formula: dependent upon contact
there is feeling, that what we feel we
perceive, that what we perceive we think
about, that what we think about may
manufacture and proliferate about, that what
we frequently think about and dwell upon
becomes the shape of our mind. This is the
basic formula of papañca. Contact, feeling,
perception, with all of it’s associations from
the past, the liking, the disliking, the dwelling,
the dwelling that turns into conclusions, into
images, into beliefs about ourselves and
others.
The process sounds very complex and
it is true that it happens incredibly quickly.
But the work of our practice is to slow the
process down. That’s what we’re doing with
the practice of mindfulness, we’re slowing
this internal process down so we can see it, so
that we can understand it, so we can
investigate it and liberate it.
So here comes a simple example (and
we’re back at lunch): You’re walking through
the dining room in the morning when lunch is
being cooked. And in that walk to the dining
room we have all the raw ingredients for
papañca. First of all, is what I described as
contact. What is contact? It is meeting of the
sense door, the sensory information, and the
sensing. In this case it’s the nose, the smell,
and the smelling. Those three meeting
together is called contact. As that contact
happens, feeling and perception arise pretty
much together. First of all we identify the
smell. It’s a perception. ―It’s garlic.‖
That’s still fairly neutral, and fairly
universal. Whether we feel that perception as
pleasant or unpleasant will depend quite a lot
on our memories and associations. So there’s
the perception of garlic, and then immediately
you can feel the surge of memory and
association coming in. ―I’m allergic to garlic.
I remember all the times I suffered from
garlic.‖ And away we go: ―Why do they
cook? A good meditation center wouldn’t
cook garlic. Life is unfair. Things always
happen to me. I can’t even go on a retreat
because they cook garlic.‖ You can feel how
it goes.
Another person walking through the
dining room with the same contact and the
same perception of garlic and they have an
entirely different background of association
and memory. ―Oh garlic! We’re having our
favorite food for lunch. It’s going to be Italian
food. I remember the last time I went to Italy
and I fell in love in an Italian restaurant. That
wonderful vacation and I got married, but
then I got divorced…‖ It started with the
same smell.
We can spend the rest of our day,
actually, in that loop, in one way or another.
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Now what would it be like to slow the process
down where the smell is just a smell and the
garlic is just the garlic? The solution to
papañca is not to hide ourselves away from
the world. This would be quite impossible.
And yet at the same time, papañca can feel
like a prison and we forget that we hold the
key in our hand. It really is a question of
whether we can transform the heart, transform
the mind, that can feel like such an adversary,
into a friend, a source of peace. As I
mentioned the other night, this teaching is not
about teaching us not to think. That would be
ridiculous, apart from anything else. It is
teaching us to think well, to think with
creativity, with simplicity. We can see the
problem, and I’m sure all of us who have a
mind can see the problem of being overtaken
by these storms, these tsunami of thinking, of
repetitive looping.
But what is the solution? First, as we
mentioned and stressed a lot here, we need to
be able to calm down, to be able to be mindful
of our mind. We need to cultivate a mind that
has a foundation of balance, steadiness, and
clarity. This is an ongoing practice that we’re
undertaking here. It really is. You can feel it
as a training that we’re learning to, again and
again, attend to just this moment. You
probably noticed that every time you come
back and somehow unhook from some of
those loops, you are in truth training yourself
in letting go. It’s kind of renunciation by
stealth. We’re sneaking it in. So we’re coming
back, over and over again, collecting and
gathering. What’s actually happening in that
process is that there’s a kind of inner fasting
rather than an inner feeding. So we’re
learning to do a little bit of inner fasting that
is really contributing to the health of our
hearts and minds. We’re learning about
restraint. This is also part of letting go of
papañca, stepping back not only from the
thought process, but also with mindfulness,
stepping back from some of the agitated
behavior that is born of papañca. You can see
if you’re in that loop about the garlic, how
you might immediately think, ―Oh I got to
write a note to the cook. I’m going to write an
essay to the board. I’m going to go to town
and get some other food.‖ You can feel the
wave of agitated behavior arising from the
agitated mind. This happens a lot in our life.
What we’re doing even with the practice of
mindfulness, in being mindful of the body, is
actually learning to undertake some restraint
instead of trying desperately to fix and to
modify once state after another, to avoid that
which we think is going to destroy us. We try
to calm the body. Sometimes we calm the
mind and that calms the body. Sometimes we
calm the body, and calming the body helps to
calm the mind. It is intentional. It’s a practice
and a cultivation. So instead of feeding the
habit of distractedness, we’re feeding and
nurturing the habit of non-distractedness, of
being present and being simply here. Then
when we do that, you can feel yourself
coming a little bit closer to that moment of
contact. When there is the smelling, there is
the hearing, seeing, touching, you can feel
yourself coming a little bit closer to that
moment of contact. Sometimes with
mindfulness, we learn that we have a choice,
which we can proliferate or we can learn to
simplify. Restraint at the sense doors is not
really culturally very praised. It’s not often
seen as being alluring or tempting prospect.
Instead we’re a little bit more encouraged to
have more sights, more sounds, more
sensations, more experience. But we see that
without practicing restraint, some restraint at
our sense doors, which we’re at the mercy of
papañca because we’re throwing so much fuel
on the fire. Or, if we don’t practice restraint,
we become a beggar at the sense doors,
pursuing our world where there’s just more
and more and more, almost as if we think that
more and more and more is going to be a
solution for papañca or unease. The Buddha
once said that our world is born of contact.
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Then he said that the wise seek to understand
contact and the foolish pursue it.
Just learning to be aware in the
practice of how our sense doors are really
being used moment to moment, because it’s a
cultivation of wise attention. Wise attention is
in this teaching, in this path, is described as
not grasping at the sense impression or the
associations with it. So, we hear a sound. ―Oh
yeah, it’s a track.‖ We don’t have to grasp at
the sense impression or the associations with
it. That is where papañca starts. When we go
past the notice board with wise attention, we
see just a note. With unwise attention we go
down a road of speculating, imaging, story
telling. We hear the sound that can be just a
sound and not the story about its past or about
its future. We don’t even need to go into the
territory of liking or disliking. It can just be a
sound. Learning how to develop a capacity to
embrace all things with wise attention, with
non clinging. It’s not just for our own well-
being. In so many ways there’s something so
ethical about this, because it’s about liberating
the world from our story about it, liberating
other people and our story about them, and
our likes and our dislikes and our demands
and our expectations.
So when we begin to calm down you
probably begin to sense a way in which
papañca is not all the same. It’s not all blanket
papañca. There are almost streams of papañca
that hold different flavors, different emotional
tones. These emotional tones within papañca
are very important to understand because the
emotional tones are the fuel that keeps the
papañca running. They keep us getting caught
in the cycle of thought and obsession. Really
seeing these emotional tones is the stuff of
insight.
So I’ll give you a list of the emotional
tones. First, there is craving-based papañca.
Craving based papañca is mostly the
unconscious projections through which we
invest objects, people, events with the
capacity to provide us with happiness, safety,
and security. That craving-based papañca is
the basis of expectation and demand, and then
of course often disappointment and
frustration. But it is the basis of the
expectation and demand that is directed
toward people and the world. It’s based upon
unfulfilled need, a sense of incompleteness, of
insufficiency. It’s called tanha papañca. ―I
must have. I need. I will be desolate if I don’t
get this--the new car, the new relationship, the
meditation experience, a second portion of
lunch. It has no conscience. ―I will be
desolate if I cannot have this because that is
the gatekeeper of my happiness. That holds
the intrinsic power to make me happy or safe,
and without it I’m incomplete. Then we build
stories about all of that.
The second kind of papañca is what is
called ditthi papañca, that stream of thinking
that revolves around opinions, prejudices,
concepts, preconceived ideas. Ditthi papañca,
view-based papañca is the basis of most of the
arguments we have with the world. ―My view
clashes with your view, and of course, I know
mine’s right. So yours is wrong and I have to
prove that it’s wrong.‖ That is ditthi papañca.
It is sometimes the idea of how things should
be. It gets into generalizations like ―People
are terrible,‖ ―The world is like this,‖
―Europeans are like that,‖ ―This kind of
person is like that.‖ It’s a whole generalizing
view. The thing we need to acknowledge
about views is that we have a considerable
amount of investment in our life about being
right—a small understatement. &&&Political
views, religious views, all those views. I
remember when I first started practicing it
was in Mahayana, Tibetan tradition along
with Fred many, many years ago. We lived up
high in the Himalayan foothills. Fred, of
course didn’t do this because he’s much too
pure for this. But I had the sense that I was
superior because I was practicing the ―greater
vehicle.‖ There were all those down on the
plains in India, those Theravadans. Usually
we called them Hinayanas, practicing in the
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―lesser vehicle.‖ When I look back on that I
can’t even believe that I was so smug, so self-
righteous. But it was like an unarguable truth
for me. The more I could see the way that the
view provided me with this sense of
belonging, and identity, and therefore safety.
The third kind of papañca is aversion-
based papañca. It’s called dosa papañca. It’s
the base of a lot of proliferating that we do
about ourselves and others. We dislike
someone, someone offends us, does
something fairly innocuous in the grand
scheme of human failures. Maybe they take
the last nectarine or they wear the wrong
color socks—something fairly innocuous, and
you can feel the aversion arise toward that
person. Pretty soon you got your eye out for
them. They can’t escape you. You’re building
up this portfolio of imperfection. ―They not
only did that, but they do that, and that.‖ It’s
like they’re this terrible person without one
redeeming quality. This is actually dosa
papañca. Of course, as long as we’re prone to
have both aversion and papañca, we’ll do the
same to ourselves. One innocent slip up, we
fell asleep in the meditation hall, we spilled
our salad—and we set off onto a journey of
condemnation that recalls all the ways that we
had erred in the past and will continue to err
long into the future until we are convinced
that we are the most completely deluded,
confused person on this retreat, actually in the
whole world. We become this story-teller, and
soon there’s not one single worthwhile quality
in ourselves that can be seen.
The fourth quality of papañca is called
bhaya papañca. It is fear-based papañca,
which is currently well-encouraged in our
culture. It is not only creates the ―other‖ that
we need to be afraid of, to demonize, surely
not to understand. It includes all the phobias,
the desire to try to find safety and guarantees
in an unpredictable world. Bhaya papañca is
projected onto people, object, events,
countries, and races. It’s pretty big. We see
the world as dangerous, a threat, and we have
all these stories about it.
The last form of papañca is perhaps
the most important of all because it is the
heart, the cornerstone of all of the papañcas
I’ve already mentioned. It’s called mana
papañca. It’s all the ways that we proliferate
and build worlds and stories about ―me.‖ ―I
am wonderful, terrible, failure, success,
outstanding, unworthy…‖ Some of this mana
papañca, papañca about me, is fairly
historical, and some of it is very momentary.
But we see that the ―I am‖ of the moment is
formed by identifying with any event or
experience, but then we proliferate upon that
identification. ―I am sad. Why am I sad? I am
sad because, because, because... I am
unworthy. Why am I unworthy? I am
unworthy because, because, because... I am
angry. Why am I angry? I am angry because,
because, because.‖ We have all this
proliferation around it, the loops that go
around and around.
Some people, through countless times
of repetition, become specialized in one form
of papañca. We can get specialized in
aversion papañca, or fear papañca. It just
shows us what we’re more prone to identify
with. That’s all. It doesn’t make it more true.
What the Buddha says is that what we dwell
upon becomes the shape of our mind. the
shape of our mind, with repetitive dwelling,
hardens into character. It’s also very
important to see that these very difficult
threads of papañca are really in an ongoing
dialog with each other. For example, fearful
thinking can produce aversive thinking. It can
then create craving papañca, which can create
mana papañca. If you’re sitting meditating
and you have a pain in your knee and you
identify with that, starting to think about it.
―What’s going on? I always have a pain in my
knee. Maybe I’m doing damage to myself.‖
You can feel the anxiety and the aversion
arising. You can dread coming into the
meditation hall again. ―I’m a useless
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meditator.‖ That creates craving papañca. ―I
need to be a different kind of person I have to
have a different kind of body to do this. It can
go on and on. This is what we need to calm
down, and really to go back to this very
simple formula of contact (meeting with the
sensory impressions), the feeling (pleasant,
unpleasant, neutral), and perception. It was at
this point, the feeling and perception that the
papañca really gets going. And it’s at this
same point of feeling and perception that
papañca can really calm down and end.
We really need to recognize that
perception is not neutral. In fact, perception
follows the same neural pathways as memory.
It’s not neutral. Perception is very much tied
up with memories of the past. Some of that
memory built into perception is very
necessary and useful. If I go outside the back
door and see a car, it’s very useful that I know
what a car is and I don’t have to learn to drive
every time I see a car. This kind of
perception, memory association, is very
useful and very necessary. But we can also
see that there is a whole load of perception
that is not within this realm of being useful,
but where perception is constantly triggering
the past into the present, memories and
associations into the present. It’s like when
you see that person who has offended you,
and you only need to see them and it’s right
there, the whole story.
We might say that part of the work of
mindfulness is to sever this questionable link
between perception and the world of
association that’s rooted in craving, aversion,
and self-view. It’s not to get rid of the helpful,
necessary perceptual modes, but we can see
how much that mode of perception in
historical memories of craving, aversion, and
self-view is actually fixing the world over and
over again into a kind of frozen place that can
never change. And of course that association,
when it’s laden with judgement, is fixing our
self into a frozen place where we can never
change.
Now we see ourselves in the face of
sounds, sights, thoughts, begin to build, begin
to proliferate. We can learn to pause. Not to
push away or to repress the thinking, but to
investigate. ―What is this?‖ In this teaching,
we’re really learning what it means to see
anew, to liberate the present and everything in
it from the burden of the past—not the wise
learning from the past, but the burden of the
past. The glue that keeps the papañca going
the craving the aversion, the fear, the self-
view, to look closely at it, to really see and
every time you begin to have those sentences
that start with ―I am.‖ to really see how that
storyteller is creating the story based upon
view, and we’re learning to release the story.
Some of you have heard me use this example
before, but I’m going to use it again. A yogi
on retreat in England told me about their
experience about being lost in agitation and
agitation-based papañca, roaming around the
retreat center, endlessly feeding the sense
doors, looking for things to do, spinning in
thought and at their wits end, really running
low on resources, found themselves reading
the instruction on the fire extinguisher. The
first instruction they read, ―Aim the nozzle at
the base of the fire.‖ Aim the nozzle at the
base of the fire. Look at what really is fueling
the agitation. Sometimes it’s said that if you
want to know about your past, look at your
mind now. And if you want to know about
your future, look at your mind now. Of
course, it’s only this mind of now that we can
really calm and liberate. Certainly in that
calmness of mindfulness is one of the central
ingredients in calming the momentum of
papañca. But inside, understanding is
essential in uprooting the source of papañca.
The ―I am‖ that is born of identifying with
thoughts, with emotions, with stories, with
events. When we walk through the dining
room and we smell the garlic we may have a
lot of thoughts about the garlic, but it would
be unusual for any of us to say, ―I am the
garlic.‖ When we hear the sound of the truck
9
outside the windon we can have a whole lot of
thoughts about it, but we’re not going to say,
―I’m the truck.‖ When we see the note on the
board there can be a note on the board, there
can be a world of thinking about it but we
don’t say ―I am the note.‖ But with thoughts
and emotions, particularly with those that
have a long history and many repetitions, we
are certainly prone to say ―I am the thought,‖
―I am the emotion,‖ ―I am miserable,‖ ―I am
unwise,‖ ―I am inadequate,‖ ―The thought is
me.‖ This is really something helpful to see.
Because it’s not surprising that we have so
many thoughts. But what is surprising is that
we give so much authority to them. If any of
you had the willingness to sit up here and
articulate your mind, speak your mind,
throughout a whole sitting, just report on what
your mind is doing, most people would feel
absolutely horrified at the thought. But the
horrifying part about it is the thought that if
you did that that everybody out there would
be aghast. But that’s not true actually. There
would be no surprises there. But interestingly,
if listen to someone else come up here and do
that, what would you say to them? You would
probably say, ―Why are you giving so much
authority to those thoughts?‖ But with
ourselves, we often find ourselves actually
giving that authority even though a lot of it is
really empty and without substance.
Papañca is of very little value in
abstract. But applied to moment to moment
experience, a profound understanding of
papañca is a profound doorway to
transformation.
Now I’m going to give you another
formula. It’s a shortened version, but one that
is really easy to apply:
Contact → Feeling → Craving/Aversion →
Grasping → Becoming
Contact happens as long as we live. There
will always be sights, sounds... It’ doesn’t
matter: what happened to a buddha, or what
happened to someone who never sat on a
cushion. Contact can be the place where we
build our world or a place of remarkable
calmness, equanimity, and wise attention.
Feelings arise throughout our lives: pleasant,
unpleasant, or neutral. Again it doesn’t matter
if it’s a buddha or one who never sat on a
cushion. But we can learn to meet this range
of feelings equally or to be lost in the
underlying tendencies that surround them:
aversion, craving, delusion. We can learn to
pause in those moments instead of being a
hostage to those reactions. We can let the
pleasant be pleasant, the unpleasant be
unpleasant, and the neutral be neutral.
Craving and aversion, okay they arise. when
we’re all enlightened they won’t arise any
more. In the meantime we have a little
practice to do. All is not lost because craving
and aversion arise. We can learn to meet
craving and aversion with equanimity, instead
of going down the pathway of feeding them.
We can learn to fast rather than feed. What is
becoming? It’s that place where we arrive
through grasping that says, ―I am,‖ ―I am
anxious,‖ ―I am hopeless,‖ ―I am unworthy.‖
That is becoming. We are becoming someone
through the identification. We are being
defined by what is taken hold of. Now we can
with mindfulness and understanding begin to
see the fabrication and construction of ―I am,‖
and to hold it a little more lightly. It’s a little
bit of creative disbelief, knowing that it’s part
of a process, not necessarily the truth or the
end of the story. We can calm the cycles of
obsession dwelling, calm our hearts, calm our
minds. Then body, this mind, used wisely,
truly is a raft to freedom.