The Fetter of Perceptions

When I first went to stay with the Ajaan Fuang and read Ajaan Lee’s instructions on the breath energy going through the nerves, around the muscles of the body, and through the different organs of the torso, I didn’t realize it, but part of me thought of it as kind of make-believe. Until one day I was sitting, meditating and noticed that there was something strange with the breath in my back, or what seemed to be breath in my back. I changed it, and then I had a lot of movement around in my intestines, and I belched. I saw the connection, “Oh, it really is connected: the sensations in the breath, breath sensations in the nerves, and movement of breath through the body.” I went down that evening and mentioned it to Ajaan Fuang, saying, “This really is true. There’s breath in the nerves.” He looked at me and it looked like he was a little insulted. He said, “Of course it’s true.”

Which made me reflect: My ideas about what was really going on in my body were maybe just one way of relating to the body. Maybe there were other ways of relating that were just as true, and maybe even more useful. After all, when you think of the breath energy flowing through the nerves, then once the breath starts getting comfortable, you can think of that comfortable breath going down through the nerves. When you have the assumption that it’s all connected, it makes it easier for this to happen.

So we have to question our perceptions, even about our own bodies, about our own feelings. There’s an of-course-ness to them: This is the way we’ve interpreted them all along and it’s worked perfectly fine. But for the purpose of gaining some detachment from the body and detachment from our physical feelings, maybe we need other perceptions. Maybe we have to go back and look more carefully at what seems to be just the raw experience of having a body sitting here, or the raw experience of feelings. Maybe there are some perceptions in there that we’re not noticing.

When we think of the word, “perception,” two things come to mind. One is a mental image, a picture, and another is a word, a name you apply to things. But there’s a third kind of perception, which is more related to your motor sense of the body. That has to do with certain feelings that go together with your idea of the breath. Start with the breath. Ask yourself, when you breathe in: Where do you think you have to feel the breath for it to count that the breath is actually coming in? One way of testing this is noticing the sensations that you have as you breathe in, and asking yourself: Can you disconnect those sensations? For instance, if there’s a feeling that you have to pull the breath up through the nose into the forehead, what happens if you stop creating those sensations? Will the breath still come in? Of course, it’ll come in. What other parts of the body seem to be pulling it in? See if you can relax those so that they stay in a state of suspended relaxation. Will the breath still come in? Well, yes, it will. You begin to realize: Your perceptions were lying to you.

Now, sometimes you can perceive of the breath coming in a way that actually is helpful for creating a sense of well-being in the body. But if you find that the way you’re perceiving the breath is creating tension—especially if you feel like you’re pulling it in from the nose to the back of the head—that’s going to create a lot of tension in the back of the neck, down in the shoulders. You don’t really have to perceive it that way. At first you feel kind of lost: You’re not breathing in the way you felt you had to. How do you know that you’re going to breathe? How can you trust the body to breathe? It’ll breathe. Don’t worry. It breathes perfectly fine at night when you’re asleep.

In this way, you begin to get a sense that even your direct relationship to your own body, which seems to be the most intimate relationship you have, is filtered through these perceptions.

You can apply the same insight to your feelings of pain in different parts of the body. Pain does happen in the body, but it doesn’t have to make inroads into the mind. And by “mind” here, we don’t mean just the part of the mind that’s talking about it. It’s also our awareness. There’s a filter of perceptions between the actual sensation of pain and how it registers in the mind. That filter is going to determine how you respond to it, what you make of it.

For me, one of the real revelations came in the series of Dhamma talks Ajaan MahaBoowa gave to a woman who was dying of cancer. He told her of the questions he asked about pain in his body while he was meditating: He was sitting one night and, a minute in, all of a sudden the pain in the body got really, really severe, as if his whole body were on fire. So he started asking himself questions about the pain. One of them was, “Is the pain the same thing as the body?”

Now, in line with the way we talk to one another about pain among ourselves, we would say, “Of course not.” But how does the mind actually talk to itself about the pain? You have to remember: Our first encounters with pain were back in the days when we didn’t have any language, and we related to it in terms of our motor reactions and our beginning perceptions. A lot of those perceptions are still sloshing around in the mind and they can have a big influence on how we perceive things, and in particular how we relate to the pain. So even though the question, “Is the pain the same thing as the body?” may seem strange, when you actually look at your experience of the pain, it seems to be that way. And because it seems to have invaded the body, we feel really oppressed by it. So can we perceive it as separate?

This is where the Buddha’s analysis of the sensations of the body into the four properties becomes useful. The four properties of earth, water, wind, and fire, or solidity, coolness, energy, and warmth are the components of your sense of the body as you feel it from within. The pains are something different. They may be in the same place, but they’re a different sort of thing. Can you see the difference? If you can, then you can just stay with those four properties as your object of focus. Let the pain be on another channel or another frequency.

Or you can try other questions: Does the pain have an intention? Is it out to get you? Will the pain spread if you allow it to? In other words, there can be that fear that once the pain happens it’s going to spread through the body unless you tense up around it to stop it. Is that going on? Or where is the worst spot of the pain right now, the most intense spot? Usually that’s the spot we’re trying to run away from, but you can say, “No, I’m not going to run away.” Chase it down and you’ll find that it keeps moving. It’s like a little bead of mercury. Nowadays, they don’t allow kids to play with mercury. Back when I was a kid, if the thermometer broke, they’d let you play with the mercury for a while. You’d push on it and it would scoot around really quickly. You’ll find that the sharpest spot of the pain, if you actually try to chase it down, is like that. It’s not quite what or where you thought it was.

All this should help loosen up your perceptions, the idea that “The way I perceive the world is the way it is.” There are lots of different true perceptions of the world. Think of all our different sciences. Take a piece of rock: Geology will talk about it in one way, physics in another way, subatomic physics it in another way, paleontology in another way. All that they say is true, but it’s true for different purposes. So what perceptions of the body, what perceptions of pain, are true for the purpose of gaining release, of learning how not to suffer?

You can answer that question only when you first are willing to admit to yourself: “The way I’m perceiving my body may not be the most useful way of perceiving it, and my direct experience of the body, my direct experience of the pain, may not be quite as direct as I thought it was.” That’s a lot of what meditation is all about: Things happening that seem very obvious are not necessarily that way. There’s more going on than you usually see, and you have to be willing to question things, open things up. And precisely which questions will work for you, and which questions will work today and maybe not work tomorrow: That really depends on where you’re clinging, where you’re craving. All too often, we’re not really clear about where our clingings and cravings are focused. The Buddha notes that your craving is located at a particular point. It may be located on a sensation, or on your perception of the sensation, or maybe on your thoughts about the sensation, or on your evaluation of the sensation. There’s a lot going on here. There are many layers. This means that a question that works in opening things up today for you may not work for somebody else or may not even work for you tomorrow.

Which means that you have to be willing to attack the issue from different directions, to pry out and see exactly what are the perceptions that are happening. This is one of the reasons why we have to get the mind into concentration, to get it really still, so that we can see things that are really subtle going on inside. When things are really still, you can see an individual perception arise. You catch it at the moment when it arises and you can see, “Oh, as soon as that perception comes, that label I put on the pain, it has an impact on the mind.” When you catch it that quickly, then you let it go quickly.

You see that what the Buddha said is true. There are some things that, as soon as one thing arises, something else will arise together with it. And when the first thing passes away, the other thing will pass away with it. That happens in the mind, and you have the choice of allowing that first thing to arise or not. You can let it go. This is why the Buddha was so insistent that what we’re experiencing right now is not just the result of our past actions. It’s past actions combined with present actions—and we’re so blind to what our present actions are that we tend to do them unskillfully.

Even when we’re sitting here very quietly—the breath is still, the mind is still—there’s a lot going on. But we’re gliding across the surface. We’re not probing around and asking questions about how we relate to our bodies, how we relate to our feelings, and how we can do it differently.

So look at the way you talk to yourself about things. Look at the way you perceive things. And if you’re not sure that you’re talking to yourself, there’s actually a layer of commentary going on almost all the time. Sometimes there’s commentary on the commentary, and commentary on the commentary on the commentary. You’re not going to see these things unless you get the mind really still and start asking questions. As I said this afternoon, if you don’t see anything happening at all, use, say, one of Ajahn MahaBoowa’s perceptions or one of Ajaan Lee’s perceptions, and see if part of the mind balks and says, “Well, that’s not real. That’s just kind of make-believe.” Okay, what’s real, then?

It’s not as if you’re dealing with direct experience and the ajaans are imposing some weird perceptions on top of it. You’ve got your experiences filtered through your perceptions. And the question is, which perceptions are more useful, and more useful for what purpose? One of the reasons this is a training is because people who have gone before us have found that certain perceptions, certain ways of talking to yourself, will really make a difference in heading in the right direction. So maybe your perceptions are true, but other perceptions can also be true. Your perceptions may be true for some purposes, but you want to try on the perceptions that are useful for getting the mind free.

So look. Ask questions. Use your ingenuity. That’s the only way you’ll learn.