The instant we begin investigating the mind through meditation, we have joined the great river of yogi-scientists—from the ancient strivers of the time of the Buddha and Mahavira all the way down to my own little band of friends and seekers. And because the nature of the human mind is everywhere the same, the seeker of today and the sramana of three thousand years ago has a remarkably similar experience.
The meditator’s first investigations reveal a subtle but disconcerting struggle going on deep in the mind and body—a kind of conflict which colors all experience with a vague sense of unsatisfactoriness. No amount of reading about this can replace the direct, immediate experience of it. The yogi’s first task is to closely examine the nature of this unhappiness.
How does this investigation proceed? We have seen that the beginning meditator finds an object and lets awareness simply rest in that object. We have seen, too, that the mind cannot rest on that object for more than mere nanoseconds before it goes zipping off, unbidden, into memories of the past, or fantasies of the future.
When we examine this process closely, we will discover the nature of the problem: the mind seems to be profoundly ill at ease with the present moment. Mind cannot seem to rest with “how it is” right now. Indeed, the mind seems to be always conducting a sub-threshold war with “right now”—using every strategy available to avoid it. I sometimes call this the War With Reality.
Most of us, even before we begin to meditate, have had some awareness of this war with the present moment. In order to bear sitting at our desk for eight hours a day, we have spent the last three months dreaming about our upcoming trip to England with our beloved. We’ve anticipated exactly how it will be. We’ve pored over the pictures of the quaint hotel in which we’ll be staying, and secretly put the brochure in the top drawer of our desk so that we can look at the images throughout the workday. It will be ten days of heaven. All of this fantasizing serves as a distraction from the strangely difficult “present moment.”
OK. But then, when we get to our dream destination, everything is not quite the way we had pictured it. As we arrive, we try not to notice that the quaint guesthouse for which we’re paying a fortune is next to what must be London’s version of a crack house. When we check into the room, we discover that the mattress is too soft, and there is an annoying musty smell that might trigger our allergies. A hard rain falls all night.
In the morning, we discover that breakfasts in England are just not right. Too much fat. Too many eggs. Where’s the granola? The fresh fruit? After breakfast, we have a fight with our so-called beloved. Suddenly, we’re in the nightmare vacation. Inside, the drumbeat begins: “NO! I don’t want it to be like this! I won’t have it be like this.” We’re at war with How It Is.
This is a dramatic example, of course. But the very same process goes on in more subtle ways in every instant of mental experience. Most of us do not see this until we attempt to examine the moment-by-moment flow of thoughts and sensations in the mind and body through meditation. Then, we cannot avoid it. Aaarrrggghh. This war is going on all the time. How did we miss it?
At almost any point in my day when I stop and check down inside, I will find some version of my silent mantra—this moment should be different!—going on. I dislike how it is right now. It’s not so pleasant. I want it to be like it was the other day, last week, last year. Or, I love how it is right now. It’s very pleasant. I want it to stay. How can I make this pleasant feeling stay? How can I keep the flow of experience from snatching it away? Oh, don’t let it go.
Each of us has our own silent War With Reality. And whatever our particular War With Reality is, its result is always a pervasive sense of the unsatisfactoriness of the moment. Yogis came to call this duhkha. Duhkha means, literally, “suffering,” “pain,” or “distress.” (It seems that the word duhkha originally meant “having a bad axle hole,” which must have been distressing indeed.)1
When we explore the mind-state of duhkha, we find that it is created by a deep aversion to being with How It Is right now. This silent, unconscious war with How It Is unwittingly drives much of our behavior: We reach for the pleasant. We hate the unpleasant. We try to arrange the world so that we have only pleasant mind-states, and not unpleasant ones. We try to get rid of this pervasive state of unsatisfactoriness in whatever way we can—by changing things “out there.” By changing the world. By changing England, if we have to.
Thoreau, through his close investigation of his own mental states in the quiet at Walden Pond, discovered this very same phenomenon of underlying unsatisfactoriness. He called it “desperation.” “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation,” he said. “A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind.”
Thoreau’s quiet desperation is precisely duhkha. He saw that ordinary mind seems chronically ill at ease with How It Is. We simply cannot say, “This is the way things are. This is how things are here in England, at least at this particular guesthouse.” Instead, mind does not hesitate to try to change the entire country of England. After a few days we get tired of trying to change England, and perhaps we surrender just the littlest bit to how England is. But we don’t surrender to how we are. To exactly how we are. We’re plagued by shoulds: I should be happy. I should be in heaven. I paid three thousand dollars for this trip, and it’s wrong, wrong, wrong. I should be able to fix my beloved, who is acting weird and distant. Something exciting should be happening to me. I shouldn’t be so bored.
Thoreau understood that this duhkha, this quiet desperation, is the water in which we swim. He saw that we mostly lead our lives blithely unaware of it. We simply don’t see it. In fact, it is quite common for new meditation students to raise their hands and object strenuously: “I have no suffering. I have no duhkha. We have no real suffering in this wealthy culture of ours—do we? I think this notion is sheer self-indulgence.”
The yogi’s response to this blindness is always the same: look more closely.
The ancient yogis did look more closely. They explored the experience of duhkha like an ancient science project—practicing meditation for years on end, in solitary caves, forests, in small groups of dedicated seekers. They persisted in their questioning: Why is it so difficult for our minds to rest in the present moment? What are the causes of pervasive unsatisfactoriness? What are its roots? Is there a cure?
Over the course of many centuries, their investigations kept coming up with precisely the same answer: the causes of this unhappiness are the forces of grasping, aversion, and delusion buried deep in the mind. Patanjali called these forces kleshas—literally “afflictions” or “troubles” or “poisons.”
…unwholesome thoughts may arise from greed, anger, or delusion; they may be mild, moderate, or extreme; but they never cease to ripen into ignorance and suffering… (2.34)
The mapping out of these forces in the mind is one of the great discoveries of yoga. Patanjali and his tradition came to believe that these “afflictions” only arise because of our ignorance of our true nature (or, “not seeing things as they are”—avidyā), and that once we know our true nature they evaporate from the mind. His complete description of the roots of affliction comes early on in the second section of the Yoga-Sūtra:
The causes of suffering [klesha] are not seeing things as they are, the sense of “I,” attachment, aversion, and clinging to life. (2.3)
Later on in this book, I’ll examine the subtle and complex meanings of “not seeing things as they are” (avidyā) and “the sense of ‘I’ ” (asmitā). In teaching the Yoga-Sūtra, however, I’ve found it most useful to begin by discussing the immediate, visceral ways in which we experience duhkha. Patanjali names three of them: rāga—craving, clinging, and greed; dvesha—aversion, hatred, and avoidance; and moha, delusion.2
Rāga—attraction—is the tendency to lean forward out of the way it is right now toward the fantasized next moment, or toward any moment in the hoped-for future (England!), or the fondly remembered past. It involves reaching, clinging, craving. Rāga has a grabby, anxious kind of energy. I want. I want. I must have. Mommy, give me that cookie before I die. In some of the contemplative traditions this quality is called “thirst” (tanha) or “hunger.”
Dvesha—aversion—is the tendency to lean backward, dig in our heels, and say, Whoa, Nellie. We may say, Stop! Get me out of here! We may say, Yuck. Aversion is a big NO to the experience of the moment. Imagine the face of a child—a picky eater—who has just eaten her first bite of the dreaded turnip. Some of the contemplative traditions identify this aversive state as hatred or fear.
Moha—delusion—is the quality in the mind that wants us to disappear entirely from the moment. Like the child in the theater who, when she sees something shocking, just covers her eyes, as if this will make everything go away. “I cannot bear to look. Tell me when it’s over.”
We lean forward out of the present moment. Or we dig in our heels and lean backward. Or we twist away from the naked truth of the moment. All three experiences keep us from being present with How It Is just now. This war with the present moment keeps us almost continually uncomfortable in our own skin. And the sense of unsatisfactoriness that results, though usually beneath the threshold of our awareness, nonetheless drives much of our experience, and many of our decisions, in an unconscious, reactive way.
In attempting to understand the nature of afflicted mind-states, most of us early on will encounter a problem: Is all longing afflicted? Is all desire really afflicted? What about the longing for God? For love? What about the longing for my beloved? Is all aversion, all anger, afflicted by its very nature? What about the anger in response to life’s horrendous injustices—to violence and aggression of all kinds? What about the anger that serves me by setting a clear boundary for those who might harm me? And what about delusion? Aren’t there times when a dollop of delusion serves us—when we are not yet ready, perhaps, to bear the full brunt of grief or loss?
So, it is important to say at the outset that all longing is not necessarily afflicted. Indeed, even anger is not necessarily afflicted. What, then, precisely, does mark certain mind-states as “troubled” or “poisoned”? What distinguishes some states as afflicted and others as non-afflicted?
Yogis mapped out this territory with great precision. All of the so-called afflicted mental states have three primary distinguishing characteristics in common:
~ Afflictive states are disturbing.
~ Afflictive states are obscuring.
~ Afflictive states are separative.
First, afflictive states are disturbing. When experiencing craving or aversion, we lose the mind’s natural equanimity. We lose the balance of the mind. States of grasping keep ordinary mind roiled, restless, agitated, ill at ease—the surface of the pond broken up. And as a result of this disturbance of mind, we feel uncomfortable with the experience of being itself.
Second, afflictive states are obscuring. They obscure the true nature of reality. They seriously distort what Western psychologists call “reality testing.” Aversion, for example, makes things appear worse than they are (wholly bad). Jake felt aversive to the “airheads” in his law firm (especially after some of them forced his embarrassing departure), and this aversion so colored his perception of these men and women that he was unable to see their many positive characteristics. Conversely, our attraction to and craving for certain objects of desire may so color our perception that their deleterious effects may become invisible to us, and we may see them as better than they are (wholly good). So, assessments of reality based on afflicted mind are not accurate. Thus, they are said to be “obscured.”
And thirdly, afflictive states are separative. They separate us from a direct experience of bare reality. They are mental states not supported by a direct experience of How It Is, but rather by our idealized notions about how things should be—our hopes or wishes about how things might be. They separate us from a real, direct, and complete experience of the phenomena of life. Afflicted states drive us to believe that objects—love objects, material objects, or success objects—will make us happy. When under the thrall of these afflicted states, we’re left feeling fundamentally separate from our own happiness, craving for the object (and the object is always “out there”—like the trip to England) that will complete us.
Now we might call to mind once again the central principle of yoga practice: the mind is transformed only by direct, systematic, and careful personal investigation of experience. Not by concepts about reality. Not by metaphysical constructs. Alas, there is no way to understand the afflicted mind-state of craving, aversion, and delusion without exploring our own immediate experience of them.
Of course, as always, there is good news: for any of us willing to pay attention, we do not have to search far afield for a confrontation with these states. They are with us in practically every moment of life.
And what does a direct investigation of these states yield? Let’s look more closely at each one of the three afflicted states, beginning with craving, or greed.
In our culture, it is particularly hard to see craving and clinging as forms of unhappiness. We exalt the drive for bigger and better. Indeed, we practically regard ambition and consumption as social duties. But what happens when we investigate the mind-states that so often drive our craving?
On my very first long meditation retreat (with a well-known Buddhist meditation teacher), my teacher challenged me to do just that. During an interview, he asked me a question: “Have you ever allowed yourself to fully experience a moment of craving? I mean, fully experience? Have you ever just stopped? Stopped, when you desperately wanted something? Stopped to feel the heat of craving?”
An honest answer to him would have been “certainly not.” Why would I have? Only a meditation teacher would ask one to do such an unnatural thing.
On the other hand, what an intriguing idea. I tried it that same day—in the lunch line at the retreat. We had already had six days of sitting and walking meditation. Sitting and walking, sitting and walking—thirteen hours a day. There was no entertainment at all. Indeed, the only thing that came close to entertainment was lunch. Lunch created a huge excitement in my mind. In this context, it was a virtual trip to Las Vegas.
For six days we had eaten adzuki beans and rice for lunch. On the seventh day, a miracle occurred. Blueberry cobbler appeared on the lunch line. (Perhaps a Christian had been smuggled into the kitchen.) I could see the cobbler from my position toward the back of the line. I could practically taste it on my tongue—its big, fat blueberries bursting with tangy pulp.
The line moved, oh, so slowly. First, of course, the frustratingly serene kitchen staff rang the little bell. We had to stand for what seemed like an age in just-pretend meditation. As I observed the blueberry cobbler from across the room, I felt the saliva fill my mouth. The inner wolf began to emerge, and I knew that my fangs had come out and my pink tongue was lolling down around my neck like a dog on a hot day.
As the line moved, I watched the blueberry cobbler disappear. Then there were only five pieces left, and eleven people in front of me. Were there reinforcements coming from the kitchen? I feared not.
When it became clear that I was not going to get the cobbler, I decided at the very least to get the lesson. I decided to try the technique I had been learning all week: Bring awareness to the breath, the sensations in the body. Move toward the feelings—the feelings in the body. Examine the texture and movement of the sensations there.
Well, OK. The sensations started deep in my belly and moved in a straight line up to my diaphragm, where they wrapped like a rope around my body and cinched tighter and tighter, stopping my breath. Talk about unsatisfactory. It was painful.
What a surprise. Craving is painful. The wolf wanted to howl. To keen. Who knew? Wanting, fully experienced, is almost unbearable. Wailing seems the appropriate response.
Later that afternoon, an insight stole in like the weather: all of that compulsive eating and sexing and consuming and shopping I’ve done. All of that stuff I do all the time. It’s all an attempt to get rid of this feeling of craving. It’s not a celebration of craving at all. It’s a way to avoid feeling it.
Aversion creates almost exactly the same feeling in the body as greed. Let’s go back to the lunch line at the meditation retreat. On day eight there is no blueberry cobbler. Only adzuki beans and rice.
Aarrgghhh!! No. Not again. This can’t possibly be. Tell me I’m dreaming. The mind simply rebels. This is beyond the bounds of all decency. Eight days of adzuki beans and rice. A fantasy comes unbidden to the mind: pick up a freshly opened five-pound bag of adzuki beans, look directly into the face of the cook, and empty the entire boring contents onto the floor.
But no. Stop. Feel. Track the sensations. (This technique is getting on my nerves now, too.) It’s somewhere at the top of my chest and up in my throat. It is heavy—like lead. Tight. There is a slight choking sensation in my throat.
As I stay with the sensations, I feel the nascent scream that wants to emerge. This sensation of aversion, when I actually feel it, is terribly like the sensation of greed. It’s the wolf wanting to howl again. It hurts deep inside. For a split second I’m actually with the pain of aversion. It begins to feel a lot like sadness.
And now the miracle: as soon as we’ve felt it fully, aversion begins to move off toward the horizon like a big thunder boomer. It moves through like a spell of bad weather—intense for a while, but soon gone. Once it’s seen through, aversion begins to evaporate.
At the beginning of meditation practice, it is helpful to start examining the most gross manifestations of aversion. It’s helpful to get some practice noticing what the big stone in your shoe feels like before trying to apprehend the little pebble between your sock and the ball of your foot—the one that has made you walk funny all morning but you don’t know why. The one that made that whole morning walk through the woods “unsatisfactory.”
When we become more skillful in our internal sleuthing, we may find craving and aversion in their subtle, insidious form dusting the insides of our guts, painting our entire lives with unsatisfactoriness. Eventually, we’ll have to experience the craving or aversion itself. We’ll have to sit on the moldy bed in England and cry, cry, cry, cry. Perhaps we’ll throw open the window and howl.
How about delusion?
I grew up in a family that preferred delusion above all other afflicted mind-states. When my first book was published, there was a naked young man on the cover, in a beautiful yoga pose. (The photo was shot in an appropriate way. His genital area was completely shadowed out, but nevertheless he was definitely naked.) When my elderly Aunt Caroline first saw the book, she called me right away on the phone. There was anxiety in her voice. “Stephen, when I first saw your book, I thought that young man was naked.” Pause. “But then I realized he had shorts on.”
Well, of course, he didn’t have shorts on at all. She put them on him. In her mind. This was not a stretch for Aunt Caroline, nor would it have been much of a stretch for anyone from my tribe.
Delusion reflects our commitment to our notions of how life should be. And in my family we had strong ideas about how life should go. Unfortunately this commitment to How It Should Be is always accompanied by a fatal indifference to How It Is. Psychologists have a name for the everyday version of this defensive structure: the False Self. We all know it to some degree: the False Self that emerges when our perceptions and behaviors are driven by unconscious ideas about how reality should look. About how our family should only look magnificent and functional, never neurotic and weird and sometimes smelly as they really are; ideas we have about that special heart-filled corporation we work for—as if it loves us, and as if it will never, ever call us in to the boss’s office the week before Christmas and ask us (and our paper box full of family photos) to be out of the building by sundown.
I’ve told the Aunt Caroline story in talks, and usually someone raises his hand and says, “But if Aunt Caroline needed to believe that he had shorts on, why not? At least it will keep her comfortable. After all, she’s so old.” This is the ignorance-is-bliss theory. Alas, ignorance does not actually create happiness, or anything real whatsoever. There is a saying in yoga circles: “not seeing duhkha is duhkha.”
Not seeing suffering is suffering. This is the sramanic view. And the correct one, I think. As a psychotherapist, I know it well. When clients can’t bear the truth, they twist away from it. They twist away from painful feelings in the body and mind. They twist away from the truth of what’s just happened at home under their very noses. Twisting away is in some ways the deepest pain. Even if you cannot see the twisting in the face, you can see it in the soul. Not seeing duhkha is duhkha.
“I don’t know, it was like a flash of insight or something,” said Jake.
“I was just standing in the shower, hot water pounding on my head. I looked up. And all of a sudden I saw the new tiles.” Jake was shaking his head in disbelief.
“You know, I’d helped Rudi renovate that shower four months ago, when I first arrived at Acorn Cottage. But in that moment, I realized I had never really seen those damned new blue tiles we put in. Even though I’ve been in that shower every friggin’ morning for four months. I’ve never seen them. Never looked at them! Then, in a flash I realized something: in that moment, I was actually there. Just there. Damn.”
Several weeks after his first meditation retreat, Jake was relating a “post-meditation” experience—a moment of happiness. For a few sweet moments, he had been “just there,” and going nowhere else—not leaning forward or backward. Not covering his eyes. “It was as if I had fallen out of the sky and landed on the earth after having been away a long, long time.” He shook his head again.
Jake had been practicing meditation regularly since the retreat, and he suspected that this moment of happiness was the fruit of his practice. I think he was right.
The sense of well-being Jake experienced was categorically different from any he could remember. In those moments when there is no clinging, no craving, no aversion, no delusion, we are entirely free. We experience sukha, or “sweetness.” Sukha is the happiness that is not colored by craving or aversion.
Jake’s discovery paralleled one of the Buddha’s great discoveries. After he left his father’s palace in search of enlightenment, Siddhartha Gautama (the Buddha-to-be) studied with many of the greatest yogis of his day. When he felt he had mastered everything they had to teach, he went to the forest to practice severe austerities with a group of other wandering sramanas. By the end of this period, he was eating only one grain of rice a day. He had become the world’s most severe ascetic. He found, however, that these austerities did not seem to be awakening his mind. Eventually he renounced them, and in a famous gesture, accepted a bowl of milk from a young girl.
Just after doing so, he had a life-changing memory. He remembered sitting as a young boy in the shade of a rose apple tree, watching his father’s farmers plow the fields. His parents and family were nearby. In that moment, he wanted nothing. Disliked nothing. He was perfectly happy with things as they were. His mind was balanced and at ease. He was able to embrace both joy and sorrow—without clinging to or pushing away any particular mind-state. He realized, reliving this experience in memory, that this was the state of enlightenment. Furthermore, he realized that it was a naturally arising state. And if it arose naturally, could it not, then, be systematically cultivated?
In that moment, Siddhartha understood the central issue: When the afflictions are absent, we are enlightened. When the afflictions are absent, the mind stops. Patanjali has given us this insight at the very beginning of his treatise: “Yoga is to still the patterning of consciousness. Then pure awareness can abide in its very nature.” When the fluctuations of the mind are at rest, the Seer is established. Pure Awareness shines forth.
Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh—the late, controversial “crazy-wisdom” guru, and prolific writer about the Yoga-Sūtra—has said it well:
When you can simply look without being identified with the mind, without judging, without appreciating, without choosing—you simply look and the mind flows, a time comes when by itself, of itself, the mind stops. When there is no mind, you are established in your witnessing. Then you have become a witness—just a seer—a drakshta, a sakchhi. Then you are not a doer, then you are not a thinker. Then you are simply being—pure being. Then the witness is established in itself.3
Mind, consciousness itself, arises and passes away moment-by-moment along with the objects of attachment. When we dis-identify with craving and aversion, the subtle afflictions that create duhkha do not continue to arise. There is, then, only witnessing. Only seeing. These are moments in which there is no suffering. And in which we see the world clearly: Jake in the shower.
In practice, we penetrate these moments of enlightenment again and again. Sometimes they happen in the shower, sometimes on the yoga mat or meditation cushion. We’re sitting at the breakfast table, and we experience a moment in which time slows down and we feel completely “here.” Everything feels entirely OK. Everything is a source of delight—the smell of the coffee, the thought of our family sleeping upstairs, even the thought of our day at work. At first these moments occur as strange but delightful altered states, as Jake’s experience in the shower had occurred to him—a fleeting visit to a foreign country. But as practice proceeds, these moments occur more frequently. After a while, we get to know them. And finally, having visited many times, we begin to find ourselves living there.
When the afflictions are extinguished (even momentarily), consciousness naturally reveals two remarkable characteristics: it is transparent and it is reflective. In these moments, consciousness is often described as being “a still forest pool.” Its surface is calm. The waters underneath are calm. There is no reactivity anywhere. Consciousness is reflective, like a mirror. Looking into it, one can see one’s own reflection. It is also transparent. On a sunny day, one can see the colors of the polished granite stones on the bottom. There are no eddies, no undertows. All of the mud has settled to the bottom.
In the state of sukha, as Jake discovered:
~ Mind is undisturbed—quiet
~ Mind is unobscured—seeing clearly, and perceiving bare reality rather than ideas about reality
~ Experience is unitive, rather than separative: we feel a sense of oneness with and relatedness to all beings
In these moments, we become acquainted with a new kind of pleasure—the pleasure of savoring experience. The pleasure of a happiness that is not saturated with grasping. In coming chapters, we will see how this capacity to know experience in an entirely unafflicted fashion is a major theme of the Yoga-Sūtra.
As they familiarized themselves with the mechanics of afflicted mind, yogis developed a remarkable point of view. Their experience taught them that craving and aversion do not exist in the deeper, luminous parts of the mind. The implications of this discovery are momentous: The afflictions are not essential components of the mind. They are just visitors.
As meditation practice proceeds, we make a wonderful discovery: We do not have to learn how to be happy. We already know. Happiness is not an alien land. It is our homeland. Furthermore, we do not need to “get rid” of Puppy Mind in order to be happy. Indeed, there is no getting rid of Puppy Mind. Puppy Mind is simply the nature of the ordinary, discursive part of the mind. Puppy Mind is not the problem. Puppy Mind is not the affliction. The affliction is our reactivity to the puppy—and to the ever-changing weather of the mind.
The good news of meditation is that this reactivity of duhkha can be seen through and profoundly attenuated through practice. We are still assaulted by storms (and this is true of even the most adept meditators) but we do not suffer as much from them. We discover that sukha, or happiness, can arise even in the most difficult of circumstances. We can make room for any kind of weather. There is no need to force happiness. It is right here all along. It is an essential ingredient of our true nature.