‘Meditation’ 2017 Nov-Dec

Mettā – Healing the Egoic Shadow of Love

This is Post 27 in the ‘Meditation Guidance’ series. Summaries of the other articles in this series can be found by clicking here.

When we rest as Consciousness, the Feeling aspect of that experience is the brahmavihāra of mettā, or Loving Kindness. Mettā is associated in Buddhist tradition with the colour red, with the end of the day, and with sunset. Although, in Western tradition, the Feeling function is associated with the water element, in Indian tradition it is associated with the element of fire.

In the poetry and imagination of India (and that of the first nation peoples of North America) fire is the element that turns the gross into the subtle, that cooks and transforms things, that extracts bright metals from dull ores. When the body is cremated, fire helps the soul on its journey to the heavenly realms. Fire is the element that radiates a nourishing warmth – but we instinctively recoil from it when it threatens to scorch us. It is the upward-rising and aspirational element that dances, and appears to reach up to heaven. All this fire imagery provides eloquent symbolism of the Feeling function. In India, the Hindu religious ascetic, or sannyasin, will usually put on robes that are the colour of fire when he or she abandons the worldly life – signifying the fire of their aspiration, and the self-transformation that they are undertaking.

In the context of the mandalas of the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, the fiery Feeling function in the red Western Quadrant appears to carry us upward from the earthy Sensation function in the yellow Southern Quadrant, to the airy function of Volition / Intuition in the green Northern Quadrant. The downward-flowing water element in the blue, or white, Eastern Quadrant, which symbolises the Thinking function, carries us back down to the yellow Southern Quadrant, the earth element, and the Sensation function, and so completes the cycle. The elements, in this context, are symbols of the cognitive-perceptual functions that Indian tradition calls the skandhas – something that students of the mandala wisdom need to be keenly aware of.

It is traditional among the Tibetan people to orientate their maps to the path of the sun, so they put the blue eastern sunrise point at the bottom of the mandala, and the red western sunset point at the top – so the way in which the element symbolism highlights the cyclical process of the mandala is unfortunately usually lost. While it is very much my wish to honour the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, I find the western-style orientation of the mandala, which puts the north-point at the top, to be much more symbolically meaningful.

The archetypal symbolism of the two axes – the two main pairs of polarities within the mandala – are so important. By placing the Earth-Air axis vertically, with the Earth Element, which in Buddhist tradition symbolises the basic and foundational skandha of vedanā (Sensation) at the bottom; and the Air Element, which symbolises the subtle and energetic skandha of samskaras (Intuition/Volition) at the top, we allow the mandala to express important truths that would otherwise be missed – important truths that in other traditions might be suggested symbolically by the dichotomies of Heaven and Earth, or Spirit and Matter.

A Four-fold Embodiment of Consciousness

The foundational stages of meditation practice require that we familiarise ourselves deeply with embodied Consciousness in all four of the surface bodies, and one of our best guides to this four-fold embodiment is the cycle of the four brahmavihāras. The Emotional Body is the third of the surface bodies, and is associated with the Western Quadrant of the mandala, and with the brahmavihāra of mettā. It is the Emotional Body that is felt most keenly in the region of the maṇipūra, or Solar Plexus Chakra, which is a point in the centre of the trunk of body just below the sternum, which I have written about in the previous post (here). Continue reading

December 1, 2017

Mettā – Living as Love and Contentment

This is Post 26 in the ‘Meditation Guidance’ series. Summaries of the other articles in this series can be found by clicking here.

It has been the experience of the ancient meditation traditions of India and Tibet that the internal space of the human body is filled with not one but seven different energetic, or somatic, fields – the seven auras, or ‘subtle bodies’. Many readers will already be aware that each deeper layer in the succession of auric layers is slightly larger than the last, so that the layers that are closer to the surface are enclosed within the deeper ones.

An important feature of this spiritual anatomy that readers may not be aware of however, is the way the polarity of the layers alternates between receptive and expansive – yin and yang – and in way that is opposite in the two sexes. I have outlined this phenomenon in previous posts (here and here) and will be returning to it – this understanding is essential, in my view, for the meditator, and provides wonderful insights into the very different emotional life of men and women.

An understanding of the ways in which these fields of our spiritual anatomy interpenetrate each other and interact, is very useful information for the meditator. Of the seven fields, by far the most important are the first four, which I have been calling the surface bodies – these are somatic fields through which our sense of ‘being a person’ finds a sense of energetic embodiment. While these four key subtle bodies, and the relationships between them, are most comprehensively described by the meditation mandalas of Tibetan Buddhism, the implicit description of embodied Consciousness that we find in the four brahmavihāras of early Buddhism (and in the pre-Buddhist teaching of the four brahmavihāras) gives us a much simpler ‘way in’ to this mandala wisdom.

Each of the subtle bodies is felt most keenly at the points in the body that we call the chakras. So, as previously in connection with the Mental Body and the subtle Physical Body (which I described here and here), we will find it useful in understanding our experience of the Emotional Body when we are resting as Consciousness, if we look briefly at the traditional Indian description of the Solar Plexus Chakra, which is outlined below.

The Manipūra Chakra – City of Jewels

The traditional Indian name of the third chakra, the chakra at the Solar Plexus, is maṇipūra, which is a Sanskrit word made up of the word maṇi, which means ‘jewel’, and pūra, which means city or place. Maṇipūra gives us an image of a sort of paradise – a place of extraordinary wealth and beauty – sparkling and radiant. In this context, the image of a landscape glittering with jewels is being used to symbolise not only ultimate beauty and value, but also unlimited ease, grace, contentment and happiness – a world of pleasurable and joyful feelings. Continue reading

November 15, 2017

Feeling – The Discernment of Goodness, Value and Beauty

This is Post 25 in the ‘Meditation Guidance’ series. Summaries of the other articles in this series can be found by clicking here.

While there is much more that could be said about the brahmavihāra of Sympathetic Joy and the Southern Quadrant of the mandala, we need now to move clockwise round the mandala to the Western Quadrant, to the function of Feeling (the samjñā skandha of Buddhist tradition), and to the brahmavihāra of Loving Kindness, or mettā (Pali), or maitrī (Sanskrit). Although in general I like to use Sanskrit, the classical language of Indian spiritual discourse, and the language of the magnificent but no longer existing tradition of Indian Mahayana Buddhism, I prefer, out of habit, to use the more familiar Pali word mettā, for Loving Kindness, rather than equivalent Sanskrit word maitrī (pronounced ‘my-tree’).

Even those who are unfamiliar with the four brahmavihāras as a mandala map of Consciousness, such as I have been presenting, may well have heard of mettā, which is the most well-known of the four. And some will perhaps be familiar with a form of the popular Buddhist meditation practice called the mettā bhāvanā, or ‘Cultivation of the Loving Kindness’. Because of this, I have already written one post about mettā (here) in my introduction to the brahmavihāras at the beginning of this ‘Meditation Guidance’ series.

In that previous post, I explained that mettā is most frequently presented in a way that does not clearly distinguish it from karuṇā (Compassion), muditā (Sympathetic Joy), and fails to acknowledge the important connection between mettā and upekṣā (Equanimity). Because I believe so strongly that a deeper understanding the whole mandala of the brahmavihāras constitutes such a powerful framework for self-enquiry and meditation, I would like now to return to the themes of that previous post.

Distinguishing Feeling from Sensation

In order to fully understand and distinguish the nature of mettā, we need first to understand that function of psychological cognition that we call Feeling, and in order to understand Feeling, it is extremely important for us to make a clear distinction between Feeling and Sensation – something that not all psychological models achieve. Indeed these two words are unfortunately often used interchangeably in English and other languages – and this causes much confusion. The distinction I make between the perceptual sensing function of Sensation and evaluative and discriminative function of Feeling follows both Carl Jung and the Buddhist tradition. I also draw on Marshall Rosenberg’s Nonviolent Communication model and various others who have also recognised and described this universal four-fold pattern, which I have some sometimes called the Mandala of Love, or more simply, ‘the mandala’.

November 6, 2017