Feeding Instructions

We read in the Buddha’s descriptions about what happens when the mind gets into jhāna that rapture and pleasure spread through the whole body, saturate the whole body, so that there’s no part of the body not saturated by them. We read in Ajaan Lee’s descriptions of the breath energy flowing throughout the body.

We begin to think that we have to be perfect in our breathing before the mind can settle down. Actually, those passages are describing the ideal state. You, however, have to start with something that may not be ideal. There may be parts of the body that seem dead, parts of the body that seem blocked—so you work around them. There may be pains in different parts of the body—you work around them.

Ajaan Lee himself talks about this. He says there will be parts of the body that you simply cannot get comfortable. It’s like a mango: Parts of the mango might be wormy or rotten. Well, don’t eat those. Cut out those parts and eat the flesh that remains. In the same way, you focus on which parts of the body you can make comfortable by the way you breathe, the ones where there’s a sense of good, comfortable breath energy—whether it feels like it’s flowing or not doesn’t matter. As long as it feels okay, settle in and enjoy it.

Some people are afraid to enjoy the meditation. They feel they should be moving on straightaway to insight practice. But what is insight practice? It’s getting to get the mind into a good state of concentration and then being able to observe the mind in concentration. So you’re not going to move anyplace else.

But first you need to feed the mind, because this is the nature of the mind: It feeds. The problem is, it feeds in all the wrong places. As we meditate, we’re giving it a better place to feed. Even if you don’t aim at going all the way to awakening, still, you can live a lot better in this world if you learn how to feed inside.

We had that chant just now: “those who don’t discern suffering.” It sounds odd. When people are suffering, they should know they’re suffering, you’d think. But that’s not what the Buddha means. To discern suffering, he says, means to see what it really is: It’s clinging to the aggregates.

As you know, his explanation of the first noble truth starts out with things we’re all familiar with: the suffering of birth, aging, illness, death, being separated from those you love, having to be with those you don’t like, not getting what you want—in this case, wanting not to have aging, illness, and death, but still having to put up with them because these things don’t go away just by wishing. These are all things we’re familiar with.

But then he boils it down: All this comes down to the five clinging-aggregates—form as a clinging-aggregate; feelings as a clinging-aggregate; perceptions, fabrications, consciousness as clinging-aggregates. And the real problem is the clinging.

The word for clinging, upādāna, can also mean “to take sustenance,” in other words, to feed. We’re feeding off of our sense of our body as we feel it from within. We feed off of our feelings, our perceptions, our thought fabrications, our consciousness—and that’s the suffering.

It seems odd. You would think that getting to feed means that we’re finding some pleasure. And we do find some pleasure, the Buddha doesn’t deny that. But he also says that these aggregates are inconstant and stressful, not-self. He’s not saying they’re totally painful—they have their pleasures. If they didn’t have their pleasures, he said, we wouldn’t fall for them, we wouldn’t feel any passion for them. But that’s where we get our food.

In fact, the whole process of feeding requires these aggregates. Think about it. You’ve got the form of the body, and you’ve got the form of the food out there. You’re going to put that food into your body.

There’s the feeling of hunger when you don’t get enough to eat, the feeling of satisfaction when you get enough, and the feeling of being stuffed when you get too much.

Then there’s the perception. You go through life finding what you can feed on. Here, for the time being, we’re talking about physical food: Think about children crawling across the floor. They see something new. What do they do? They put it in their mouths to see if it’s edible. That seems to be their first perception. They don’t yet know the word “edible,” but they have that perception in mind somehow—looking for things to eat. As you get older, you get a better and better at perceiving what’’s edible.

Then there’s fabrication. As you think about what you would like to eat: When you find something, the question is, “Can you eat it raw, or do you have to fix it? As with potatoes: If you ate a potato raw, it’d be poisonous. You’ve got to cook it first, then you can eat it. The thinking and preparing: That’s fabrication.

And finally, consciousness—you have to be aware of all these things in order to do them.

So even just the activity of eating physical food in the world outside requires all five of these activities. And they are activities. The term “aggregate” is kind of unfortunate—it sounds like gravel, individual bits of matter. And they are individual, but they’re not things—they’re activities, things we do.

And just as we engage in these five activities to eat, we also feed off of them. You see this especially when you get involved in mental food. Say, you have a relationship with someone. You might think you’re feeding off of them, but where actually are you feeding? You’re feeding off the feelings you have around that person, or you’re feeling about the perceptions, the memories you have about the good times you had together, the times when that person loved you. Or fabrications: all the narratives you create around that relationship.

In fact, as the Buddha said, often our clingings and cravings aren’t focused on where we think they are. You may think you love the person, but actually you love the feelings, you love the perceptions, the thought constructs that surround your sense of that person. You see this especially when the relationship changes.

Say, the person is beginning to suffer from dementia and a side of that person comes out that you didn’t see before. There’s less and less and less communication. You feel starved because this is an area where you opened yourself up so you could feed, but now bad things are coming in. So you have to reflect: Exactly what was the relationship based on? Why was it bearable? Because both sides got to feed in their ways. But what were you feeding on? As the Buddha would say, you’re feeding on form, feelings, perceptions, thought constructs, consciousness. Now that person is no longer providing them. When there was mutual feeding, it was okay. But now it’s not mutual. This is why you need an alternative place to feed inside.

And this is why we develop the path, starting with the thought constructs of right view and right resolve, so that we can feed off of wisdom, feed off of thoughts that help us explain to ourselves why we can’t feed where we used to feed, or why, even though we can feed in areas of the world, it may not be a good thing to do that. The path also gives us the pleasure of mindfulness and concentration so that we’re not starved.

Feeding well along the way is an important part of the practice. And the Buddha’s providing you with good food: good things to think about, good perceptions, good thought constructs, good feelings, good things to be aware of.

As you circle in closer and closer inside, you come to your sense of awareness. That, too, is an aggregate: the consciousness aggregate. Sometimes these acts of awareness are described as unconditioned, the argument being: How can consciousness, if it’s conditioned, know something else is conditioned? Well, that’s precisely the nature of knowledge. Your consciousness is conditioned by its objects. Without those objects, there would be no sensory consciousness.

Now, there’s a great sense of ease when you learn to feed on consciousness itself, as you make consciousness the object. You can’t push this; you can’t rush this. It happens first as you’re getting the mind to settle down and there’s a strong sense of oneness. First, there’s directed thought and evaluation as you adjust, adjust, adjust things in the body, adjust things in the mind. It’s as if you’re outside the breath a little bit. But then when things are well adjusted, there seems to be a melding as your awareness and the breath become one. Sometimes you have to stay there for long periods of time, but ultimately they will separate out on their own—the awareness and the breath—but not where you might expect the dividing line to be. Then you can focus on consciousness itself as an object. It’s very refined food but it’s not the unconditioned. Still, it’s a good state of mind for observing other things that are going on in the mind. And it’s an important step in developing concentration.

So you find that you’re still feeding on aggregates as you practice, but you’re feeding on much better ones: aggregates that go into making the path. They put the mind in a place where it can actually see things, very subtle things, going on inside that you wouldn’t have seen before. This concentration provides a foundation for insight. When insight does its work properly, then you open up to something else entirely—something that’s not conditioned at all, something that doesn’t require any feeding at all.

But until you get there, learn how to feed properly, both in the meditation and as you go through life. Look at the world around us right now. A lot of things that we used to take for granted, we can’t take for granted anymore. We were feeding off of a false sense of security. So the mind feels starved. We’ve got to learn how to feed it properly from within.

There’s a passage where the Buddha is confronted by Mara, and the Mara says, “The eye, the ear, the nose, the tongue, the body, and the mind are mine.” And the Buddha seems to agree with him. For most people, that’s their Mara: the world of the senses. But, the Buddha says, when you get the mind in concentration like this, you get to a place where Mara can’t see you. You’re outside of Mara’s domain. Even though you haven’t gained even the first stage of awakening, you’ve got something independent inside. When you have an independent food source, then you can survive all kinds of things. So learn how to feed here. We’re feeding off of aggregates, anyhow, so we might as well learn how to feed well.

That’s what it means to discern suffering: when you realize that this is what you’ve been feeding off in your relationships, in your attitudes toward the world, the narratives you tell yourself about your life, about yourself. Those are all aggregates. When you see how unreliable that kind of food is, then you’re more inclined to want to find food that’s more stable, more reliable here in the path: aggregates again, but fixed in a different way, a way that gives you the nourishment you need to be in the world and not suffer from the world—and, finally, to learn how to go beyond.