Passion for Dispassion

The question came up yesterday as to why we meditate. The answer is: because we want happiness. In fact, all of our actions are for the sake of happiness, but most of our actions lead in the opposite direction, bringing us suffering and pain. We want to know why. The Buddha’s answer to that question is that it’s not the case that our quest for happiness is the problem, it’s simply that we’re going about it the wrong way. So he proposes a new way.

Now, we may have read a lot of his teachings. We’ve learned that he teaches a lot about dispassion and letting go. There’s that famous story where the monks are going to a foreign country, so they take leave of the Buddha. He tells them, “Go pay your respects to Sāriputta before you go.” They go pay their respects to Sāriputta, and he asks them, “That country where you’re going has many intelligent people. They’re going to ask you, ‘What does your teacher teach?’ How are you going to answer them?”

They respond, “Sāriputta, we would like to hear your answer.” So he tells them first to say, “Our teacher teaches the ending of passion and desire.” Then he adds, “Because they’re intelligent, their next question will be, ‘The ending of passion and desire for what?’” And the answer is: “The five aggregates”—although I would note here that this shows one of the differences between intelligent people back then and people now. You tell people now that the Buddha teaches the ending of passion and desire, and they change the channel.

But suppose we were to take Sāriputta seriously. We look elsewhere in the Canon, and it becomes obvious that there’s so much emphasis on dispassion. When the Buddha teaches his stepmother the eight principles for deciding what is and is not Dhamma, the first principle is that if something leads to dispassion, then it’s true Dhamma; if it leads to passion, it’s not. And of course, the third noble truth tells us that dispassion for craving equals the end of suffering.

So we can come away with the impression that the Buddha’s simply teaching us to let go. Sometimes we interpret dispassion as letting go of the quest for happiness: Just accept whatever is happening, and you’ll be okay. That’s the best you can do. But as I said, the Buddha said that the problem is not with the quest for happiness. It lies in how we go about it.

He gives an analogy. Suppose a person is trying to get milk out of a cow, so he squeezes the cow’s horn. He squeezes a little bit and doesn’t get any milk. He squeezes it harder, and he still doesn’t get any milk. Then he gives up and stops squeezing the horn, and he realizes it’s so much more relaxing not to be squeezing the cow’s horn. So he just relaxes and he tells himself, “I don’t need any milk.”

But that’s not what the Buddha recommends. He affirms that it’s all right to want milk. After all, the cow has milk to offer. The proper course of action is to find the udder, squeeze that, and you get the milk.

Basically what this means is that the path to the end of suffering is going to require right effort. You can’t just relax and say, “I understand that those who are awakened are totally relaxed, so I’ll relax ahead of time.” The reason they’re relaxed is because they’ve completed their work. And the Buddha actually says that the work involves passion. He recommends passion for the Dhamma, passion for learning how to develop skillful qualities, passion for abandoning unskillful qualities, passion for seclusion, passion for a goal that is totally unafflicted, and passion for a goal that doesn’t involve any conflict.

So we have to develop right passion, which means that we have to look back into our own mind to see how we can make our passions right. This is an important part of right effort: generating desire to abandon what’s unskillful and to develop what’s skillful. And the best way to generate this sort of desire is to see that our current actions are unskillful and are causing us to suffer. As the Buddha said, this means that we have to find what there is in the mind that causes us to act in unskillful ways. Only then will we be able to stop creating suffering because we’ve understood why we do it. Only when we understand why will we be able to stop.

This is why we practice meditation. And this is why we should be passionate about doing the meditation: It helps us to understand the powerful hidden corners of our own minds.

When I was staying with Ajaan Fuang, I translated some of Ajaan Lee’s books into English and we sent them to various Dhamma centers around Thailand and other parts of Asia. There was one person in Singapore who had received a copy. He sent a letter to Ajaan Fuang, describing his meditation practice, saying that whatever he was doing, he always saw things in terms of the three characteristics. When he was watching TV, when he was driving the car, he looked at things in terms of the three characteristics: inconstant, stressful, and not-self.

I read the letter to Ajaan Fuang, and he said, “Okay, write back to him and say, ‘Look at what’s saying that things are inconstant, stressful, not-self. That’s the troublemaker. The problem is not with your television or the things you see while driving around. The problem is within the mind.’”

This is one of the reasons why we practice concentration: We want to understand what’s going on in the mind. We do that by getting the mind as quiet as we can, both because we learn a lot about the mind in the process of getting it to settle down, and also because once the mind has become quiet, then when there’s the slightest disturbance in the mind, the slightest movement in the mind, we can see it clearly.

That’s where you begin to see how and when the mind lies to itself. This is a message that you hear throughout the forest tradition, which is that your mind is lying to you. Ajaan Chah once said that when you’re keeping track of your mind, the first thing you learn is how much it lies to you. All the other ajaans say similar things.

So, you have to figure out: Why is it lying and why do you fall for the lies? You’ll find that a lot of it has to do with the fact that you’re both lazy and stupid, especially when you think that you’re being smart. So, you have to bring a slight skepticism to the movements of your mind: “Where is my mind lying to me?”

One of the first lessons you learn when you’re doing concentration, if you really stick with it, is that you get to a state where you say to yourself, “My mind is totally quiet.” But if you stay with it longer, you begin to see that there’s still a little bit of disturbance in there. So you let go of what you’re doing that’s causing that disturbance, and then it gets a lot quieter. Then you say, “Ah! This is it. Totally quiet.” But if you stay with it for a while, you find that there’s a disturbance there as well. You see the level of stress in the mind go up and down very subtly, and you can detect what you’re doing to make it go up and down. You’re developing your sensitivity. This is why one of the emphases in the forest tradition is that you try to get the mind as quiet as possible.

There’s a map in the Canon as to what the different stages can be. We’ve been working basically on the first two.

The first stage of jhāna is when you’re focused on talking to yourself about the breath and trying to adjust it so that it feels just right for the body, just right for the mind. Basically, you’re trying to get the mind and the object to fit snugly together, as when you’re putting two pieces of wood together and they fit together perfectly. Then, when they settle down like that, you can stop the internal dialogue and can just be One with the breath. There will be a sense of fullness and pleasure. That’s the second jhāna.

Now, sometimes that sense of refreshment or rapture comes to be too much. It’s as if you’re tuning your radio. You’ve been listening to heavy rock, but now you want to listen to something more calming. You find that there’s a more subtle level of energy in the body, so you focus there. This gets you into the third jhāna.

As you continue there, you’ll find that even breathing seems to be too much of an effort. The breath energy in the body is full, so you can simply stop breathing. You realize the breath energy comes from within, so you really don’t have to worry about the need to pull anything in from outside.

Then, as everything gets very still, you begin to realize that your sense of the body begins to lose its outline, so that it’s made up of little sensation points, like little droplets of water in a cloud. You can focus on the space between the spots. You realize that that space connects with the space outside of the body, and then it goes through the walls, so there’s nothing that is not entirely surrounded or penetrated by space. You hold that perception of space in mind. Then you ask yourself, “Well, what is it that knows the space?” and then you focus directly on that consciousness.

Now, we’re not talking about going through these stages in the course of five minutes. It takes a while, sometimes a long while. But with time and practice, as you get more solidly with this sense of just “knowing,” you begin to sense that it would be even more relaxing to just drop the perception of Oneness in the knowing. That leaves you with a sense of nothing, and you stay with that perception.

Now, some people find this really fascinating, figuring how you can take apart your perceptions of your body and of your mind. You learn a lot about the process of fabrication, and you can actually get very passionate about learning these stages of concentration.

Other people find this very easy, so they don’t find much interest in the process of getting the mind to settle down. However, they do find it interesting to figure out what happens when they leave concentration. In other words, what is it that the mind latches on to when it lets go of the concentration? How does it go back to creating more stress for itself as it engages with the world?

Here you can apply the five steps that we’ve been talking about in the course of the retreat: looking for the origination of whatever you find yourself holding on to, how it passes away, how you pick it up again, what the allure is that makes you want to pick it up again. Then you look at the drawbacks of holding on to that thing, and when it hits you that the drawbacks outweigh the allure, and that you have the alternative not to hold on, you let it go.

As for the people who find concentration fascinating, they eventually get to the point where they see that even that state of nothingness is fabricated and has to be maintained, so then they apply the same five steps to that.

Basically what it comes down to is that you get really passionate either about concentration or about discernment because of how they help you to understand and unravel the mind’s unskillful habits. But you need both. It’s only when you’ve been passionate for these two things that you begin to understand why the mind has been creating suffering. Then, when they’ve done their work, you can let them both go.

So, to get to the ultimate dispassion, you have to be passionate about the path. Don’t think you can just relax and glide into nibbāna. It requires understanding the activities of the mind, because you don’t really understand suffering until you understand why you’re doing it, why you’re clinging to things. If you simply force yourself to let go for a while, it’s very likely you’ll pick things up again because you don’t really understand the allure of clinging. As one of Ajaan Lee’s students once said to him, “It’s very easy to let go of this bowl, but I still have my hand on top of it, ready to pick it up again.” It’s when you really understand why would you want to grip it to begin with: That’s when you can totally let it go.

The path does require work, but as the Buddha says, you can learn how to be passionate for it, you can learn how to really like doing it. This is why his Dhamma talks are so full of encouragement and rousing and urging, helping you to realize that even though the path is a challenge, you’re more than up for the challenge.

In America, there was a psychologist who specialized in what’s called positive psychology, which is basically the study of what makes people happy. When he interviewed people, he asked them to describe what made them happy, and then he would have them make notes when they were actually experiencing those activities, to see exactly how happy they were. Most people reported that they weren’t really as happy as they thought they would be. “Why is it,” he thought, “that people are so ignorant about their happiness?”

Then he reflected on himself. He liked to do mountain climbing, and he noticed that before going up the mountain, he was happy about the fact that he was going to go up the mountain. When he had come down from the mountain, he was happy that he had been up there. But while he was on the mountain, he was miserable. The conclusion he came to was that people shouldn’t look too carefully at the ways they find happiness. Happiness thrives in ignorance.

But the Buddha would have you look at the issue in another way: Why is it that we talk ourselves into thinking that something makes us happy? There’s so much embroidery that goes into anticipating happiness and then talking to ourselves about it afterwards. If our experiences really were that good, we wouldn’t have to embroider them so much. We should come to the conclusion that sensory pleasures don’t provide us with as much happiness as we think they do. We’re ignorant of what we’re doing, which is why we suffer.

This is one of the reasons why the Buddha would say, “Look someplace else for happiness.” The whole point of the third noble truth is that there is a much better happiness, a happiness that requires no embroidery, the happiness that comes from abandoning craving. That’s why he recommends the path of virtue, concentration, and discernment. But that path, too, requires some elaboration, because it takes work to hold to the precepts, to get the mind to settle down, and to try to figure out how the mind is deceiving itself. This is why he said we should try to develop delight in the path: Delight is basically our mental embroidery on our pleasures. The Buddha often mentions delight together with passion. We need both in order to give ourselves the energy to stick with the path even when it’s difficult.

And it should be something we should find easy to find delight in. You’re finding out about your own mind. You’re trying to figure out how it is that the mind can lie to itself and why the mind likes to be lied to. This should be one of the most fascinating things in the world.

Of course, part of us doesn’t like revealing this because we don’t like to admit to ourselves that we’ve been lying and been willingly accepting our own lies. But when you can identify with the part of the mind that likes to figure things out, and you give the mind the sense of well-being that comes with the practice of concentration so that you put yourself in a good mood to do this work, then it’s easier to admit to yourself, “Yeah, I have been kind of foolish, but I’m foolish no more.”

When you get to the goal, there’s no more need for passion or delight. The happiness that comes there doesn’t require any elaboration. In other words, it’s so happy that you don’t need to elaborate, which is why they say that the awakened ones are beyond delight. To us, it sounds a little bit dry, but the actual experience is just the opposite. You don’t have to keep talking to yourself about how great nibbāna is; you don’t need to add herbs and spices. It’s totally satisfying in and of itself.