“But I’m not sure whether I’m just imagining it” is something I often hear from people who are starting to be able to tune into the felt sense of metta.
At a certain point, the metta practice becomes less about generating the felt sense, and more about listening to it, with sensitivity and appreciation, in such a way that one can begin to become more easily absorbed into it.
And it’s natural, when we’re listening for something, to want to hear what’s really there; if we’re anticipating a guest, many other things can begin to sound like a knock at the door, and we can become prone to false positives.
Practitioners who are smart, meta-cognitive, and have a healthy wariness of the power of confirmation bias don’t want to accidentally fool themselves into thinking that they’re experiencing metta, when they really aren’t. So it can seem like a good idea, good epistemological hygiene, to try to get rid of one’s expectations and preconceptions, and to approach the sensations in the body with as neutral a state of mind as possible.
As sensible as this view may seem, it can actually be a stance that hinders the development of metta at this point. Being confronted with the limitations of this view of looking for what’s “really real” in our experience is also what makes this junction such a fertile place to begin to develop some insight into the nature of perception.
There’s no test you can do to detect ‘deliciousness’ in a food, no matter how precise and accurate your equipment is. Deliciousness depends on how the food you have interacts with what tastebuds you have. Different animals have very different compositions of tastebuds; for instance, cats cannot taste sweetness at all; they lack the receptor entirely. And of course experience - even just of taste - is determined by more than just the state of your tastebuds; it’s also constructed by your history, expectations, beliefs, conditioning, attention, view, and yes - imagination. We have a lot of control over some of these, and we can develop flexibility and range in our ways of experiencing as a skill by playing creatively with them.
This skill in playing with perception in meditation really isn't that far from learning to experience more deliciousness in food. Actually there is a lot we can do to impact the experience of eating the same food - presentation, expectation, setting, taking the time to savour it, etc. etc. But to make the thought experiment neater and more compelling, let's imagine that you could just learn to modify your own tastebuds at will. If you could do that, it would become clear why this question "but I'm not sure whether I'm just imagining the deliciousness" is a category error.
Deliciousness was never something in the food in the first place; no matter how much skill you develop in altering your tastebuds, it wouldn’t get you any closer to accurately perceiving which foods are really and truly delicious. There’s not any objective truth there could be about that. And everything that’s ever in your direct experience is like this; it’s a product of interaction, not an objective representation of some real property.*
In a similar way, the skill we’re developing in service of samadhi is more like learning how to experience deliciousness - more like savouring - than like perceiving with dry accuracy what sensations are really there. It’s not like there’s a perfectly formed, defined, discrete sensation or emotion hanging around somewhere “in the body” (or “in the brain”) waiting to be perceived, just as there was no deliciousness waiting to be perceived “in the food”.
If you’re starting to feel something that might be metta, and you try to establish whether that feeling is “real” or not by adopting more of a probing, close attention to moment-to-moment local sensory experience (because that feels more objective), you probably will find that the experience changes or even goes away - but that doesn’t mean that it was made up! That close, probing, moment-to-moment attention to local sensory experience is just one way of looking, and it’s very useful and appropriate for some things, but not others.
If the sensations that you're noticing in metta practice feel like they might be influenced by the fact that you're expecting them to arise, or you're looking in a certain way, well that's also true for all other sensations! It's just that the ways of looking that inform our ordinary experience are so habitual and agreed upon that they go unquestioned.
This course is for samadhi rather than insight, but they overlap inevitably, and this is the link to insight practice. Part of what insight is is learning to notice how perceptions are constructed, and the constructedness of experience gets clearer and clearer the more skill you develop in playing with perception in these ways, and the more readily you’re able to loosen your more habitual ways of looking.
So experience is constructed, and you can construct it differently depending on how you relate to it. This is true also, of course, of the felt sense of metta. So the question isn’t “is metta really, actually there, truly?”, it’s: “how can I relate to this experience in such a way that a felt sense of metta unfolds and becomes stable, beautiful, supportive, lovely, expansive?”
And that question has no end - you don’t land on a final answer, just as you don’t land on a final, fixed answer to the question of how to relate beautifully with a partner. It develops and unfolds organically in new and unexpected ways, and will admit of a range of different answers at different times. It’s divergent - it opens up more and more over time - rather than convergent - narrowing in on a single correct answer.
The Energy Body
Development in noticing how perceptions are constructed also tends to correspond with skill in perceiving and working with what's often called the 'energy body', or ‘subtle body’.
Usually our perception of the body is heavily filtered, largely conceptual, and inextricable with our activities; we don’t feel the raw sensations themselves, we feel ‘pointing’, ‘making a fist’, ‘hammering’, ‘opening the lid of this jam jar’, ‘putting on socks’, etc.
Because so much of the sensation potentially perceptible in our hands is completely irrelevant day to day, and it would be very energy-consuming and distracting to be aware of it all the time, our brains don’t bother including all that stuff in our perceptions. But if you sit and watch your hand (and not your concepts about your hand) closely for a little while, you’ll see ‘below’ the normal perceptions and experience it more like a formless cloud of ever-changing sensations. This is a partial glimpse of the experience of the energy body. (and yes, this is an example of where a dry scrutiny of moment to moment sensations might be helpful at first!)
The energy body is often described subjectively as a kind of “second body”, or separate layer of sensations, beneath the coarser and more obvious ones. Because it’s subtle, and requires seeing past our usual conceptual layer of experience, it requires some degree of samadhi to experience at all. Until then, it just sounds rather mysterious, but it’s referring to a fairly straightforward direct experience that you can have.
As you might expect, the experience of the energy body can vary enormously between people and depending on which practice you’re doing, but common descriptions are of moving or circling energy, tingly sensations, goosebumps, electric currents, or something like a kind of wind or breeze subtly moving through the body. It may become more and less intense in sync with the breath. It can feel dense and uncomfortable and knotted, or bright, clear, open, joyful, and spacious. In the context of metta practice, it’s often experienced as warm and glowy.
The energy body is malleable and responsive to your way of relating. This is the ‘level’ of experience at which emotional sensations are felt, at which the experience of joy, pleasure, rapture, and peace are felt, and, of course, it’s the level where the felt sense of metta tends to be felt as well.
This is why the deepening of metta, wellbeing, and samadhi are deeply tied to your experience of the energy body: because the energy body is the level at which metta and wellbeing can be stably felt, and it’s this powerful quality of wellbeing that unifies the mind into deeper samadhi. This process depends on being able to stay with subtle experiences at this level, rather than the coarse, conceptually-laden level of body sensations that we’re used to.
I hope you can see why the view I mentioned before - “but what are the actual real sensations that are really there?” - tends to prevent the experience of the energy body from opening to joy and love. Passionless scrutiny is not particularly supportive as a condition for opening up to and becoming absorbed in love and wellbeing on the level of the energy body.
So what is? That’s the question that we’ll begin to touch on in this section, and go much deeper into in the next section. It’s far from exhaustive, of course, but it points out some approaches that I expect will be helpful.
You’ll start to experience the energy body at some point in your practice, and I’ll refer to it at times in the meditations especially from Section Three onwards, but don’t worry too much if this seems a little mysterious at the moment.
*Bear in mind that we’re just talking about the nature of experience here, not making any claims about what’s true about the world. Buddhist philosophy does go there, but it’s not important to get into ontology for our purposes right now. We’re just noticing that everything that we can ever experience has this same feature that deliciousness does - it’s a product of our interaction with the world, rather than being an objective readout of it.