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 1

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?

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.”

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

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 welltrained 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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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.

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

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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 wellbeing. 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 selfrighteous. 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 aversionbased 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 selfview, 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:

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.

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

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