Not Getting What You Want
October 04, 2024

Most of the Buddha’s descriptions of dependent co-arising end with the suffering of aging, illness, death, sorrow, lamentation, pain, distress, despair. But there’s one that goes beyond that. “From suffering,” it says, “there’s conviction”—in other words, conviction in the Buddha’s teachings that there is a way out. Then, based on that conviction, you practice until you gain a sense of joy. The joy becomes the basis for concentration, then discernment, release. So that version of dependent co-arising ends positively, with suffering leading you ultimately to follow the path that gets you to something that’s not dependent, something independent—which is total release.

It’s interesting to think about how that connection between suffering and conviction comes about. Remember, in suffering there’s clinging and craving. We usually think of craving as being bad because it causes suffering.

Yet there’s a part of the definition of suffering—or the explanation of what suffering means—which includes desire, but it’s actually a skillful desire, one that the Buddha has you cultivate. It’s in the phrase “not getting what you want.”

It sounds pretty ordinary. There are so many things in life where we want something, we don’t get it, and then we’re unhappy. But the Buddha’s not talking about that general, generic kind of suffering. He’s talking about something deeper: that those who are subject to birth don’t want to be subject to birth. But he says, “This is not to be gained simply by wishing.” And so on: If you’re subject to aging, you don’t want to age, but that’s not to be gained by wishing. You don’t want to die, but freedom from death is not to be gained by wishing. Down through sorrow, lamentation, pain, distress, despair: In each case, if you’re subject to these things, you can’t simply wish your way out of them.

But the Buddha doesn’t discourage you. He doesn’t say, “Well, just give up all desire. Give up hope. Don’t want things to be different from the way they are.”

Look at him. As a young man, he examined his life and realized he didn’t want to age, grow ill, die. He wanted to gain freedom from these things. As he searched, he finally found that there was a path of practice that could get you beyond aging, illness, and death.

So the desire to go beyond aging, illness, and death is not to be discouraged. You are wanting things to be different from the way they are, but you realize that simply wanting is not going to be enough. You actually have to follow the path. That’s what conviction is all about: You’re convinced that this is a good path.

The desire in the suffering itself is what compels you to practice. As Ajaan Fuang used to like to say, “Nobody’s hired us to practice. Nobody’s forced us to practice. We’re practicing of our own free will.” And while it’s true that nobody has forced us to practice, the simple fact of suffering and the fact that we don’t want to suffer is what pushes us.

The Buddha talks about this kind of desire in a positive way in many places. There’s a passage where he talks about household distress, when you don’t get the sights, sounds, smells, tastes, tactile sensations, and ideas that you want. He says to replace that with what he calls renunciate distress: when you think about the fact that there are people who have gained awakening, but you’re not there yet. That sense of distress should compel you to practice.

From renunciate distress then you go to renunciate joy, when you begin to gain insight into things that have burdened the mind, and you see that you’re now free from those things.

So the distress there is actually useful. It’s to be encouraged, but you don’t just sit, of course, with the distress. You act on it—through your conviction that there is a way out.

Similarly, with the issue of desire as one of the bases for success. You probably know the story: Ven. Ananda is staying in a park. A brahman comes to visit him and asks him, “This path you’re practicing, what’s the goal?” And Ananda says, “One of the goals is to put an end to desire.”

“What kind of path do you follow to the end of desire?”

Ananda describes the four bases for success: concentration based on desire, concentration based on persistence, concentration based on intent, concentration based on analysis. The brahman says, “Then it’s an endless path. How can you use desire to get rid of desire?”

Ananda asks him a question in return. He says, “You came to this park. Before you came here, did you have the desire to come here?” “Well yes.” “How about now that you’ve arrived?” “The desire is gone because I’m already here.” Ananda says, “It’s the same with the path. You use desire to get yourself to a place where you don’t need to desire anything anymore.”

Again, you don’t do that simply by wishing. You think in terms of cause and effect. You follow the path. In this case, it’s the path of concentration plus right effort, and by implication, all of the other factors of the path.

When the Buddha talks about the various wings to awakening, the question always comes up, “How do you develop them?” The answer always comes down to following the noble eightfold path. So look at your practice. The path comes down to training in heightened virtue, heightened concentration, heightened discernment. Which aspect are you missing? In which aspect are you weak?

Virtue is there to make you honest and more sensitive to your mind as you go through the day. We talk about being mindful of mind states, as if it were happening as something in the abstract that you just observe without getting involved. But it’s actually happening as you’re making choices as you go through the day about what you’re going to do. What kind of choices are you making? What kind of intentions are you acting on?

This is not just a matter of watching things coming and going, but noticing which intentions in the mind are skillful and which ones are not. If there’s an unskillful intention, how do you say No to it in an effective way?

This kind of knowledge the Buddha calls penetrative. He talks about how discernment sees arising and passing away in a penetrative way, but what does that mean: to see it penetratively? It’s not just watching the fact of arising and passing away. It’s noticing that when some things arise, you should want them to continue because they’re skillful. They have good effects. When other things arise, you should want to put an end to them because they don’t. You’re making value judgments.

So you’re thinking about not simply things arising and passing away, but also about: Where are they leading you? What kind of actions will they inspire in you? Bringing the practice of the precepts into your daily life makes you sensitive to that aspect of what’s going on in your mind.

It also prepares you for concentration, because it gives you practice in looking at your intentions. So now that you’re going to practice concentration, you’re going to focus on one intention: You’re going to keep with the breath here in the present moment, and for the time being you’re going to preoccupy yourself with nothing but the breath.

We know that concentration is not the end of the path. It’s not the goal. But you really want to focus on it because it is the path, and you want to give all your energy to the path.

There’s a Zen teacher, Dōgen, who made the comment one time that the development of the path is basically the same thing as the realization of the end of suffering. What he meant was that you don’t sit here going through the motions of the path with your mind down at the end of the path, saying, “When is that going to come?” You focus here on what you’re doing, getting really involved in the breath. As you focus here, the end of the path will appear right here.

As the Buddha said, you leap up or you leap into the breath. You grow confident, steadfast, and your mind gets released into its perception of just being with breath. The whole body: Think of every sensation you have in the body as being related to the breath somehow.

Make a survey through the body: When you breathe in, where do you feel it inside? When you breathe out, where do you feel it? Is there a boundary around the breath? Well, no. How far can you gain a sense of how the breath relates to the different organs of the body, the different parts of the body, out through the skin, out beyond the skin? Really immerse yourself in the perception of the breath.

If there are any tight spots in the body, don’t think of them as being solid. Think of them simply as blocked breath, stagnant breath. And if breath is stagnant, what do you do? You open up all the channels around it so that it can flow.

In other words, you relate to your sense of the body, as you feel it from within, totally in breath terms. Try to gain a sense of oneness with the breath, your awareness in the breath, and the sense of well-being filling the whole body.

As you do this, you begin to notice how you’re putting this together. The way you breathe, the way you talk to yourself, the images you hold in mind: All of these things are called saṅkhāra, fabrication. They’re things you put together.

The Buddha wants you to get really good at this, because the path as a whole is the best fabricated thing there is in the world. As you put it together, you begin to gain some insight into how you not only put this together, but how you also put all your other emotional states, mental states together using these three things: breath; the way you talk to yourself; and the images you hold in mind, the feelings you focus on.

This is how training in heightened concentration gets you to training in heightened discernment, because fabrication—when you look at dependent co-arising—is right next to ignorance.

The implication being that if you fabricate your experience with any of these means—breath, your inner conversation, and your perceptions—you’re going to suffer. But if you do it with knowledge, it can become the path to the end of suffering. You’re developing new skills.

The word for ignorance, avijjā, means not only not knowing, but also lack of skill. The discernment that comes with mastering these skills is what enables you to see these things for yourself.

You’re not just cutting out the Buddha’s brilliant ideas and concepts, and pasting them on your mind or on your experience. You’re actually learning about what’s going on in your mind and your body by developing skillful mental states and skillful physical states with the breath.

It’s in this way that you complete the path, composed of the eight factors that boil down to virtue, concentration, discernment, to the point where you can let go of everything else that’s not on the path.

Then finally you let go of the path itself because it encourages you to do so. Right view encourages you to look at things as fabrication so that you can see where they’re not worth engaging in. You see where their appeal is, where their allure is, but also where their drawbacks are, to the point where you discover, “Okay, that’s not worth it.” A value of judgment.

When you’ve cleared away your other attachments, then you turn around to this attachment, to right view itself. You take this apart because it tells you to. It basically refers back to itself: This too is fabricated, so take it apart.

Take it apart. Take apart your desire and passion for it, and then you’ll be freed. That’s the point where the Buddha tells you to totally let go of desire and passion.

But up to that point, you use it. The desire to find what is free from aging, illness, and death: It’s what’s been motivating you all along—like the brahman walking to the park. When you get there, you can put the desire down.

So have a clear sense of which of your desires are part of the problem, and which of your desires are part of the solution. The desires that are willing to put in the effort to master the path are the ones you want to encourage.

The desire to simply sit around, thinking, “I want this, I want that,” without really doing what needs to be done: Even with worldly things, that doesn’t work. And of course, it’s not going to work with the Dhamma.

You can’t play the reverse of Barney the Dinosaur, saying, “Well, if I don’t want something strong enough, then it’ll come.” You learn how to cultivate skillful desires and then apply them in a skillful way.

So those desires there in suffering can actually be cultivated wisely: The desire not to age, not to grow ill, not to die actually become part of the path—the motivation behind right effort, the motivation behind right resolve. As you apply them to the path, you find the happiness of actually getting what you want.