Was it only a week ago that a blizzard shut down the East Coast? And now our fearless leaders have involved us in a war in the Middle East.
We’ve been exploring the Four Foundations of Mindfulness, a teaching we looked at last fall and now have returned to for a deeper look. Why is this teaching so important?
When the young Siddartha Gautama who became the Buddha discovered the existence of aging, sickness, and death, he changed his life. He gave up the comforts of life in the castle - security, beauty, sensual pleasures, position, career as head of his clan, even family, and went in search of a better response to what he had learned.
What he discovered was awakening. First he basked in the happiness of his enlightenment and reviewed how it had come about. When he was persuaded that some people might understand, he went in search of his fellow travelers. As he was walking along the road, he was met by a traveler who, noting his radiant countenance, asked him about his radiance. The Buddha replied, I am awake. The traveler hurried off without looking back perhaps fearing that this person was not only a nutcase but possibly dangerous to boot.
But the new Buddha’s reply conveyed the essence of the fruits of the practice - why we all practice to this day. To wake up. To be awake, alert, clearly seeing, mind not ajumble with half-perceived thoughts and emotions, clouded by doubts and dark thoughts, endlessly pulled around by our desires and aversions. He was awake, calm, peaceful, centered. And thoughtful. He realized he needed to be more subtle than to proclaim he was awake and expect people to immediately follow him. He also realized that everyone he ever hoped to share the teachings with had to come to it from the same direction he had - from understanding suffering and wanting the end of suffering. Thus, one of his first teachings was the Four Noble Truths - the truth of suffering and how realizing that truth deeply leads to the path out of suffering, leads to understanding the causes for suffering, that suffering can end, and the way out of suffering - the 8-Fold Path.
The Four Foundations of Mindfulness was the how of practice - how we practice to become free of suffering.
The first foundation mindfulness is mindfulness of the body culminating in practices that bring us into direct contemplation of the fact of our own mortality, that this body is made up of interconnecting parts, of all the same qualities as all matter, and that this body is impermanent, will sicken, age, and die and when it dies, it will decay, crumble and return to earth.
Why is it so important to realize or understand the fact of death and dissolution of this human body?
The answer lies in the fact that not being fully awake to our own mortality is largely responsible for our lack of clarity, our dark, jumbled half understood inner world. We only need to have a near miss on the highway, or stumble on a set of steep steps or get a piece pf food caught in our throats to experience the spike of fear that tells us how we feel about dying. Our settled stable life can be set a-jangle with a direct experience that threatens our lives. Depending on a number of factors, our reactions can range from momentary upset to PTSD.
But being awake is not about being in a state of terror. To some extent, we already are there. There is a field called Terror Management Theory. On the one hand it sounds preposterous and on the other, it seems about time. Existential terror is alive for everyone at some point in their lives - for some it can be held at bay until it can’t. For others, it is more pervasive, closer to hand.
But one of the studies which is especially relevant today is that unacknowledged terror can have some extremely negative consequences. This I learned from the course on Sattipathana I am taking with Venerable Analayo and can be found in his book The Sattispatthana Sutta: A Practice Guide. Subjects were divided into two groups. One group was driven by a graveyard everyday. No mention was made of the graveyard, no attention was drawn to it. They just drove by it every day. The other group existed in identical circumstances except no drive by the graveyard. In subsequent testing which involved questions of how much punishment or leniency fictitious offenders should be given, the group that drove by the graveyard recommended tougher sentences and less leniency than the group that didn’t get any graveyard exposure. The implication seemed to be that the low level of exposure to death every day without any processing of what they saw or felt made the subjects less compassionate, perhaps more callous to the suffering of those being sentenced.
I’ve been a resister of AI from the beginning but I want to share what AI had to say when I looked up Terror Management Theory:
Terror Management Theory (TMT) is a social psychological framework proposing that human behavior is largely motivated by an unconscious fear of death. Developed by Jeff Greenberg, Sheldon Solomon, and Tom Pyszczynski in the 1980s, it posits that people manage this existential terror by adopting cultural worldviews that provide meaning, and by building self-esteem.
Psychology Today +2
Key Aspects of TMT:
The Problem: Humans are biologically driven toward survival but possess the cognitive ability to realize their death is inevitable, creating potential, constant terror.
The Solution (Anxiety Buffers):
This overview may help us make a little sense of what we are living through right now. In the past five years, the world has been confronted with a global pandemic larger than we have ever seen, a breaking point in global warming that suddenly made it clear to everyone through heat waves and huge wild fires on the one hand, and monster storms and droughts on the other that our world had lost the balance we took for granted for so long, and a shift in world view toward authoritarianism and intolerance.
It has made me wonder how the world received the shocks of the Pandemic of 1917-8 and two world wars. The McCarthy era, while bad, was probably one minor element of the aftermath.
It also made me wonder - and this is not scientific but intuitive - if, when the world is confronted with enough death and destruction, the reality of death and the vulnerability of all beings is finally realized by enough people that the arising of compassion and kindness overtakes the aversion and judgement and harshness that the unprocessed terror supports. Maybe that’s more hope than intuition.
Martin Luther King, Jr. said the arc of moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.
But where does this leave us as meditators?
Perhaps this. The Buddha meditated as if his life depended on it. Then he taught as if the lives of others depended on it. Nothing less is at stake here. We have one precious life, one precious opportunity to wake up. We’ve all allowed ourselves to go with the flow and to be lulled by the twin defense of “Not Me!” and “Not Now!” And we’ve all had moments of clarity - this life is all we have. This opportunity to wake up, to be awake is finite.
And…and we have all had experiences of being awake, fully awake in this moment. Perhaps what we lack is the confidence and the knowledge that it is possible for us too to be awake in more moments, to see clearly. When we’ve had those moments, we understand those are the moments when we feel fully alive, with an energy and a love of life and of other beings that surpasses other more worldly pleasures. When we are fully awake in this moment, we have a temporary experience of what the Buddha realized when he was enlightened.
One of the words the Buddha used to describe enlightenment is “the deathless”. Ven. Analayo has written about this deathlessness. The realization of deathlessness is to attain a release from the fear of death, to no longer be held in its basilisk gaze, frozen to the spot.
This is what is possible for us. And the Buddha assures us this is so because he is a human, not a god, and that being awake is possible for all human beings.
Thus, the Four Foundations of Mindfulness. The next critical step through this process of awakening goes through the second foundation which is feeling tone. The Pali word is Vedana. It is the initial spark of positive, negative, or neutral feeling that registers upon contact with a sight, sound, sensation, taste, smell or mental input such as a thought, memory, mood.
We will delve into this important topic of feeling tone and how it connects body and mind next.