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I would also appreciate another look at the background, Lal. So far, I have mostly been working on cultivating the anicca saññā, i.e., noting when the mind leans towards something as a way of trying to get lasting security from a universe that ultimately has none.
I really am not sure what would be the nail in the coffin for getting to Sotapanna in this case..
I would also like to double on Lang’s point, since it is still quite hard for my sila to adjust in accordance to my understanding of sanna, to not mention getting to a phala.
For example: I still have trouble eating healthy sometimes, even though I tell myself that the taste is not in the object. This is something I intellectually understand, but clearly don’t grasp or comprehend. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be a repeat recipient of the Fell for It Again Award, given personally by vinnana himself. :D
I would imagine not all saññā are exclusive to a physical body. In gandhabba form the mind still craves sights, sounds, and some smells, but as the mind wishes to continue separating, three (or maybe two and a half) senses aren’t enough. Instead of one way of experiencing an object, it craves three so it can continue separating good objects from bad objects. The saññā derived from the qualia of touch or taste (aka the sweetness as a mind interpretation of sense contact) is necessary for this separation.
If there was a way for the mind to get a body with ten senses in the same way as our normal five, it would definitely take that.
It’s a shame most of these videos in Sinhala don’t have English translations… Hopefully the English versions will get to the deeper aspects of Dhamma in a few more years.
Oh yeah, Tilakkhana contemplation has definitely helped with my outlook on life. I was very bummed out when I essentially had the rug pulled under my feet from my last place of work, but I found it very hard to be angry towards the people involved. I experience patigha every now and then, but it kept coming back to me, “What do I have to gain being angry towards this person? When has adding more lobha or more dosa to my experience made me more happy? The people who wronged me were just as helpless as I was before I was exposed to Dhamma. Actually, who wronged me? Who was I that was wronged? They did lots of work to get this part of the universe shaped to their liking, is it really worth it on my part?”
It’s curious seeing how the undercurrent of ignorance under lobha and dosa is always some variant of trying to get something to work to my liking. I still have these schizophrenic greed fantasies of getting to play a Paganini caprice after five or ten more years of dedicated practice, knowing well this runs under the assumption that the six sense bases are of nicca nature.
I also find it interesting how many monks whose dhamma talks I listen to also used to be STEM heavy before they took up the robe. There’s one who did postdoc work after his biochemistry Ph.D (pretty much my field) and then realized that he could do a lifetime research fellowship of studying the mind without needing a grant or equipment. :3
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1:54:53
“The essence of today’s talk is this: this is not you. None of this is you. That’s why if you say ‘I have a habit that I can’t come out of or break,’ well… yeah, because it’s not you who has the habit to come out of or break. Because it’s not you who picked it up. Habits are simply patterns of vipaka.”
I misremembered the exact word then, a “pattern” would probably have a bit of a different connotation than “collection.”
You can also try interleaving with content outside of this website, especially desanas where you listen to what’s being said rather than simply read.
This Zoom series is given by a monk very closely related to Waharaka Thero- it teaches you the core parts of Dhamma but ALSO what to meditate on.
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My impression is that karmasthana was the chanting of Pali phrases from suttas while understanding their general meaning to ward off kilesas. So I would have to understand at least the gist of what is being chanted, which is why I’m asking what text is being used to recite these things.
Would you happen to know what sutta is exactly being recited? I cant see anything that references it.
I’ve been coincidentally listening to desanas on this topic (this one puts the ideas pretty nicely I’d say).
So the Bhante here puts a thought experiment for taste. Suppose that a scientist went all Dr. Frankenstein on us and changed the wiring to our brains so the sour and the sweet output are switched. That leads to us perceiving lemons as sweet and chocolate as sour.
I guess we could extend this to sight, too. What if we took the rods and cones in our eyes and changed the output wiring there? They’d respond the same in response to wavelength, but the colors we perceive would be different. If you fall on your head, you might perceive light, even though no extra light has hit your retina. That’s because you’re stimulating the optic center of your brain from the fall.
We could go even more absurd with this and think about pain perception, too. (Well, not too absurd. Synesthesia, or the perception of sound as color, also exists.) Pain is a mind created perception in response to particular object-touch contacts. When you do a pushup, the body does not register pain. The mind does. It simply interprets whatever signals the body gives the mind as such. But we could change the wiring in a similar fashion, so instead of pain output, the normal wiring for pain could be redone for vision. If you hit yourself with a hammer, instead of wincing in pain, you would perceive it as color. Absurd, but that’s what would happen.
So at the end of this, with this information given, Bhante more or less explains the three stages in weaning ourselves from sense pleasures:
1): We think pleasure is intrinsic in objects, such as the sweetness in the strawberry.
2) We learn that taste is not intrinsic to the objects themselves, but a product of contact between object and sense object. We can note that strawberry flavored ice cream, gum, or even vapes exist. But there’s no strawberry in either of them. So we still crave the taste, not the strawberry.
3) We stop craving the taste altogether once we understand the truth of saññā. Bhante doesn’t expect us to get this down, but he at least wanted to get us all to stage two.
As a comment about getting to stage three, I saw another clip from a different monk (the abbot, I presume?) where he basically outlined that our entire life is designed so that we can perceive objects. That’s why lots of people conventionally see getting an education and making money as successful, so they can have access to more objects to perceive.
I would say objects of desire are a more immediate form of money, since both are a means to an end. At the end of the day, we don’t want the object itself, but the perception of the object that comes from the contact or object to sense base.
Really puts things into perspective, I’d argue.
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I listened to this desana yesterday, and I felt a moderate sensation of joy, as if I just realized that no sense pleasure, be it of the mind or the senses, would ever make me lastingly happy.
I thought that maybe this sensation would go away, but at work today, I was just told that my Ph.D contract, what I thought Id be working with for the next three or so years, would be terminated. But I wasn’t angry. I didn’t feel any resentment towards anybody. I don’t know if this is even makes me Sotapanna Anugami, but I’d say it’s a step closer.
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I greatly look forward to these new posts, Lal! I am constantly looking for any sense pleasure that would be worth doing at the expense of other people, the same way Diogenes looked through the agora with his lantern looking for a wise man. Experiencing Sotapanna phala would just be relieving since it would make such inquiry obsolete.
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