Do we really experience only one kind of feeling at a time?

Discussion
45

This made me think of an3.23:

…Touched by both hurtful and pleasing contacts, they experience both hurtful and pleasing feelings that are a mixture of pleasure and pain—like humans, some gods, and some beings in the underworld.

But this seems mostly like a language problem to me. If you’re experiencing pleasure and guilt, is that one experience or two? I don’t think ordinary language gives us this amount of precision.

Like, if we watch a movie, we say we watched a movie, we don’t say we experienced a mixture of sights, sounds and mental experience of narrative. But it’s still probably impossible to watch two movies at the same time and get anything coherent out of that.

Just imagine having two TVs in front of you, trying to watch two different movies at the same time. This would probably not work very well.

Maybe vedana is a bit looser as a term at the time of the Buddha, but then later it gets narrowed down and embedded in a theoretical framework, etc. ?

So, one way to read this would be “when you’re experiencing something you would call a pleasant experience, you’re not experiencing painful or neutral…”

IMO, this would make it more of a common sense thing to say to a non-Buddhist :slight_smile:

46

I totally agree @Dhammavidhu! Thanks for your comment. Yes, @HinMarkPeng ’s comment also makes perfect sense. Empirical evidence (science) represents a very different method of understanding phenomena, where science is NOT about moment-by-moment manifestation of first-person experiences.

47

Do you suggest that sati is not science?

48

Thank you for this question Bhante. Similar thoughts came to my mind as well. Whether my view is helpful I don’t know, in the hope of contributing something I would like to broaden the perspective and extend it to the Buddha’s context and reasoning technique.

Do you think the Buddha would advise us to address this statement about feelings in a discussion?
I don’t think so, because on its own, that statement doesn’t provide a solid foundation. But it worked twice in context.

The Buddha was not concerned here with giving a definition of feelings, as in the Abhidhamma. I think the Buddha was arguing here, quite typical of his teaching, in a particular context, situational, tailored to the person and building a chain of reasoning, and accordingly should only be reflected upon in context. In M74, the identification with the three views is first resolved, in addition to the views, we identify primarily with the feelings, again three feelings, as before with the three views. So using this example here for the mindset of a person could been used specifically as an upaya? Similarly in DN13. It seems to me that he uses this example (exclusively?) in the context of identification.

I hope this short approach is helpful, even with my limited English, obviously I am not a native speaker :sweat_smile:

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49

I think it must be said that which cannot be discerned through mindfulness/a moment of consciousness, is only pure speculation. There maybe multiple things going on in the brain at any given time, but if we can only discern one at a time, using the best apparatus we have at the moment (sati and samadhi) then that is the extent of our knowledge. Everything else is ‘extra’. You can even hide atman in that black box of unknowing, not to mention God.

50

I agree @Dhammavidhu The following article (which I also posted above) differentiates these two ways of ‘knowing’: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2158244015583860

51

@thomaslaw : As I see it - it is science. The whole of Buddha’s teachings are a ‘first-person science.’ But main-stream science (that is obsessed with materialism) does not see it that way.

52

Have you reached any further conclusions on this Bhante?

53

I think we have to look at that in its context. He was supposing this as a method of personal inquiry for impermanence.

The Buddha is just asking us to look and see “at this one time, I was feeling pain, but at the other time, I was feeling pleasure, there was no pain at that time, so clearly my feelings completely transform from one thing to another, so they are impermanent, and not worth holding on to.”

What immediately follows the quote about feelings is this:

Pleasant, painful, and neutral feelings are impermanent, conditioned, dependently originated, liable to end, vanish, fade away, and cease.

Seeing this, a learned noble disciple grows disillusioned with pleasant, painful, and neutral feelings. Being disillusioned, desire fades away. When desire fades away they’re freed. When they’re freed, they know they’re freed.

I believe this is the extent of the purpose of him mentioning this principle, it isn’t to lay out a universal, philosophical principle that makes sense in every context. This is also typical of the MN suttas which tend to dive a little further than most know into specific topics.

Even The Buddha said that he does this in MN59:5.2

Ānanda, the explanation by the mendicant Udāyī, which the chamberlain Pañcakaṅga didn’t agree with, was quite correct. But the explanation by Pañcakaṅga, which Udāyī didn’t agree with, was also quite correct. In one explanation I’ve spoken of two feelings. In another explanation I’ve spoken of three feelings, or five, six, eighteen, thirty-six, or a hundred and eight feelings. I’ve explained the teaching in all these different ways.

Let’s use this model and say feelings can happen at the same time in all the ways people in this thread have cited. When they change altogether from both tasting cake and shame to spiritual pleasure and back pain, clearly feelings are still impermanent. When you focus on one part of your vision, but the peripheral areas are still sensing, both these areas are still subject to impermanence, which is within the bounds of the main point of the original quote. What really matters is whether you hold on to feelings, believing that they will last. Finding technical logical contradictions whether philosophically or in meditation experience is drawing away from the point, which you could see as a small reflection or explanation that he made for the sake of helping the audience see the direction of the path to awakening.

54

Hello Venerable!

Certainly, in sutta there is no systematic treatise on momentariness as found in the various Abhidhammic systems. But I think we can find more than one place where the Teacher talked about moments in the ordinary conventional sense of common language, right?

In the same way, when the Teacher talked about these three kinds of feelings, I’m pretty sure he intended only a useful trichotomy and not any systematic treatise. If we take the trichotomy too far and think that he intended some kind of fundamental distinction, that’s when we run into problems, right?

Regarding everyday experience, I think people readily divide feelings into, “pleasant, painful and neutral” prima facie. It is only upon analysis that this division begins to fall apart. But it isn’t the trichotomy that falls apart, rather it seems to me that feelings themselves fall apart; as you say, “the mind is the same: feelings are a complex web.”

As the Teacher said:

Suppose it was the time of autumn, when the rain was falling heavily, and a bubble on the water forms and pops right away. And a person with clear eyes would see it and contemplate it, examining it carefully. And it would appear to them as completely void, hollow, and insubstantial. For what substance could there be in a water bubble?

In the same way, a mendicant sees and contemplates any kind of feeling at all … examining it carefully. And it appears to them as completely void, hollow, and insubstantial. For what substance could there be in feeling?

SN 22.95

That fact that feelings, when analyzed, seem to fall apart and no core or essence that is either 'pleasant, painful, or neutral" can be found is a feature not a bug. But I don’t really know that’s just how I like to look at this conundrum. :joy: :pray:

55

Hi Bhante,

It is an interesting topic. @dougsmith made a youtube video about this a few months ago as well https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ax7XBJ8HkBQ. As for me, I find that the simplest explanation is just that some type of semantic drift occurred as follows:

  1. The original message, or at the least the meaning of the original message, would have been “down-to-earth” as you say. Something like, “We experience three types of feelings. When you experience pain, that’s painful, when you experience pleasure, that is pleasurable, when you experience a neutral feeling that is a neutral feeling.” In English at least, it is not uncommon to add emphasis like I have done here to indicate that for the purposes at hand we don’t need a more complicated analysis at the moment.

  2. This was actually said like, or got translated to something like, “We experience three types of feelings. When you experience pain, that’s just painful, when you experience pleasure, that’s just pleasurable, when you experience a neutral feeling , that’s just a neutral feeling.” Notice how the English word “just” can be used in different ways: to indicate exclusivity or to mean something like “simply.” The word “just” here does not have any semantic meaning in itself but instead indicates that (for the purposes at hand) the situation is not complicated.

  3. It is not hard to see how the above gets translated into what you have shown.

Of course, the weakness of this theory is that I have not explained how this would have happened in Pali.

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56

Namo Buddhaya!

The op question is philosophically akin to asking whether one is only in one place at a time.

And there are many way to dissect it

But it will turn out that thiking like this is inadequate, as in a sense all observable universe is in motion all the time and the relative position of everything changes nonsensicly fast such that nothing is ever still over any conceivable length of time, and the relative positions change by the time it takes you to measure anything.

With feelings it is analogically not possible to exactly discern where one ends and another begins because consciousness changes as it persists such that by the time you apprehend a feeling it would’ve changed.

It is also analogical to the concept of ‘now’. Is it one now at a time?
Is it the same now in the beginning, in the middle and in the end of any experience?
… any measurement?
… any experiment?
… any observation?
… any consciousness?
… any thought?
… any feeling?
… any length of time?
… any space?

So when one thinks about any length of time one has to assert change in regards to what was, what is and will follow.

And so the question is flawed, is there only one feeling at a one time, because to say at a time means ‘any length of time’ and the world is never exactly the same in the beggining middle and the end of any period, and relatively speaking nothing is the same in the beggining middle and the end.

If we take ‘at one time’ to be not about the beginning middle and end, but supose we want to only talk about the middle, one can delineate a difference and talk about the middle but one can’t separate them because a middle Is thus only called in relation to a beginning & end.

One can also see that this ties to paradoxes like this

If one would want to use the same logic that there is used to show motion to be paradoxical, one can make a case against discernment being possible if one asserts that there is only one feeling at a time.

It would follow that nothing can be felt because one would have to feel something else first ad infinitum.

With all this being said one also can’t say that one can be two places at the same time or feel two feelings at once.

57

I think it’s helpful to consider how Vedana arises. How exactly a vedana arises given a particular sense object? We can see that different types of Vedana arises for the same object and We can also see that Vedana is tied to that particular experience. While one person might consider a sensation as pain, another will consider it as pleasure.

Why does it happen? I think it’s due to the mind state or sankharas that are active before Vedana arises. I also think Vedana is not merely feelings and more like comparison. It compares the new sensation/object to the current mind state and gives rise to pleasant/unpleasant/neutral.

58

This should not be an issue at all. Anyone with strong enough Sati/Samadhi can observe that only one moment of consciousness (and therefore feeling) arises in the present moment. This is not even Lokuttara Dhamma. The issue is absolutely clear cut, what the Lord Buddha said in DN 15:28.7 = MN 74:10.1 is correct, only one feeling can ever be experienced at a time. It is only Moha that makes it seem otherwise.

59

I believe, when Buddha talks about one perceptions or feeling at a time, he speak about perceptions and feelings that have become aware, that have caught the eye, nose…mind. But most perceptions are not like this. There are during a day biljons of visuals, smells, sounds etc. that are perceived/detected but not caught by the eye, ear…mind.

What is caught by the eye, ear…mind that is always a situation of engagement of the mind (MN28). But many things are noticed, perceived, seen, heard etc. but no engagement takes place.
Mind can detect things but that does not mean that it catches the eye, ear…mind. This seems to be the situation.

If we would become aware of ALL we see, hear, feel, the brain would explode and be quickly overloaded. We see, hear etc many more things thenn becomes aware via engagement.

So there is perceiving that does not become aware and is more like detecting.
But still these perception play a role in decision-making processes.
It is not that this info plays no role.

In this sense, what we become aware of is such a small part of what we perceive.

60

This talk tries to clarify some of the points in this thread:

61

Perhaps its referring to meditation?

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