Fangs in the Static
October 13, 2024

In one of the Ice Age movies, there was a scene where the animals are on a raft, adrift in the ocean, and it’s foggy and dark.

All of a sudden, they see a light, so they paddle over to where the light is. What they find is a whole series of mermaids and mermen lounging on rocks, luminous. The mermen are very handsome; the mermaids very beautiful. They look very welcoming, and the animals on the raft get kind of dreamy-eyed.

But then as you look more carefully at the mermaids and the mermen, you begin to see static in the image. As you look into the static, you see the fangs of piranha fish.

This scene sticks in my memory—I saw it on a plane one time—because our minds are so much like that. We fall for the first appearances of things and don’t look carefully.

Think about when you’re going to die: What if your mind still has that habit of ignoring the bad sides of things, looking for the good side, and just running for whatever? You’re in this body and it’s pushing you out. You can’t stay here. Different images will appear to the mind, based on your past karma. Some of them will be obviously unpleasant, others will be apparently pleasant, but if you look more carefully, you realize they have a lot of drawbacks—like this human realm that we came into the last time we were born.

If you compare it to some of the lower realms, it’s got a lot of appeal. But do you really want to come back here? The Buddha says there are better ways to die. At the very least, you want to go to a higher realm. Ideally, you want to not go to any realm at all—to be totally released.

So, you have to look at the mind’s tendency to fool itself, in the way it places perceptions on things. Perceptions are the labels it places on things that tell us what this thing is, what it means, what it’s worth.

And as with any label, you can put an attractive label on something that’s basically pretty crappy. And there are some pretty bad labels that are on good things.

Ajaan Fuang, my teacher, was a connoisseur of tea. A student one time was also a connoisseur of tea and he brought a box of tea to Ajaan Fuang that had Mickey Mouse as its logo. And yet it was really good tea.

So, you can’t tell things by the cover. You can’t tell things by the labels. You have to learn how to look behind the labels.

This is why the Buddha, when he was asked to teach a monk—Ven. Girimananda, who was sick and might be dying—he told Ven. Ananda to go and teach him ten perceptions. These are perceptions to undo our tendency to see coming back to the human realm or coming back to be reborn as a good thing.

Some of them are about the human body.

If you were to take the human body apart, piece by piece by piece, and put it on the floor in front of you, you’d want to run away. Yet when it’s all assembled like this, as you’re sitting here right now, it’s perfectly fine. No problem at all. But you have to ask yourself, is this something you really want?

Another one of the perceptions is of the drawbacks of the body. Whatever part of the body there is, there’s at least one disease, maybe many more diseases, for that part of the body. As soon as you get a body, you’re opening yourself up to the possibility of suffering from this disease or that. Is that what you really want?

In another place, the Canon talks about the fact that simply having a body means that you’re subject to people yelling at you, subject to people hitting you. There are a lot of drawbacks to having a body.

Yet often we can think of only the good things.

So, you have to ask yourself: If something is attractive on the surface, is it necessarily good? Learn to look at the other side. As Ajaan Lee said, don’t be a person with one eye. Be a person with two eyes. Anything that looks attractive, look for its unattractive side. Anything that looks unattractive, look for its attractive side.

After all, there are some things that look unpleasant but actually might have something good to offer. When you think about it, when you’re going to die and have to be reborn, you want to be reborn in a place where you can practice the Dhamma. Sometimes those places are pretty unpredictable.

Think about the northeast of Thailand, which is an extremely poor area, yet that’s where the forest tradition came from. So even though if you’re born in a poor house, you might have the opportunity to meet with a true Dhamma—unlike people who were born in Bangkok back in those same days, where they were taught by the monks that the path to nibbana was closed, the path to jhana was closed, so monks should engage in social services.

Which means that even though you might be born in the comfort of a wealthy house in Bangkok, you might be hearing wrong view. Born in a little tiny shack in the northeast, you might hear right view. So don’t go for the appearances.

Keep in mind that the Dhamma is what you want, regardless of the appearances.

Then look at the things that would pull you away from that determination. That’s what these perceptions are for. They talk not only about the disadvantages of being born as a human being, but also about the disadvantages of being born as a deva.

Any world you could go to is all going to fall apart. If it’s a really good world, you get really attached. Think about the devas living comfortably: All they have to do is think, and whatever they want appears. Can you imagine how spoiled they’re going to be? And how hard it will be for them when they fall?

And when you take on any world, what is it made out of? It’s made out of the same things that your experience of the world is made out of right here: the form of the body, feelings, perceptions, fabrications, consciousness—all very ephemeral things. How could you build anything lasting out of things that are ephemeral like this?

Now, not all those perceptions are negative. The Buddha also has you think of the positive perceptions of how the cessation of these things would be a good thing, dispassion for these things would be a good thing. This requires a certain amount of maturity to realize, yes, there is a peace that comes from dispassion, and we trust the Buddha when he says that that’s the highest happiness.

Years back, I was teaching the four noble truths to a group up in Orange County. When we got to the third noble truth, about nibbana, they said it didn’t sound all that attractive. Then we got to the fourth noble truth—where we have jhana, the practice of right concentration, which includes pleasure and rapture: That, they said, sounded attractive.

As I told them, go for the jhana first, go for the pleasures of concentration first, and then as you get more sensitive by creating states of concentration, you find that you ultimately do want to go for the unfabricated, something that doesn’t require any putting together at all. It won’t fall apart on you at all.

The Buddha also has you develop these positive perceptions for cessation and dispassion.

The final perception he has you focus on is the mastery of perception that comes from breath meditation. When you do breath meditation, you get more sensitive to how the mind creates its perceptions, where the allure of those perceptions is, what the drawbacks of the perceptions are. In other words, you get a better sense of what’s actually happening in the mind as it feels drawn to something.

As the Buddha said, perceptions are like mirages. They promise something, but then you get there and it’s not there, it’s someplace else. So, you don’t want to be driven by perceptions. But you use wise perceptions first to pull yourself away from the attraction of bad ones.

It’s like learning how to look at something that’s for sale: Look at the label, look at the package, and say, “I can’t judge the item by the package. Let’s look inside and see what’s actually there.”

In other words, you’re training the mind how not to fool itself, or not to be fooled by its greed, aversion, and delusion. You learn how to see the tricks of greed, aversion, and delusion—how they make you think that something’s going to be really good when it’s not, or how they tell you that something is bad when it’s actually good. You learn to look behind the label. That’s when you begin to trust yourself.

You have to realize that if you can’t trust yourself now, while you’re sitting here perfectly fine, how well are you going to be able to trust yourself when you’re being pushed out of the body, you can’t stay here any longer, and all the regrets and all the attachments of this lifetime come welling up in the mind? You have to learn how to not be affected by them.

So, the purpose of concentration is to make you strong and to provide you with a basis for discernment, so that you can begin to see through the ways the mind lies to itself with its perceptions, with its labels of things.

That way, when the static comes, and you can see, yes, there are fangs in the static, you know you don’t want to go there.

Or something that may not look all that appealing to begin with, but when you get there, you realize, okay, this really is fun. The idea of dispassion, cessation, peace in body and mind may not sound all that attractive now, but as you practice meditation, you get more sensitive to what really is the mind’s well-being, what really does weigh the mind down. You find that you get more and more attracted to the idea the mind’s not being weighed down by anything at all.

This is why the Buddha has you develop those perceptions: to incline the mind in the right direction, so that it learns how to see through its own tricks and doesn’t let it fool itself ever again.