Over the years of studying the dharma I have come to understand most of the Buddha’s teachings. However, there is a teaching that I have not really fully understood. This is a small part of one of the Five Skandhas which is often translated as heaps or aggregates. I have talked about the Skandhas previously in these writings. I hope this little exploration of the topic will help both you and me to understand more fully this important Buddhist teaching.
You may recall that the second Skandha is Vedanā, often translated as ‘feeling’ but that is not a very good translation and can actual be rather misleading as we tend to think of feelings in terms of our emotions. Emotions are deep and complex thought patterns not arising until the fifth Skandha. However, Vedanā is something different, it is an initial basic response to an experience. This response can be one of three types; either pleasant, unpleasant or neutral.
But before starting to look at neutral Vedanā I want to just map out the dharmic terrain of how we get to the Vedanas. The Five Skandhas are the process of how we arrive at the sense of self. How the I is created, the mental hoops we traverse when we experience something and our relationship to that thing develops.
The first Skandha is Rupa. You may have come across this term when people are talking about the Buddha statue in our shrine room. Rupa is the thing that we are experiencing, such as a statue of the Buddha. However, it is not the concrete thing itself but only our first sensed experience of it. So the mental state that is the first response to our sensing an object. So Buddhism is not interested that much in the thing or experience in the world, but it is very interested in our response to that thing in our own individual internal world. By our senses we create a sort of mental map of what is around us and affecting us. That map and the individual points on it all come under the term Rupa.
The next part, the second Skandha, is our first reaction to that experience, this is Vedana. Traditionally there are three ways of reacting with a thing, three separate minds-states we take on or that form our reaction. The way we react is dependant on our habits, that is dependant on the karma vipāka already created. So on previous experience of coming into contact with this thing or something similar. We can react positively or negatively. We can like the experience and so be drawn towards it or we can dislike the experience and draw back from it. So if we see a good friend in the distance we will, probably unconsciously quicken our pace towards that good friend. And as you might expect if we spot an ‘enemy’ then will will slow down and try to avoid that person. All of this happens before our conscious mind has engaged with, or even noticed the person in front of us.
So in this way, depending on the experience, the Rupa in-front of us, we crave it or are repelled by it.
But there is a middle ground in the Vedanas. The third Vedana is described as neither pleasant or painful but neutral. This neutral position is often talked about as only being held briefly, before moving to the painful or pleasant states. This is the teaching that I have never gotten my mind around. Maybe because it appears to be a brief interlude that I have never been too concerned with its full implication.
So from my description it might seem that this neutral position is the place to be. So not being reactive to the situation, just staying calm maybe? It might seem like by holding a middle position we are keeping on the Middle Way. We could think that this middle position is on the path to the higher state of Equanimity (Upekṣāin sanskrit, Upekkhāin Pali). The state of Equanimity is the final part of the Brahma Viharas meditation practice, the first being the Metta Bhavana. This is self-less Metta meeting the worldly winds. But this is not the case, Upekkha being a higher state is outside of ego clinging and grasping, so is therefore outside of the Vedanas, outside the Five Skandhas. So the neutral Vedana is actually the near enemy of Equanimity. Fooling us into thinking that we are making progress when in fact we are just indifferent to the experiences we are meeting. We need to fully experience to be able to go beyond and see the fallacy of the ‘self’ that experiences.
When Sangharakshita was asked to return to the UK from India in 1964 he noticed that many people in the British Sangha were in a strange state. This state he described as Alienated Awareness. They had been practising a type of intense meditation that left them cut-off from their experience of the world around them. They thought they were in a higher mental state but actually they were just lost. Sangharakshita tried to stop the monks teaching this type of meditation but met with fierce resistance. This was one of the reason he decided to start a new Buddhist movement so that he could teach more appropriate meditation techniques, that would foster higher mental states and lead to true insight. Thus at the Buddhist Centre we now teach the Mindfulness of Breathing and the Metta Bhavana, both keeping us fully engaged with our experience, whether it be pleasant or painful.
So this neutral Vedanā took a back-seat and was overshadowed by its siblings of pleasant and unpleasant Vedanas. However, since the Covid pandemic there has been more interest from the psychiatric world about this sort of alienated state. I have also met more people who seem to be caught in this neutral state for longer than is good for them.
I have read a number of recent articles that talk about these types of alienated state, often referred to as ‘Anhedonic states’. This term is from the Greek word for pleasurable hēdonikós, with the addition of the negative prefix ‘an’, meaning a lack of pleasure or of the capacity to experience it. So this inability to experience pleasure, and not forgetting pain, we can see as falling into the Neutral Vedana. So instead of just being a brief interlude before the full experience occurs, we get trapped in this neutral state. After a severe illness, whilst recovering we can find ourselves in this neutral state, and it may take awhile for us to fully recover and feel like fully engaging with the world. However, the Neutral Vedana can also be a chosen defence strategy. A way of avoiding strong emotions by not allowing ourselves to experience them. In this way we become cut-off from the world around us. And if it persists for too long this anhedonic state can lead eventually to depression.
From a Buddhist perspective, we may know that we create the Karma Vipaka, the future response or habit of Vedana. If our overiding habit is Neutral then that doesn’t allow us to experience the full range of Vedanas, but keeps us in a blocked state. This then has a knock-on effect on the next three Skanda’s of perception, volition and consciousness. Thus creating ourselves with an ‘Alienated Awareness’ without full engagement with the world in which we live.
We all go through periods in our life when we feel flat and cut-off from the world that surrounds us. But we must be careful that they don’t last for too long and that we apply an antidote to free us from this neutral state. The antidote is available to all of us at the Buddhist Centre, it is the positive effect of friendship, especially deep and meaningful friendship that forms our Sangha. It is the engagement with others, engagement with people, whether that engagement is pleasant or painful that will show us how to fully experience ourselves. And it is the engagement with Metta, the practice of the Metta Bhavana, that can take us out of our own petty concerns and lead us to help others in a truly self-less way, and that is Sangha as part of the Three Refuges.
So, if you need to, apply the antidote and come down to the Centre and engage with the Ipswich Sangha. This month at the Centre we have the Padmasambhava festival, the celebration of the Greatly Precious Guru. If you don’t know what this is about then now is your chance to sample the magic.
See you soon
Bodhivamsa
