Many Desires, Many Selves

As we practice, we try to focus our desires on one thing—the ending of suffering—but the nature of the mind is that it desires tend to head off in lots of different directions, like the man who jumped on a horse and rode off in four directions all at once.

Our desires to pull us here, pull us there, and we try to find some unity to them, some way of making them not work at cross-purposes all the time. So we like the idea that we have one self that has one genuine desire or set of desires that are all in harmony. That’s one way of trying to bring some order to our desires—asking ourselves, “Who’s the real me in here?” That, we think, should help us establish our priorities.

But as the Buddha noticed—when you try to find the real me, there are lots of me’s in there. It’s somewhat arbitrary as to which ones you’re going to choose.

As you may have noticed, every desire leads to becoming, which is a sense of self in a world of experience. It’s focused on a desired object, something you want—say, an ice cream cone. Then there’s a world in which that ice cream cone exists. All the aspects of the world outside that are relevant to the ice cream cone—either helping you get it or getting in the way—are part of that particular becoming. Everything that’s not relevant to the ice cream cone is absent in that world. Then you enter into that world as the person who’s going to get the ice cream cone—the person who can either make the ice cream or buy the ice cream—and the person who’s going to enjoy it. On top of that, there’s always the self as commentator, saying, “Are you doing this well? How might do you do it differently? Is it really worth doing?”

So every desire has three senses of self right there. Every desire has a world. But rather than trying to find unity among these things by defining your self as a unitary thing, a unitary self, the Buddha said, “Let’s learn how to look at the process by which these worlds and these senses of self get put together. Learn to look at them in impersonal terms.” That’s why we have dependent co-arising, the Buddha’s analysis of how to look at events in the mind simply as events in the mind, before you’ve slapped a sense of self or world on them.

Learn how to look them in impersonal ways. See where there are perceptions or thought fabrications or feelings that go together to build up this state of becoming. All kinds of things go into this. When we learn these impersonal terms, we realize that if we look at our desires impersonally, it’s a lot easier to pull ourselves out of them.

That’s what we’re trying to do as we meditate. We’re trying to bring the mind to a state where you’re dealing directly with events in the mind. You’re holding to a perception of the breath. The breath, of course, is an aspect of the form of the body. You hold on to a perception that allows you to breathe in a way that feels comfortable. You’ll also be thinking about the breath and adjusting the breath, evaluating it—that’s called fabrication. And you’re aware of these things: That’s consciousness. There are also intentions that keep you here. There are acts of attention: What are you going to pay attention to? What are you going to ignore?

You learn to look at your mind in impersonal terms.

The problem is that a sense of self can move in here as well, and it can be either helpful or not helpful. A helpful sense of self is one that says, “I can do this,” “I’ll take on this duty,” “I find it an interesting challenge,” and “I’m going to enjoy it.”

Then there’s the inner critic that can be either well-trained or ill-trained with regard to the meditation. The ill-trained one gives up at the slightest disturbance. You’re trying to focus on the breath, and yet the mind seems to want to focus on anything but the breath. Then you tie this into your narratives about what a miserable meditator you are, and then, from that, what a miserable person you are in general, and it can expand, expand, expand. That’s not very helpful.

It’s better to think about times in the past when you’ve faced difficulties but were able to overcome them. Or you were working on a skill that you really wanted to develop, really wanted to master, and you had enough interest in it to face whatever challenges there were and be up for the challenge. That’s the kind of self you want to develop around the meditation.

But notice, we’re not trying to find a unitary self here. Many psychologists, many philosophers, talk about how we have to unify the self, as if they see the divided self as the big problem. But the Buddha says the big problem is that we have divided desires. Our desires don’t have any clear sense of priority. If we can focus our desires on solving this one problem—the problem of creating suffering—all our other problems are going to evaporate.

In other words, there may still be problems in the world outside, but they don’t weigh us down. We don’t suffer from them. That’s the important thing.

From that perspective, the Buddha is perfectly fine with the fact that we have many different selves. The question is, which ones are you going to use and which ones are you not going to use to foster skillful desires? As you take them apart, it’s important to realize that you’re going to be dealing with many different people in here.

All too many meditators try to streamline the practice by saying, “Well, there’s no self to begin with, so just tell yourself that there’s no self, and whatever comes up, put aside your sense of self and you’ll be okay.” But you don’t have one sense of self, you have many.

And as you practice, you’re going to find that some of the selves inside really enjoy the meditation and some don’t. You have to deal with the ones that don’t on an individual basis. In other words, you’re going to be dealing with individual desires, which have their individual allure and their individual drawbacks. There are some general outlines to the drawbacks. One is that everything that you could possibly identify with is going to be inconstant, stressful, and not self. But you can say those words over and over again, and they may not have any impact at all. As the Buddha said, you have to look specifically as to what the allure is for that particular desire, that particular sense of self.

Say, a particular instance of anger comes up: Why does the mind like to be angry about those specific things? Sometimes it’s out of fear, sometimes it’s out of desire. Fear of what? Desire of what? Clinging to what? You want to be really clear about this, because if you’re not clear about the allure, then you can talk about the drawbacks from dawn to dusk, from dusk to dawn, and they won’t have much impact because they don’t focus directly on what the attraction is.

The same with lust: We tell ourselves that we lust for a particular body, but is it just the body? Is it your perception of the body? A lot of it has to do with your perceptions—because our perceptions are like sketches. There’s no perception of the world or even of yourself, your own body, that could encompass all the details. So we live with cartoons.

That’s why cartoons are so effective at expressing emotions. They focus on the specific details of an emotion and they erase all the irrelevant parts. The bad part is that we live within these cartoons and they control us. As a result, you’re usually in love with a cartoon. You lust for a cartoon.

This is one of the reasons why interpersonal relationships are so fraught. The person you love thinks that you love him or her. But then they find out, No, it’s something else. You’re in love with a perception of them, a thought construct about them—or about you in relation to them. Or you may just be in love with the idea of being in love. That’s not much of a foundation to build any kind of solid relationship on.

So you’ve got to see the specific points of the allure. This is why the Buddha says you want to locate the craving. Where is your craving located? Where is it focused—for that particular instance of anger, that particular instance of lust? If you’ve gotten past one instance of anger, don’t think you’ve taken care of all types of anger, because you may have many different triggers.

Lust may have many different ways of drawing you in, attracting you, being alluring. After all, it’s been around for a long, long time. It’s learned a lot of tricks. It can hijack your breath. Every time it comes up, it can create a sense of tightness in the body, something in the body that you can’t stand. You say, “I’ve got to get this out of my system.”

It’s amazing how this applies not only to anger, where we talk about getting anger out of our system, but to all our emotions. The way we breathe has been hijacked by our defilements in a subconscious way. By breathing in a particular way, we’ve already gone over and sided with them. Then they say, “Give in to me now, it’s going to get worse. It’s going to get stronger until you explode, so give in now. And you know you’re going to give in at one point anyhow, so why don’t you make it easy for both of us?”

These defilements have lots of different tricks. So for each type of anger, each type of lust, or whatever the unskillful emotion it’s going to be, you have to see: What specifically is the allure? And which particular self have you created around that allure?

You’ll find that you don’t have an infinite number of selves or an infinite number of desires. The number that keeps getting thrown out by the Canon is 108. Of course, there are more than that, but it gives you an idea. There are lots but they’re not infinite.

This is one of the reasons why the practice takes a while. You’re dealing with specific instances of allures, and specific instances of how to figure out how to see the drawback of those allures. We’re not dealing with abstractions here. We’re dealing with specifics. We’re not dealing with one self. We’re dealing with many selves. As long as you learn how to see each self as an activity, a part of this process of becoming, it’s a lot easier to let go of these things.

It’s not as if you’re tearing yourself up or totally negating yourself. You’re just trying to create some order in this committee or this crowd inside, so that you can train the parts of the mind that can be trained to be focused on this one issue: putting an end to suffering.

That’s where the unity lies: willing one thing above all other things and then submitting all your other desires to that. It’s called determination. As the Buddha pointed out, determination has four qualities.

First it has to have discernment. In other words, you have to see clearly which desires are in line with your overarching determination, which ones are not, and what’s a good determination to begin with.

Second, you have to be true to it. You have to be honest with yourself about which of your desires are actually in compliance, and which ones are not.

Third, you have to be willing to relinquish anything that’s not in line with that overarching desire.

Finally, as the Buddha said, you train only for calm, trying to find a way of bringing the mind to calm as you’re practicing—finding what’s disturbing the mind, looking for those disturbances, seeing what’s causing them, being willing to put them aside.

It’s by having this overarching determination that you can find some unity, and your desires do all come together: the ones you finally trained to bring you to the ultimate calm. That’s the unity we’re looking for, but it requires that we deal with a lot of specifics. And because you have so many different desires, so many different selves, you’re going to have to learn all their various tricks.

So don’t get discouraged when you’ve given up, say, one specific instance of lust, only to find that another one comes up—or one bout of anger and another one comes up. Realize that they’re not all the same thing. The allure may be different. The focus may be different. So, take that as a challenge, as part of the skill. And take heart from the fact that these various tricks of the defilements are not infinite. They may seem to be a lot, but as you get to know them better, you get better and better at detecting them quickly and dealing with them quickly as well. You do develop skill as you keep focused on this.

So take heart. It’s not an endless job. In fact, it’s one of the few things in the world that actually does come to an end. And the end is more than worth whatever effort it takes to get there.