Okay, go ahead.
From contact, feeling.
From feeling, craving.
Does every contact always follow with a feeling?
Is it okay to focus more on the liking or disliking than the feeling?
Or is the liking, disliking actually the feeling?
Thank you, Robin.
Okay, so contact actually arises... See, one thing you have to understand about paticcasamuppada, dependent origination, is it doesn't refer to a linear... It isn't linear.
It's not a temporal sequence where first A, then B, then C, then D. It's not chronological.
And that's actually the limitation of dependent origination.
This is why the Buddha said about dependent origination.
He scolded Ananda who said, oh it seems quite easily understandable.
And the Buddha said, what are you crazy?
He said, I didn't say that.
He said, come now Ananda, don't say that.
This is a very difficult thing to understand.
It's very profound, very hard to understand dependent origination.
He scolded Ananda for even suggesting that it's easy.
The reason being that there are 24 different kinds of causality, of causal relationships.
And they're being employed here in different cases.
So to say that contact creates feeling doesn't mean that first there's contact and then there's feeling.
Contact and feeling are a part of the same thing, experience.
But the point is without contact you can't have feeling.
So the Buddha's
explaining that, using that as the teaching.
So, at every experience of seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling, or thinking, the five aggregates all arise.
Sorry, except in the case of the mind, it's not necessary.
In the case of the thinking, it's not necessary.
But the first five senses anyway, there's the physical, there's the feeling, there's sanya, there's sankara and there's vijnana.
Although even with the khandhas it's not quite so clear because sanya and sankara,
only arise, don't arise at every moment.
So you have to go to the Abhidhamma, this is the point.
The 24 types of causality and all the explanations of physical and mental realities.
So in an ordinary experience there are 17 thought moments.
One rupa, one vision, 17 thought moments.
And that's a process of experiencing, discerning, discriminating and deciding and reacting to the experience.
So the experience itself requires contact and each one of those 17 thought moments is going to have Vedana in it, feeling in it.
That's technically speaking.
So that's how you have to understand those two, that actually contact and feeling don't be so, don't mistake that it's chronological because it's not.
But
Actually, every mind state has Veda in it, has a feeling in it, whether it's just a neutral feeling when you first see something or whether it's pleasant or unpleasant feeling, a pleasant or painful feeling when you like or dislike or when you have pain or pleasure in the body.
That's the first question.
The second question is focusing more on liking or disliking than the feeling.
Okay, this is switching gears.
We're talking about something practical.
And as far as the four satipatthana goes, there's no sense that one object is better to focus on than another.
Now, the commentary does say something that certain people should focus on certain satipatthanas.
So in this case, a person with raga charita, a person who is passionate, who has either lots of anger or lots of greed, should focus on vedana, should focus on the feeling.
A person who is Diti Charita, who is more in delusion, involved with delusion and views, wrong view, sort of more cerebral sort of person, should focus more on the Dhammas.
So should focus more on liking, disliking, drowsiness, distraction, doubt, the hindrances.
So that would be the deciding factor.
Is it okay to focus more on the other?
Only in this case where you realize that your problem is more the cerebral side or your problem is more the visceral sort of feeling side, vedana side.
And is liking, disliking actually the feeling?
No, they are two very different things.
Liking and disliking are accompanied by specific feelings, but the feelings, certain feelings may arise separate.
Now, the only exception is with Domanasa.
So a painful mental feeling is
It's not synonymous but can only arise, you could for all intents and purposes call it synonymous with disliking because it only arises with disliking.
disliking and the painful mental feeling are for all intents and purposes one and the same.
Now, according to the Abhidhamma, according to the orthodoxy, they are not.
They are two separate aspects of the mind state, which makes sense because disliking is a judgment, painful mental feeling is a feeling.
I'm still a little bit suspicious.
Practically speaking, they are really one and the same, a negative mental interpretation of something.
But on the other hand, a positive mental feeling isn't necessarily liking.
So happiness, mental pleasure,
can arise with wholesomeness.
When a person cultivates wholesomeness, it can even arise with a functional mind.
An arahat can have a pleasant mental feeling, but they can't have an unpleasant mental feeling.
Interesting.
It's just more complicated than that, according to the texts.