christina feldman - papañca - proliferation of thoughts

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1 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 silenceand 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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Page 1: Christina Feldman - Papañca - Proliferation of Thoughts

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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

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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.